“We want to break the silence on the consequences of Agent Orange in Vietnam”

Tribune. There are dramas that fall into oblivion; stories that, by staying in the shadows, die out with the individuals who wear them.

Sixty years ago, on August 10, 1961, the first applications of Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide containing dioxin, the substance responsible for many cases of cancer and birth defects, began.

This herbicide was dumped on the southern part of Vietnam by the United States army during the Vietnam War, in order to destroy the plant cover and thus flush out the Vietnamese resistance who took refuge there.

Sixty years ago, the history of this war was just beginning to be written, but what remains of this story? We, citizens of a country, France, which colonized Vietnam from the year 1858, which forcibly recruited “worker soldiers” (the “Linh Tho” during the First World War, then the “ Cong Binh ”, during the second); who, at the end of the Second World War, refused it independence by fighting those who fought for this inalienable right, and who since 1975, has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese on its soil, what do we know about their story ?

In history-geography books, in middle and high school, the Vietnam War is mentioned. We learn that it began in 1955 and opposed, on the one hand, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) with its Vietnamese People’s Army – materially supported by the Soviet Union and the China – allied with the National Front for the Liberation of the South (called Vietcong by its enemies) and, on the other hand, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), supported by the United States army and several allies such as Canada, the Australia, South Korea and the Philippines.

The illusion of a distant war

Education today is content to sweep the broad outlines, omitting the disastrous – and yet terribly current – consequences of war on ecosystems and inhabitants. He also omits, all too often, to support the difference between napalm and Agent Orange, the nature of which the French do not always discern, no doubt because of the absence at the time of representations of the devastation caused by Agent Orange and the famous snapshot of a Vietnamese child burned with napalm in 1972.

Archives: Vietnam the forgotten dioxin

But above all, it gives us the illusion of a distant, past war. However, this war, for the veterans and their descendants, is far from behind them, far from being silent, on the contrary. Insidious, it still fits into the body; murderous, it continues to sow death and despair in families – who also see it as a sign of punishment.

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