Trump can cause poison disaster in Vietnam

50 years after the war, the ground in Vietnam is still full of American toxins.

When the United States has now strangled the assistance, the remediation work is put on break – and countless Vietnamese risks being exposed to harmful dioxins.

“It is US responsibility,” says Nguyen Thi NGOC Diem, one of all who was born with severe malformations due to the environmental poison Agent Orange.

In February, the remediation work at the former US air base Bien Hoa in southern Vietnam suddenly ceased.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the base, some of them just meters from the toxic remains. A few hundred meters away is the Dong Nai river, which flows into the multi -million town of Ho Chi Minh.

Here are contaminated soil enough to fill 40,000 trucks – or 200 Olympic swimming pools.

– It’s unreasonable. Agent Orange came from the United States and was used here – it makes us the victims, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem told The New York Times in February, after the decontamination stopped.

She was born a few years after the war with a malformed spine and malformed limbs, just like tens of thousands of other Vietnamese whose parents were exposed to Americans’ chemicals. Diem sits in a wheelchair and still lives at home with their parents.

Low unprotected

During the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed large areas in the then South Vietnam with the consumption agent orange. Over forests and fields, countless millions of liters of the plant poison were dumped to expose hidden FNL soldiers-and to deprive the Vietnamese guerrillas food.

According to Vietnamese calculations, hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of the extremely harmful by -product Dioxin, which is very difficult to break down. At least 150,000 children were born with malformations.

Since 2020, the United States has helped with the remediation of the Bien Hoa base, where huge amounts of agent orange were stored during the war. Washington has promised the equivalent of more than SEK 4.3 billion for the ten -year project.

But when US Foreign Minister Marco Rubio abruptly stopped all US aid in mid -February, the remediation workers were forced to quickly leave, writes the American excavation site Propublica. Remaining giant polluted earth mounds were largely unprotected. For weeks they were only covered by tarpaulins – which on at least one occasion also blew off.

Cancer and birth defects

Shortly thereafter, US diplomats stated in Vietnam alarms to the White House. The rainy season is on the entrance, they warned in a letter that Propublica took part in. With large amounts of rain, dioxin -polluted soil risks flowing on to nearby communities and poisoning the food supply.

“To put it simply, we move quickly towards an environmentally and life-threatening disaster,” they wrote.

The White House responded with silence.

The United States stopped using Agent Orange in 1971, after it was discovered that the drug contained one of the most powerful poison ever created: tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, so -called TCDD. Even today, the effects of the Vietnamese people are seen: cancer, immune diseases, birth defects, severe malformations and psychological and neurological problems.

The half -life is long – underground up to 100 years, according to studies. Last year, authorities in Dong Nai, where Bien Hoa is a provincial capital, stated that over 8,600 people in the area are still suffering from Agent Orange-caused health problems. During the war, Dong Nai was sprayed more than any other province in Vietnam.

Rehabilitation programs hit

At the end of February, the White House backed and gave green light to the remediation work at the base. But it is unclear if the funding is actually underway again, several US media notes. In addition, the USAID workers who monitored the project have been unemployed, just like most of the aid authority’s staff, in Donald Trump’s and his “efficiency adviser” Elon Musk’s hunt for savings in the US state apparatus.

When Propublica visited Bien Hoa in mid -March, they found that over half of the employees had left the base.

– They (White House) have backed from several of these arbitrary decisions, but we are far from the other side than, says Tim Rieser, adviser to the democratic Senator Peter Welch who urged the government to resume the projects in Vietnam, to AP.

– You have to ask if those who made the decision to freeze this money know something at all about tragic history about the United States and Vietnam.

Trumpstyget’s dismantling of the Aid Authority USAID has also affected the work on clearing blinds in Vietnam, according to US reports. A rehabilitation program for the victims of the war has also been affected by the cuts, as well as a museum on the US work on repairing the damage after the Vietnam War.

Strategically important

In addition, the cuts risk jeopardizing years of diplomatic attempts to cook the relationship with Vietnam, which for the United States is strategically important in the power struggle with China.

Trump has put 30 years of diplomatia on end, notes The New York Times.

– This doesn’t help at all. It’s just another example of what many critics claim: “You can’t trust Americans”. It’s not a good message, says Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy to AP.

Vietnam will probably think about before deepening military cooperation with the US or buying US weapons, states Vietnamese political scientist Nguyen Khac Giang according to AP.

– Confidence (for the United States) has increased gradually and is very easy to demolish. There are good reasons for Hanoi to be careful.

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