HANOI (AFP) – As a young woman, Tran To Nga was a war correspondent, a prisoner and an activist. Now, at 81, she is waging a court battle against United States (US) chemical firms to win justice for the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

Nga is the first and only civilian to bring a lawsuit against the 14 multinational chemical firms, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, that produced and sold the toxic herbicide sprayed over Vietnam by US forces during the war.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), some batches of Agent Orange were contaminated with a dioxin – a highly toxic environmental pollutant – that is being investigated for its link to certain types of cancer and to diabetes.

In May 2021, a French court threw Nga’s case out. But she refuses to give up.

“I will not stop. I will be on the side of the victims until my last breath,” Nga, visiting Hanoi from her home in Paris, told AFP.

“This will be my last fight, and the most difficult of all,” said Nga, herself a victim of Agent Orange who spent nine months behind bars, imprisoned by the South Vietnamese regime for her suspected connections to high-ranking communist leaders.

The activist gave birth to her youngest daughter in prison, before being freed when the communists defeated US-backed South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

Like many other first-generation victims, Nga was at first unaware she had been exposed.

In her mid-20s, she was stationed at a Viet Cong military base near Saigon – now known as Ho Chi Minh City – as a trainee journalist working for Hanoi’s Liberation News Agency.

Coming out of an underground shelter one day, Nga was “covered with a wet powder from a US aircraft”.

“I took a shower only when I was told that it was herbicide all over my body. But then forgot all about it,” she said.

Between early 1962 and 1971, US warplanes dropped about 68 million litres of Agent Orange – so-called because it was stored in drums with orange bands – to defoliate jungles and destroy Viet Cong crops.

At that time, no-one knew they had been exposed to a substance that many believe destroyed not only their lives, but also their children’s and grandchildren’s.

A year after the exposure, in 1968, Nga gave birth to her first baby, a girl born with a congenital heart defect who survived for just 17 months.

“For so long, I blamed myself for being a bad mother, giving birth to a sick baby and not being able to save her,” Nga told AFP.

Nga only suspected her child was a victim of Agent Orange decades later when she encountered veterans and their disabled children in a similar situation.

Vietnam’s Association of Victims of Agent Orange said 4.8 million people were directly exposed, and more than three million have developed health problems.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has said it assumes – although there is no official scientifically proven link – that some cancers, diabetes and birth defects are associated with Agent Orange exposure.

It has also recognised a link among veterans’ children to spina bifida – a spine defect in a developing foetus.

Nga herself is suffering from effects including type 2 diabetes and cancer.

“I think of Agent Orange as the ancestor for all sorts of other substances that have destroyed the environment,” Nga said.

At a state-sponsored facility caring for Agent Orange victims in the suburbs of Hanoi, Nga watched a computer lesson given by Vuong Thi Quyen.

Quyen, 34, was born with a deformed spine after her soldier father was exposed during the war.

“I am so happy to meet Nga, my idol. She has done so much for victims of Agent Orange like ourselves,” Quyen told AFP.

After the war Nga, a trained chemist, spent many years as a head teacher at a school in Ho Chi Minh City before assuming a role as a go-between for donors in France and Agent Orange victims in Vietnam.

“I have no hatred towards the American government or people. It’s only those that caused devastation and pain that should pay for what they did,” Nga said.

At the trial in France, the multinationals argued that they could not be held responsible for the way the US military used their product, with the court ruling they had been “acting on the orders of” the US, and were therefore immune from prosecution.

Nga said she had been offered “a lot of money” to settle the lawsuit, but “I refused to accept”.

She has since started a crowdfunding campaign to finance an appeal, scheduled for 2024.

So far, only military veterans from the US and its allies in the war have won compensation over Agent Orange.

In 2008, a US federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a civil lawsuit against major US chemical companies brought by Vietnamese plaintiffs.

“The fight to get justice for Agent Orange victims will last a long time,” Nga said. “But I think I have chosen the correct path.”

BOGOTÁ (AFP) – Indigenous volunteers working alongside the army were a winning combination in the rescue of four children lost in the jungle for 40 days, but Colombian commandos, among the most seasoned in the world, also played a key role.

“It was a successful amalgam of indigenous knowledge and military art,” General Pedro Sanchez, who led the search operations, said on Sunday.

Suntanned and direct, Sanchez is the head of the Colombian armed forces’ Joint Special Operations Command (CCOES).

It was his Special Forces men who took part in the gruelling daily marches through the hostile Caqueta jungle, where a plane carrying the children crashed on May 1. Three adults, including the children’s mother, were killed in the crash.

For Sanchez’s commandos, “it was a different mission” from fighting against the many armed groups operating in Colombia.

“We always save and protect lives, including during our combat missions,” Sanchez said of efforts to rescue the children, aged between one and 13.

The Colombian military has been criticised for summary executions committed during the long internal conflict that has drained the country, as well as its collusion with far-right paramilitaries and the complicity of some of its officers with drug traffickers.

In this mission, though, “failing or giving up was not an option”, Sanchez said. His men, the most highly trained in the Colombian army, had accomplished “the impossible”, he added.

‘HONOUR GUARD’

The CCOES is the Colombian equivalent of the United States (US) Special Operations Command, which contains the famous Green Berets and Delta Force.

Its motto is ‘Union, Integrity, Victory’, and in its videos it claims to be the ‘honour guard of Colombia’.

Created in 2007, the CCOES brings together elite elements from the army, air force and navy, and works in close cooperation with its North American ally.

According to media reports, it comprises about 3,000 men, with three main components – land, urban and sea – as well as an air support element.

Their primary mission is “the planning and execution of special operations inside and outside national territory against terrorist groups, high-value targets and organised crime”, a Colombian military source told AFP.

The CCOES took part in the capture in October 2021 of “Otoniel”, the leader of the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s largest drug cartel.

Trained in nursing as well as search and rescue, “they were tasked with this mission in the Amazon, not only because of the difficult geographical conditions and the difficulty of access, but also because FARC guerrilla dissidents operate in this region”, the source added, referring to what was once Latin America’s most feared guerrilla group.

There are other special forces units within the Colombian military, such as the marine commandos, the COPES police special operations command and the police’s fearsome ‘Jungle Commandos’. Colombian police operate under the authority of the Ministry of Defence.

TOO RISKY? TOO BRUTAL?

These soldiers, particularly the “Jungle Commandos”, are “among the best elite units in the world”, according to a foreign expert who regularly works with them.

“They volunteer for the most dangerous missions. They lead ascetic lives, don’t get bonuses, and can spend several months in the forest. It’s extremely tough,” the source told AFP.

“To be a commando in the jungle in Colombia is to be sure that you’re going to experience fire at very close range, and often outnumbered… it’s very risky.”

They are motivated by patriotism and the pride of belonging to an elite unit, the expert said.

“They eat little, they drink little, they sleep little, all with high exposure to insects, snakes and bugs of all kinds.”

“Tactically, the environment and the adversary prevent them from having the slightest comfort… They live almost permanently wet in very degraded conditions so as not to make any noise when in contact with their adversary,” the expert added.

BOGOTÁ (AFP) – ”I’m hungry” and “my mum is dead” were the first words uttered by the four children missing for 40 days in the Colombian jungle when they were found, members of the rescue group said in a televised interview on Sunday.

After wandering alone for more than a month, the Huitoto Indigenous children – ages 13, nine, five, and one – were rescued and airlifted out of the Amazon on Friday, and were recovering two days later in a military hospital in the capital Bogota.

Interviewed on Sunday on public broadcast channel RTVC, members of the initial group to find the kids, themselves members of the Indigenous population, recounted the first moments after meeting the children.

“The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: ‘I’m hungry’,” said Nicolas Ordonez Gomes, one of the search and rescue crew.

“One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: ‘My mum is dead’.”

“We immediately followed up with positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family, the father, the uncle. That we were family!” Ordonez Gomes added.

In a video released on Sunday which showed the children soon after they were found, the kids seemed to be emaciated from their time spent in the wilderness.

Their rescuers are seen singing and celebrating.

The four children had been lost in the jungle since May 1, when the Cessna 206 in which they were traveling crashed.

The pilot had reported engine problems only minutes after taking off from a deep Amazon area known as Araracuara on the 350-kilometre journey to the town of San Jose del Guaviare.

The bodies of the pilot, the children’s mother and another adult were all found at the crash site, where the plane sat almost vertical in the trees.

The children’s father, speaking to the press on Sunday outside the hospital, said that his wife had been severely injured in the May 1 crash, but that she did not die until four days later, her children beside her.

“The one thing that (13-year-old Lesly) has cleared up for me is that, in fact, her mother was alive for four days,” Manuel Miller Ranoque told reporters.

“Before she died, their mum told them something like, ‘You guys get out of here. You guys are going to see the kind of man your dad is, and he’s going to show you the same kind of great love that I have shown you’.”

Magdalena Mucutuy, the children’s mother, was an Indigenous leader.

It was in part down to the local knowledge of the children and Indigenous adults involved in the search alongside Colombian troops that the youth were ultimately found alive despite the threats of jaguars and snakes, and relentless downpours which may have prevented them from hearing possible calls from search parties.

“The survival of the children is a sign of the knowledge and relationship with the natural environment that is taught starting in the mother’s womb,” according to the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombia.

The children ate seeds, fruits, roots and plants that they identified as edible from their upbringing in the Amazon region, Luis Acosta of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia told AFP.

Defence Minister Ivan Velasquez, who visited them in the hospital with President Gustavo Petro, said they were recovering, but could not yet eat solid food.

The youngest two children, now five and one, spent their birthdays in the jungle, as Lesly, the oldest at just 13, guided them through the ordeal.

“It is thanks to her, her courage and her leadership, that the three others were able to survive, with her care, her knowledge of the jungle,” Velasquez said.

General Pedro Sanchez, who led the search operation, credited Indigenous people involved in the rescue effort with finding the children.

“We found the children: miracle, miracle, miracle!” he told reporters.

Army chief Helder Giraldo said rescuers had covered more than 2,600 kilometres to locate the children. “Something that seemed impossible was achieved,” Giraldo said on Twitter.

In addition to the jaguars, snakes and other predators, the area is also home to armed drug smuggling groups.

Petro touted the success as a “meeting of Indigenous and military knowledge” that had demonstrated a “different path towards a new Colombia”.