Socialist Republic of Vietnam

An organization of former US soldiers in Vietnam War has approved a project to raise awareness and call for support of local residents to Vietnamese Agent Orange victims, according to a source from the Vietnam-US Association.

The campaign, scheduled to be launched next month, will educate US citizens about consequences of the toxic substance on the Vietnamese, and raise funds of $100,000 for research on the impacts and providing assistance to the Southeast Asian suffers.

The Boston-based organization also targets to collect one million signatures asking for the US government to admit responsibility for Vietnam's victims. The petition will be submitted to the US president and Congress.

In related news, over 120,000 people have added their names to the webpage http://www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/petition.html since it was launched in March. The figure is expected to increase to 200,000 before the court case against US chemical firms, which supplied defoliants to the US army to spray over the Vietnamese jungles during the war.

Between 1961 and 1971, the US army was reported to have sprayed around 80 million liters of defoliants in southern Vietnam, most of which was in the form of Agent Orange containing about 400kg of dioxin. Both Vietnamese and American organizations have estimated that there are approximately three million sufferers of Agent Orange-related diseases in Vietnam. (Youth Aug 13 p1, People's Army Aug 12 p8)