 Good morning everybody, welcome. We're delighted to have you here. My name is John Hamery. I'm the president at CSIS. And before when we have public events, before we begin, we always start with a little bit of a safety announcement. If there's any emergency, I'm your responsible safety officer. So I would ask you to follow me. I'm the person that's going to keep you well and safe. If we have to escape, evacuate, we're going to get behind, we'll move, we'll kick over those cameras, we'll get them out of the way. The exit's around the side. We go right out through the exit in the first ground level. If our problem is in the front, we're going to go around to the National Geographic. If the problem is in the back, we're going to go across the street to the park. And I'm going to do a head count, and I'm going to make sure everybody's well. So okay, just follow me if we have to do anything. It's a real privilege to welcome Senator Patrick Leahy and Marcel. Now, I will just tell you, this is a rare event, folks. When Marcel comes to something, you know it's important, okay? And I'm so glad, this is one of the few states where we've got three senators, and we'll have to pay for two of them. And we are fortunate enough to have Marcel fully devoted to public life and everything that she's done. It's been wonderful. America has a bad habit of wanting to walk away from our messes, and we left a mess in Vietnam. And I think it's Senator Pat Leahy who has said that this isn't right. This is something that America has to tend to. It's our responsibility. It may be too late, but well, it's never too late. It is late, but it's not too late. And it does reflect a commitment that we must honor. And I think Senator Leahy should be thanked by all of us for keeping our national consciousness awake to this problem. Just a little vignette, which I think gives you an insight into the content of this character. Senator Leahy and Marcel were in Vietnam recently and in part to track down what was the human tragedy associated with the use of dioxin and Agent Orange. They've never admitted this, but they went to a family that had two children that are to this day badly disabled. And they've never wanted that known. I want you to know it because I want you to know the kind of character. This isn't a theoretical issue for the Leahy. This is a personal issue. And their commitment on behalf of America is something that we have to honor. We thank them for their courage. We thank them for their conviction to make this a priority for all of us. I will tell you, Senator Leahy has a vote at 11 o'clock. He's going to have to leave. He won't be able to take questions, unfortunately. So let me ask with your applause. Would you please welcome Senator Patrick Leahy. John, thank you so much. You know, I've heard different meetings here and also we had the big luncheon during the Falfa Club here. I've heard John give that instruction about it. There's danger or something. Just follow him. John, I've been following you for years. So I'm perfectly willing to do that. And I'm also so happy that Charles Bailey is here. You know, Charles did such extraordinary work on Agent Orange at the Ford Foundation. And that makes it possible for us to be here. And I want to acknowledge Tim Reeser who's here. A lot of you know Tim. When he started my office, he was six foot five, 250 pounds. And look how we've worn him down. Well, and he was in Vietnam just a few months ago and also stopped in Seoul to visit our ambassador there, Mark Lipper, who used to work for me and was savagely attacked by a knife-wielding person. And then we have Lake Aesong that I hope I pronounce that. He's been a leader on the Vietnamese side and I thank him. I first started in this issue of disabilities in Vietnam with George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush. And let me tell you a story. President Bush, after General Vessey had been over doing the POWMIA with the Vietnamese, he said, we've got to do something to show some goodwill toward the Vietnamese. How about using the Lake War Victims Fund over there? And for people who've lost limbs and disabilities and so on. And I said, good idea. Let's do that. So we did. And went over, Marcel and I, Marcel was a registered nurse, so particularly one heard of there. We went over with John Glenn and his wife and some others. I'll never forget the very, very hot day. We're at the first site of the Lake War Victims Fund. You had some men who had been crawling on the ground since the war and lost their legs. They're now getting wheelchairs. The Vietnamese authorities were speaking in Vietnamese about what this was. And every time you go on Vietnamese, I hear Patrick Lee. Patrick Lee. And one man is just staring at me. I thought, I'm an American. I'm a big guy. He must hate me. And when they finished, they said, would you go and pick him up and put him in his wheelchair? And Marcel was whispering to me as a nurse would, how best to pick him up without injuring him. So I picked him up all the time. He was just staring at me. I put him in the wheelchair. I started to get up. He grabbed my shirt, pulled me down and kissed me. Now, this day I get choked up. And when we were in Denang, Tim, we walked in and saw the picture at the reception. There's that man and both Marcel and I were choked up at that time. Now, at that time, our focus was on victims of unexploded landmines and bombs. And there are such a huge number. The Laid War Victims Fund became the first USA to the Vietnamese people after the war. Now, that was back in 1989. And since then, the Laid Fund has helped thousands of Vietnamese war victims have lost their legs and arms, regained their mobility and their independence with artificial limbs and wheelchairs and vocational training using limbs, wheelchairs and all made in Vietnam by Vietnamese. The US government has also provided millions of dollars to help clear unexploded ordnance from Vietnam. You know, it's not just in Vietnam, but everywhere else. A cruel legacy of war. The soldiers leave. The armies leave. Peace is declared. Guns are silent. But civilians, often children, continue to die from landmines and shells and bombs years later because they explode. Armies are gone. The weapons of destruction are still there. So I hope that the programs we've worked on have helped the normalization of relations with Vietnam. And I was thinking that when we were there last year, last year, this year, last year. Over the past 25 years, we tried to use efforts to improve relations with the Vietnamese people and their government. From the Fulbright and international visitors programs to combating HIVA, Samaritan Security Cooperation with the Vietnamese Navy, which has become, as you know, a very significant point. And I think it's helped transform our engagement with Vietnam since 1995. When President Clinton, with strong support of many in this room myself included, reestablished diplomatic relations, and they further our strategic interest in East Asia. But there's one issue that remains a great resentment and that's Agent Orange. I recall in my meetings with Vietnamese officials, they mentioned their support for the programs to remove unexploded ordinance, the use of the war victims fund, but then they'd bring up Agent Orange. John the tenor of those meetings would change at that point. They would insist the United States should take care of the victims of Agent Orange, whom they numbered in the millions, and clean up the areas that were contaminated with dioxin. They always brought up. They're not shy about it. And I encouraged it because it was hard to argue with it. If Agent Orange contaminated dioxin were sprayed today over inhabited areas of rice fields, as was in Vietnam back then, many would declare it a war crime. I thought we had a moral obligation to do something about it, but there were two big obstacles. First, our government, the U.S. government refused to accept any responsibility appearing that would encourage thousands or even millions of legal claims by Vietnamese citizens for reparations. And secondly, the Vietnamese government originally argued that seemingly anyone in Vietnam who suffered a birth defect was a victim of Agent Orange in large parts of the country of main contaminate. Well, two things got us over that. First, Charles Bailey at the Ford Foundation funded a survey and this, Charles, I can't thank you enough for this. It showed that contamination was limited to a few docs and hotspots at former U.S. military bases and that dramatically limited the areas to be cleaned up. Secondly, the U.S. government began providing compensation to American victims, veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and were suffering serious illness. And about the same time a U.S. court dismissed a case brought on behalf of Vietnamese citizens who claimed damage for exposure to Agent Orange. Now, some would say the causal connection between dioxin and Agent Orange and specific diseases has not been proven, but I said we cannot have a double standard in our approach to U.S. veterans versus Vietnamese citizens. So Agent Orange disability payments to U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War earned the billions of dollars. And now we're also talking about the U.S. Air Force Reservice. But I wanted to turn Agent Orange from being a symbol of antagonism and resentment into an area where the U.S. and the Vietnamese government could work together. So over the past seven years, the Congress, often with legislation I've written, has provided $105 million to clean up the Da Nang Airport, which had formerly been a U.S. military base. Another 30 million for health disability programs focused on likely Agent Orange victims. And last year, I joined Vietnam's Vice Minister of Defense who has since come and visited me in my office and our U.S. Ambassador in activating the heaters to destroy the dioxin in the first 45,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil at Da Nang. This thing is huge and apparently it's working. But then I said, and I wanted to do this with no press or nobody around. Marcel and I wanted to visit a family with, and this is where I followed the nurse with her abilities and her conscience. And we went there and we saw two young boys. They could have been the age of a couple of our grandchildren. Badly disabled. And we'd helped change the modest house that they were living in so that they, parents were getting older, would not have to carry them upstairs and all that. But I thought, oh my God, how would I react if there's not one but two children in my family who had this? And then we went to a local hospital. Again, people wanted big speeches. I said, let's not have any speeches. It's a hot day. Let's give these children and others who are suffering from disabilities the wheelchairs and hearing aids, which is very interesting. They've gotten from the U.S. government. And Marcel and Tim will remember, and JP I think of this offered a couple of those children, they put the hearing aids in, their parents spoke to them and they heard them for the first time. This is a pretty remarkable. These are things we take for granted, but they couldn't. So we come a long way. We have a further way to go. BNWA airport survey, that's under ways. It's going to show more extensive dioxin contamination in Da Nang. I've urged the Department of Defense how pay for the costs of this effort, because it's in their interest to work with the Vietnamese military counterparts to address it. USAID has expanded the health disability program to $21 million over five years and up to eight provinces that were heavily sprayed. But these are steps, but we have to do a lot more. President George W. Bush, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Kerry have made clear the U.S. and Vietnam are partners in addressing the dioxin issue. We learned a great deal about how social services can help children and adults with disabilities, ways to boost their families, because the families carry the greatest burden of daily care and responsibility. And if they're children at some time, the parents will no longer be there to care for them. Now, we can't lift all the problems there, but we can work far more together to do it. Ambassador, I want you to know that as long as I'm in the Senate, I'm committed, strongly committed, to help that cooperation. The Vietnam War is a terrible tragedy for the people of both countries, for the veterans, for their families, for millions of others who are harmed directly or indirectly. And often overlooked are the millions of U.S. cluster munitions in Laos that continue to maim and kill civilians 40 years later. That's another legacy of the Vietnam War, as John, as you know, we're providing funds to get rid of them. So we can talk about these painful legacies, but I think as I conclude, let's ask some satisfaction that the U.S. and Vietnam are finally doing things together. Finally, the people there, and I'll tell you one story again, I was at meetings with all the officials. A friend of ours, Hal, lives in Hanoi, said to Marcel, let's go for a tour around here. Now, those of you who know what traffic is like in Hanoi, she comes up with a motor scooter. The two of them hop on the motor scooter, and after they go on the swarm, I mean, it looks like schools of fish, they had intersections. And I recall telling your president that Marcel was on that scooter, and he asked the translator, what did he really say? And I showed him the picture of her, which got passed around to every official there, and I was no longer the important person. My wife was willing to go out on annoying traffic. Little did they know how much I was worried during that time. But this would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. We are working together in a time when China is actively seeking to extend its fear of influence, and the United States has begun its own rebalance toward Asia. These Vietnam legacy programs have taken on added significance. Vietnam's highest ranking government official, the Secretary General of the Communist Party, is due to me with President Obama and myself and other members of Congress in two weeks. We wouldn't have thought of such a trip if we had visited a few years ago. I believe that the Chairman of the National Assembly is going to visit here in September. There's talk of President Obama possibly visiting Vietnam, and I've talked with the President about that several times. And we're seeing how the next generation of Vietnamese who embrace any opportunity become versed in regional and global issues, eager to take on new responsibilities. I visited the students of the law school in Hanoi last year. I looked at these young people. Ambassador, this is the future of your country. You can be so extraordinarily proud of the young men and young women I saw there and the questions they ask and the interest they had. So it's a long time from lifting that man into a wheelchair. But the arc, in this case, the arc of history, has gone in the right direction. And I thank all of you. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank the senator for that great speech and for kicking us off in exactly the right tone. It's now my pleasure. I should introduce myself. I'm Ernie Bauer. I'm the chair for Southeast Asian Studies here at CSIS. It's my pleasure to invite our next speaker to the podium. His name is Ambassador Pham Kwan Ving and he is the fifth Vietnamese ambassador to the United States in our 20 years of diplomatic relations that are being celebrated this year as the senator noted. The ambassador has the rank of senior ambassador, which is sort of the diplomatic equivalent of a five-star general in Vietnam. He is one of the highest ranking of the career foreign service and having worked with him, I can see very clearly why he was promoted to that rank. He's a terrific diplomat. He knows Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific very well, having been deputy foreign minister before coming here in charge of ASEAN, South Asia and the Pacific Affairs. And so I hope you'll join me in welcoming Ambassador Ving. Thank you very much, Ernie Bauer. And thank you CSIS and all of you for attending this significant event. Actually, 40 years have passed since the end of the war, but we are talking of an issue which is of great humanitarian nature. All of us has a common sense of humanitarian nature. We are very much happy to have Honorable Senator Patrick Lee here to be with us to kick off our discussions. And this is very much significant also. Senator Patrick Lee has been pioneering and championing the healing of the war between our two countries. And he has been very much involved proactively in this general exercise of helping the victims, especially with the establishment of the World Victims Fund since 1989. Actually, to us in Vietnam, Senator Patrick Lee has been both a statement and a great friend of the ordinary people. He has been to Vietnam many times for the policy issues on making our partnership to be greater, right? And at the same time to helping the victims of the wars, including those affected by Asian Orange and dioxin, it has been great support from him that we have now our joint venture in this exercise. So I would like to express on behalf of the government of Vietnam the words of great appreciation for Patrick Lee and for all those who have been working with us in helping the victims of the war in Vietnam. As you may have known, the war in Vietnam has been so much devastating and the consequences continue until now, especially the effects of the Asian Orange, dioxin and unexploded ordinances all out there. It has effects on the environment and it has more effects especially on the people. And especially if you consider the dioxin and Asian Orange, you will see the effects not for those who have been exposed to the Asian Orange and dioxin but also for the offsprings. And you consider in the family that Senator Patrick Lee has just mentioned has two children, deformed children and no offspring in our traditional nature of the family that we need children to be a next generation of ours. So this is. And I also share the views that we need to tell the truth. We need to take responsibility and we need to work together out of the common sense of human nature. This is what we have been doing. And on the part of the government of Vietnam, we have been working hard to overcome the consequences of the war since the end of the war. And on this very issue of the Asian Orange and dioxin, the government of Vietnam has spent at the national level every year 45 million US dollars for this purpose. But we have also mobilized at the provincial level and at the social level with all the associations and the people helping in this exercise. And we have been working closely with international partners and we have Chuck Baylor representing at that point in time, Food Federation. We have been working very hard and thank you very much for your engagement and dedication to this issue, Chuck. And we have a national program for both two issues as a legacy of the war. That is the landmines and the unexploded ordinance and the other also a national commission overseeing this one, the Asian Orange and dioxin. And we have mobilized the forces of all the society including the responsibility and the dedication of the government as well. And we had hope in working with the US, in working with other international partners, we can complete basically or we can meet basically the target of cleaning up the dioxin and Asian Orange between now and the year 2020. But it's much more than that. It, that target is very difficult to get and we need more assistance. And between Vietnam and the US, certainly Senator particularly has mentioned that we are some difficulties in talking with each other at first but later on out of the sense of humanitarian nature, we have been working, we have a dialogue, we have people involving on how we can form some form of interventions in this one. And Senator Patrick, he was those among the pioneering that have been happening on this one. And I just give a few figures to highlight the partnership that we have in this one. Number one, in the joint declaration or statement at the high levels of our leadership, we only highlight that overcoming the legacy of the war will be a priority for both countries, both governments, including in the joint statement on the comprehensive partnership that adopted by President Obama and my President, Chung Tan Son, two years ago, 2013. And since mid-2000s, the Congress of the US has been involved in this one by giving some funds to the program for assisting us in overcoming the legacies of war including in the area of Asian-Orient and dioxin. And the fund has been increased every year since then. And it is now, I have the figure maybe about 22.5 million US dollars for this year. And we have a big project in Danang that Patrick Lee, he was there April last year in turning on the project on decontamination or cleaning up in the area, especially the airport of Danang. And it's totaled about 84 million US dollars for the total project. And the government of Vietnam has been very much appreciative of the US assistance between 2007 and now 2015 about as Senator Patrick Lee has mentioned about 130 million US dollars has been reserved for the project of cleaning up Asian-Orange and helping people 15th of that Asian-Orange. The government of Vietnam has been working hard together with the US. And we do share that our future work still very much heavy and we have a lot of work to do including in the project in Danang that we have. It needs, because studies are up when we need greater efforts but there are other areas we have identified 28 areas especially focusing on the 17 areas including the airport of Bien Hoa for example. And the people need more help also. If you see out of the total funding from the US for the environment and for the people it usually one third of the total amount of funding or very recently the current program about half of the funding for the people while the funding for the environment, cleaning up the environment is greater. Certainly both areas of helping the victims for the environment, for the land reclamation and for the people affected by the Asian-Orange are both equally important. So on part of the government of Vietnam we call all of you including the Congress and the government of the US to work together with Vietnam, to work together with us to further expand and to further deepen our partnership in this program to overcome the effects of Asian-Orange and dioxin out of the sense of humanitarian nation and responsibility. Thank you very much. Thank you. The Ambassador has time for a couple questions. So I'd like to just ask you to identify yourself in your institution if you have a question and we'll open the floor. To the gentleman in the back here. My name is Morton Sklar. Oh, thank you. My name is Morton Sklar. I'm with the Human Rights Group called Human Rights USA. I'm retired now. My question for the Ambassador is as a member of the former member of the United States military during the Vietnam War, I share all the concerns and emphasis that needs to be placed on reconciliation. At the same time, I have many concerns about the importance of Vietnam addressing the serious human rights problems that are taking place in the country still today. And among those is the use of chemical herbicides in the border dispute with Cambodia. What is the Cambodian government doing to address the human rights concerns and the use of herbicides against Cambodia? Thank you for the question. First of all, regarding the reconciliation and overcoming the legacy of the war, I think myself and particularly he has been elaborating a little bit about it. We have also long-term serving, working in this area, Professor Le Kesson who will be talking with you later on. The government of Vietnam talking about chemical war, we never had that one. We always respect the human rights issue. We always respect the rules in engaging in the war. And one thing very important here is that if you look back in history, we never wage a war against any country. We wage a war out of our national defense. Thank you very much. I share with you that we need reconciliation and take care of all the victims of the Asian origin, both in Vietnam and those who have been affected by that. But the ordinary people have been also affected, not just the veterans. So we need to take care of the ordinary people as well as the veterans. Thank you very much. Okay, Ambassador, thank you very much for your remarks. And I'd like to invite the panel to join me on the stage if we could. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador. Well, welcome back. Thank you very much, Ambassador, again for your remarks. I'd like to introduce the panel. But before I do, I'd like to say a word about my colleague, Murray Hebert, who couldn't be here today. He's traveling in Asia. But Murray is our deputy director and a senior fellow here at CSIS. He really worked hard with Charles and Tim and others to put together this program on Agent Orange. And he really believes in the reconciliation process as I do. But I have to give Murray a lot of credit because he really dug hard to bring the right people together. I think with Charles Bailey's strong encouragement, Charles, thank you and Murray both for being the inspiration behind putting this together. And I have to, before I introduce the panel, I have to put this in a little bit of context. You know, we mentioned it before, but we are at 20 years of relations in the U.S.-Vietnam relationship. It's 40 years since the end of the war. The general secretary of the party is coming to the United States for the first time in early July. He, this visit is historic because no general secretary has ever visited the United States. And a reporter asked me yesterday, you know, what's going on here? And I said, and I believe this, that the United States and Vietnam are entering a new chapter in our relationship. And I don't think we could really enter that chapter without addressing the issues that we're going to talk about here today. And I really want to thank the gentlemen who've joined me here because without addressing these issues, without telling the truth, as the ambassador called it, I think we can't move to this new relationship. So let me get to the most interesting part of this panel program and introduce our leaders here. On my left is Mr. Tim Reeser, who is a Democratic Clerk in the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State Foreign Operations and Related Programs. Anybody who's done Southeast Asia over the last 25, 30 years would know Tim. He has been a stalwart working to address the truth, I would say, overall and human rights in specific. And on this issue, he's obviously had a great partnership with Senator Lehi and bringing our eyes to focus on the issue. Next to him is Dr. Leke Son, who is the Director of the National Research Program on Agent Orange and dioxin in Vietnam. And that's part of the Vietnam Environment Administration. It's wonderful to have him here. He's a true expert on these issues. And as you've inferred from the senator's remarks and the remarks of the ambassador, the man who's really provided a lot of focus and inspiration for this discussion and this event is Dr. Charles Bailey, who was the, I think you were the founding chairman of the Ford Foundation in Vietnam. He's since joined the Aspen Institute where he is the former director on the Agent Orange Program in Vietnam. But anyone who knows anything about this issue knows that Charles Bailey has been central to this issue. So I think the batting order, gentlemen, is that Charles will start first and then we'll talk to Tim and Dr. Son if we could ask you to conclude. That would be great. And then I'll open it up for question and answer and discussion. So Charles. Well, thank you very much. And I also want to thank Murray Hebert, who isn't here for all he did to make this happen. Nothing could be done about Agent Orange for many years. The issue was truly stuck. And then things began to move in 2007. Dr. Leke Son here took charge of this issue for the government of Vietnam and he saw that it was possible to take this complex problem and break it into a part and work first on the more manageable bits. Our then ambassador to Vietnam, Michael Marine, said he felt the United States had a moral obligation and he made progress on Agent Orange a priority of his ambassadorship. Tim Rees were working for Senator Leke. He brought patience and persistence to this issue with the Congress appropriating $136 million for Agent Orange in Vietnam to date. As for myself, I provided grant funding to 37 Ford Foundation grantees, both Americans and Vietnamese, who worked together to show that Agent Orange is a humanitarian concern that something could be done about. And we can see important progress as we've heard this morning. In the last eight years, we see active bilateral cooperation in which USAID has played a leading role. We have moved to more clarity and specificity and to a shared sense of responsibility for humanitarian response. The Danang Airport cleanup is underway and people are being helped. But this progress has been achieved largely by a relatively small number of individuals in both countries working on it year by year. A further, a full resolution of the Agent Orange legacy by the two governments, however, still lies on the horizon. Senator Leke talked about recognizing a moral obligation. What would that mean? From the USAID, a president at some point needs to say, we shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have done that. We're going to make resolving the Agent Orange issue a priority in our relationship with Vietnam. He needs to put funds for this in the president's budget. If it's in the president's budget, it's a U.S. priority. Right now, it's not a U.S. priority. Of course, the president is not ultimately responsible for appropriations, but if the president wants it, it will happen. As for the Vietnamese, they at some point need to decide that, okay, we now have a strong enough relationship with the U.S. that we're going to deal with this last legacy issue. And at that point, they need to say to the United States, you know, our two governments have dealt successfully with so many issues since 1995. Now Agent Orange is the one issue we want to see really your priority. And that's about the United States coming to the table with significant money to help our disabled population. Thank you. Thank you very much, Charles. Tim, I don't even know how to turn a microphone on. I don't really think I have much to add to what the senator said and what Charles and the ambassador said. This was an issue that needed to be addressed. And I can talk more during the questions and answers about how we came to obtain the funding to do so, it was not easy. For over a year, frankly, we encountered real resistance in our own government. And there's certainly a lot more that needs to be done. And I can talk more about that as well. But like most things in the government, few things happen that don't reflect the work of other people. And these two people on my left were absolutely indispensable. Without them, we could not have done anything. Again, we have plenty yet to do. We've come quite a good distance. It hasn't been easy. We need more high level attention in both governments, frankly. But we've accomplished a lot and I think it has reflected well on our relationship more broadly. So I think I'm going to stop there and we can talk more afterwards. Thanks, Tim. I'm not going to let you off the hook. I've got some questions, but we'll move to Dr. Son. Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry. My English is not good, but I try to speak English with you. I'd like to thank CSIS and all of you for having this opportunity to discuss here today the Asian Orange issue in Vietnam. The Asian Orange story has been with me over the last 30 years and the more I understood it, the more complicated I thought it. The Asian Orange issue is complicated because of the complicated scientific nature of diving in Asian Orange and even more complicated because of the viewpoint approach and treatment of those who are related to the issue. The consequences of Asian Orange on human and environment in Vietnam on U.S. veterans and veterans of country participating in the war in Vietnam is a reality that nobody can deny. The produce of Asian Orange and the people who are ordered, who ordered the spraying when the story begins in the early 1960s could not have visualized and did not want the consequences. Why was the story of Asian Orange only brought up for discussion between the two government 30 years after the end of the war? Why until now we have not been able to complete the cleanup updancing in Dandan Airport and have not been able to start treatment updancing at the Bien Hoa Airport? Even so, the rapid growth of the city has led to large numbers of people living around the contaminated areas. Why are some people reluctant to use the word Asian Orange victim? And why children of exposed war veterans who have birth defects are not seen to be affected by the dive scene in Asian Orange? There are many other questions and I understand for this issue there are no simple questions and no simple answers either. The most important thing is not good answer to such question nor to find a way to avoid questions but to find how to more speedily treat contaminated area in Dandan Airport and to start sooner to treat using in Bien Hoa in order to stop new damage to human and environment in these areas. We need to find how to ease the pain and difficulties of the exposed people and their children and grandchildren. As long as they are not done, the history of Asian Orange will not be close. We recently met Vu Kuan, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Vietnam. He was an architect of the opening of relation with the United States. I'd like to quote the former Deputy Prime Minister Vu Kuan said, the question is not when the Asian Orange issue will be finished. The question is how it is a finish and what needs to be done in the relationship between Vietnam and the US. We need an approach to Asian Orange that addresses is as a humanitarian scientific and responsible subject and that puts it in the right place in a comprehensive bilateral relationship between Vietnam and the US. It will help us organize implement activities of larger scale and create the effectiveness so that we can end the Asian Orange story in a new future. Thank you. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all. I'd like to ask a couple of questions and I'd like to ask the audience to think about questions that you'd like to see asked. We also are producing this live on this live streaming. So if you're in the audience and you have a question, please go ahead and send us an email to SoutheastAsiaProgram.csis.org and we'll try to get your questions. I'll try to ask your questions of the panelists and we are, if you're tweeting this program, it's live tweeted at hashtagcsis.live. Sorry, but that's the world we live in. We have to give the social media guidance. I think I want to start, Tim, with you because you used the fewest words, but where is the resistance? You said it's been hard. It's been a hard path to get the $136 million that you've appropriated so far. Where is the resistance and what would you recommend to President Obama that he do in relation to this issue if he visits Vietnam this November as maybe in the world? So I'm not sure the President will be asking me for my advice, but I can say that, you know, initially it was difficult for the reasons that the Senator said that the lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon were very resistant to the idea of any kind of action by the United States that might be interpreted as being reparations or compensation or anything like that. And that's nothing new. It's just consistent with tradition. And so it took over a year to reach agreement with them that what we were talking about was not either of those things. It was really about trying to work with the government of Vietnam and others in Vietnam to address a problem which we obviously had responsibility for in a way that was going to help further our relations with Vietnam and also was fundamentally a humanitarian effort. And it wasn't a legal issue. It wasn't about admitting some legal liability. It wasn't reparations. It was rather providing training and other assistance and other forms of environmental remediation to help both Vietnam but also further our relations with Vietnam. And it actually took quite a while to overcome the resistance of the institutions. There's just a natural institutional inertia to things such as this. But once we did, then the other issue, he alluded to one which was the fact that there's not been established a scientifically proven causal connection between exposure to Agent Orange and the kinds of disabilities that we're all familiar with in Vietnam. And so we also had to make the point that we didn't really think it was necessary. That the point was that we had been involved in supporting programs to assist people in Vietnam who are clearly victims of war injuries for years. And we wanted to expand those programs in areas where Agent Orange had been sprayed or where there were serious concentrations of dioxin contamination because we believed that it was quite likely that many of those people had been exposed to Agent Orange or were the offspring of people who had been. Plus, of course, the fact that we were compensating American veterans for this same type of exposure, it seemed, as the senator described, to be an obvious double standard and that the arguments that had been made to us really didn't hold water given that we were providing assistance to our own veterans. So that whole process, that whole discussion took quite a while to get past. And then the issue became one which was simply financial. There was no money in the budget. It's not like the administration has ever actually designated funds specifically for this purpose. You know, if every year the president releases his budget, all the things that he wants the Congress to fund, and we do our best to try to address his priorities, and we also obviously have members of Congress who have their own, not to mention others outside the government who have an interest in the work of the government and how funds are appropriated. But in this case, we have had to find the money. And because it's a zero-sum game in the appropriations process, if you take money from one place or to get money from one thing, you have to take it from somewhere else. So we've basically had to steal money over the years from different places to fund this program. It's not like the administration has budgeted for it. And so that has been difficult also. And it's why it has been a very incremental process. Every year we find $25 million, $30 million from whatever source I can dig around for. And that is how we have worked our way over the years incrementally to the point where we now have budgeted over $130 million, as was mentioned. But we have quite a ways to go. The Bien Hoa Airport is, we expect, more heavily contaminated than Da Nang. And it's why the center mentioned we've urged the Pentagon to also contribute to this effort. After all, they had a lot to do with this. And they should, he feels, recognize that it's in our interest to, that they are working with the Vietnamese military to try to address it. And so we have to plan for the future. We have to, ideally, if the president would include money in the budget, it would make our lives much easier. But at the very least, to when there are opportunities, if the president goes to Vietnam or when the general secretary comes here, to reinforce and reaffirm the commitment of both countries to continuing to work together on these issues. That's almost as important as providing the funds to do so. Thank you very much. Next question is to Charles and Dr. Son. And that is, I wonder if you could share sort of your personal perspectives. What did you learn about the potential for the U.S.-Vietnam relationship in your work on this issue? Is there anything we could learn from what you've experienced, what you've seen, what you've done in your journey to try to address the Agent Orange issue? Any lessons you can share with us? I'll respond and then Dr. Son. I went to live in Hanoi in 1997. And for the next seven years, I found it was virtually impossible to talk about this subject in official circles for various reasons that Tim has alluded to. And I think it was a real impediment in developing other areas of the relationship. But as we began to see progress after 2007, there was a mutual, there was a kind of virtuous circle instead of a vicious circle. That is, progress on addressing Agent Orange created conditions, positive conditions in other areas and vice versa. So that's one lesson. Another lesson is that it's possible to tackle unpalatable subjects that many people wished had never happened or when they happened they wished they'd go away and we didn't have to talk about them. But somebody has to come out and talk about it. And in this case, it was valuable that the Ford Foundation and other American foundations were able to play a role here as a neutral ground, including an eminent persons group which was the first free-flowing two-way channel between well-credentialed, well-connected people in both countries where they could talk as individuals and put language out there that made it easier for officials to talk to each other. So those are my two lessons. That's excellent. Thank you. Dr. Son. So let me speak Vietnamese and my colleagues handed me to translate. I think that the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S. in dealing with the Agent Orange issue is just like the political relationship between the two countries over the last years. Meaning that we did have a very difficult time in the past just like in the darkness. But later on, we did see a very clear movement in particular after the removal of the embargo. At that time, the word Agent Orange was seen as a very sensitive word. In 2000, there were high-level meetings in Singapore which ended as a failure. Not until 2005 did we see the first progress. What we have achieved so far in the Agent Orange issue was not what we could have thought that we could do it. The first progress, I think, is that we could share the information about the Agent Orange issues. After that, we had a joint research on the diocese residence in the environment. And then officially treat the diocese contamination in the Nang Airport. In particular, we officially have a program to support the disabled people that includes the people who are exposed to Agent Orange. I would like to specifically thank Dr. Charles Bailey and the Ford Foundation who were pioneers in this issue. And my special thanks to Ambassador Michael Marin who approached the issue as a moral responsibility. The relationship between the two countries, the achievement over the past years that we have so far couldn't be achieved without the support of Mr. Tim Reiser. What we have achieved so far would be a good foundation for us to move forward. And I hope that we could soon be able to close this issue, this story. Thank you. Those are great answers. I really appreciate it. Let me open the floor to your questions. And again, just please identify yourself and your institution. The gentleman right here in the front. Two quick comments. Mr. Weiband, you take the mic. Two quick comments. If I may, Tim, you really have to beware the causality trap. Association is what you need between diseases and conditions and exposure. And the American Enterprise Institute and others are still trying to wipe out all the gains on toxic wounds for American service people by demanding causality. But it's a fool's trap. All of the stuff that we consider dangerous within our society comes back to association. That's number one. Number two is a question. And that has to do, incidentally, as a follow-on to that, many things are not compensated for American veterans, including birth defects with the exception, small exception of a spina bifida. And there is legislation which we hope Senator Leahy will gain to co-sponsor as a hearing tomorrow, AS 901, Toxic Exposure Research Act, which is designed for the first time to start researching birth defects and really epigenetics. It makes it possible because we believe that it's changing of the acids, et cetera. Epigenetics didn't exist 10 years ago, basically. And the question is, there was a framework developed as part of the agreement in 2002 following the first-ever International Agent Orange Conference held in Hanoi at the Daewoo Hotel. One half of that was to do an ecological survey of the whole country with American scientists and Vietnamese scientists working side-by-side, and EPA was in charge of that. The other side was epidemiological work looking at the people and focusing on the north because you knew who went south and who didn't. Therefore, looking at the progeny of those who went south versus the progeny of those who did not go south and therefore were not exposed to Agent Orange would have been beneficial for American veterans and for Vietnamese. Once again, by association, that was abandoned and blown up basically by the Bush administration because they wanted to send Bush and wanted the Agent Orange to go away as Charles Bailey so eloquently said earlier. What is to preclude putting money back into NIHS during the next 18 months while we have Dr. Linda Bernbaum, who is head of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences and probably one of the three or four top experts on dioxin in the world have you thought about making that a priority and looked at that schematic? Let me just say that I, you know, I'd only deal with one piece of the federal budget and it's the international affairs piece. So we don't fund NIH, for example. I wish we did. There's a lot of money there. So I honestly don't know the answer to the question. I focus on the amount that we have every year to fund all of our international assistance programs and our contributions to the United Nations and other international organizations around the world and obviously direct funding assistance for governments and a whole myriad of programs. But it's all funds that are used overseas, so not by domestic agencies for activities here. But I do think that, you know, I'm sort of interested in your point about association versus causality because causality has always been the argument that I've run into. And, you know, I responded by simply saying, I don't see that that's really an issue here. We know what happened. We know that we have a responsibility both to our own veterans and to people in Vietnam. We know that dioxin is very toxic and, you know, we could, I suppose, have spent years avoiding the problem and continuing to encounter the kinds of anger and resentment that we did and continued to ignore our own veterans or we could have done something about it. I wasn't in the military in Vietnam. I came close, actually. I got a very high number, though, in the very last years of the war. But I always felt that what happened there was something that, you know, we had a responsibility to address. And so when I've had the opportunity in working for Senator Leahy, I've tried to do that. And not to be deterred by arguments about legal arguments or others that seem to simply try to defect responsibility or come up with reasons why we couldn't do something that clearly we needed to do. So, you know, I sort of made the same case that whether it was causality or not was not the issue for us. Clearly, we were involved. Our people were exposed. They were exposed. There were serious consequences. It's become a huge problem in our relationship. We want to move forward. This is an important issue that we have to address. And particularly for someone who lived through that time, it was something that I felt personally about. And so did Senator Leahy. Next question here, the gentleman in the blue shirt. My name is Scott Allen. I also was in Vietnam. And I'm on the board of the advocacy project. Thank you very much for all the work that you've been doing. But my question relates to something that Rick said. You know, when the spraying took place, almost all of it was in the south. But the folks that were in the jungle and in the rural areas of Vietnam that were being sprayed were North Vietnamese soldiers. Many of them lived in those conditions for months and years. After the war ended, they went home. And presumably they brought the dioxins back. And I wonder if there's been any analysis, any work done to understand the magnitude of Agent Orange in the north compared to the south? I think Charles can answer that more specifically than I, but I can tell you that we were... I wasn't actually aware of that, but I was made aware of that. And so some time ago in conversations with USAID, which is administering this program, I recommended that they first of all expand it significantly from just in areas where there were designated hotspots to a number of provinces that had been heavily sprayed and also provinces where North Vietnamese who had been in the south had returned to, like Tai Bien near Hanoi, because we recognized exactly what you just said. I don't know the extent of it. I don't know if any studies have been done, but we were made aware that that was an issue that we needed to address and that not only should we focus our attention on provinces that had been sprayed, but also where those who had been in those provinces had returned to after the war. Dr. Saanard. The Vietnamese government has pretty good programs for policies toward the people who are exposed to Asian orange. Without any differentiation, regardless of whether you are from the south or you are from the north, you are the civilian or you are in the army. There are criteria to determine whether you are exposed or you are not, but the first criteria is you must be at that time of the spraying you are in the sprayed area. Recently in Vietnam there are new changes. There are supporting programs for the people who served in the Saigon army before who were in the spray area through humanitarian programs. The financial support from the US government to people who are disabled, including the people who were exposed to the virus or including the people who were exposed to Asian orange. The supporting funding is not very large. That's why we focus on the people who live in the sprayed area, who live near the hotspots. I hope that in the near future, when the funding becomes larger, we would focus more on the subject of the people that we mentioned, people who came from the north. But the Vietnamese government, they do include the offspring, the children of people who were exposed during the war time in the program to be entitled to receive support. And now we find that the third generation, the grandchildren of the people who were exposed, they are also affected. We don't yet have the information about the fourth generation. But we do find the changes in the China. The Vietnamese government, however, doesn't have the policy towards the grand children generation. The main reason, I think, is the limitation of the budget, the funding. Because if we include the third generation in the list, the budget would become very large. Thank you very much. Other questions? How are you doing? Hi, Michael Martin from CRS. I'd like to continue a little bit on the same theme, which Senator Leahy alluded to, which is, I think it would be reasonable to characterize or overgeneralize, which we try to avoid at CRS, but anyways, that the environmental remediation aspect of the bilateral relationship is going quite well. However, when you get to assistance for health care, health-related issues, disability, there we're experiencing some problems. Tim, as you alluded to on the U.S. side, resistance to legal liability exposure, but also Congress appropriates funds in a particular way. The money goes over to state, goes over to USAID. It becomes a nationwide disability program. So there seems to be some resistance in behavior from USAID and state to having a program associated with Agent Orange and dioxin. On the Vietnamese government side, as the Senator alluded to and others of us have noticed, there's sometimes a conflation between individuals who may have medical conditions that could be attributed to exposure to Agent Orange and individuals who have medical conditions probably unrelated to Agent Orange and therefore conflation of the affected community. It seems the current structure on both the U.S. side continues to create these problems. Could any of the panelists think of an alternative framework by which the U.S. could provide assistance that would solve the problems on the U.S. side, but also at the same time allow the assistance program in Vietnam to reach the targeted people? Well, that is a very good question and it's one that we struggle with because obviously we don't have a lot of money. We want to make the best use of it. And you're right, the environmental remediation part is pretty straightforward. You know, it's a complicated process. It involves technology that the Vietnamese don't have. We had to find a U.S. contractor. It's costly, but it's pretty straightforward. You're dealing with decontaminating soil. Dealing with human beings is more difficult. And yet I think that we're largely past the debate about causality, about responsibility, about all of that. Both governments are invested in this. Top U.S. officials have expressed support for this effort, have committed to continuing to support it, have recognized the benefits both to the people of Vietnam and to the relationship generally. I think we're beyond that. What we're not beyond is the limitations of government bureaucracy and of course the funding challenges, which we have not just here but across the board. So we struggle to find sufficient funds for all kinds of important and compelling needs and we routinely fall short. So the funding issue is one that we deal with on a daily basis. Again, if the administration were to include funds in its budget, that would be enormously helpful. We've encouraged them to do so. But short of that, we find the money because Senator Leahy feels that strongly about this. If he didn't, it wouldn't be there. It's as simple as that. In fact, none of this money would have been available for this purpose. But the issue of how best to use those funds to benefit people the most and the most people who are affected or likely affected is the challenge. We appropriate money to federal agencies. We don't appropriate it to you or to me or anybody else. We can only appropriate money to agencies of the federal government that then enter into grants or other types of agreements with organizations that implement programs. And I think this is where we've seen the biggest difficulty. And part of that is our responsibility. That is AID has its own way of doing things which are not always the most cost effective or imaginative. And I think some of what we have invested in hasn't been as effective as it should have been. It hasn't involved the Vietnamese to the extent that it should. It hasn't, I think, helped to build more sustainable types of programs because ultimately we can't be the public health service of Vietnam. They have to take care of their own people. Our role, I think, is to help them do that, to provide training, technical assistance, other knowledge that we have from our own experiences over the years with people with disabilities. And there's a lot that we can do to help, but we can't fund the health services of Vietnam. So we have to make the best use of what resources we have. And I think that means working at the local level. It means working with Vietnamese provincial authorities. It means working with community organizations. I think what it doesn't mean is hiring some big contractor from either the United States or somewhere else to come to Vietnam and try to solve the problem and charge an arm and a leg to do it. So it's a work in progress. We're expanding, as the senator said, our efforts to multiple provinces. We're looking at working at the local level as best we can. One of the problems is finding capable Vietnamese partners. It's not as easy as you might think, because we also have to be able to account for how the funds are used. And there's a real lack of capacity. So I think the best thing that we can do is be realistic about what we can accomplish, not think that just by spending money we're going to solve this problem. We have to go about it in a way where we are building the capacity locally so that families can receive the support that they need. Dr. Sain, did you... I agree that there are some instances of abusing the word victim of Asian orange. And we did alert the government from the central to the local government of the problem. There are reasons around this. The first thing is that the nature of determining whether it's caused by Asian orange is complicated. And even with world veterans in the U.S., there are diseases that it's hard to determine if it's associated or not. The second is the awareness, the understanding or the knowledge of the people who run the program. And the qualification, the management skills of the organization of the departments that run the program. And not only in Vietnam, also in the U.S., people talk about the causality. That's why our approach to address the problem is we take the humanitarian approach. And then after that comes next the responsibility and also scientific approach. Charles, yeah, please go ahead. I have a general and a specific comment. Tim talked about the limitations of bureaucracy and there is still what I would call foot dragging within the State Department and USAID. Sometimes I call this that they're still managing a problem rather than seeing this as an opportunity. But we've been able to make it easier within these conditions. And one of them is this definition of docs and hotspots, which focuses that effort. And last year some research shows a high correlation between people who have severe mental and physical disabilities in Vietnam and people that are considered to be aging orange victims. So it's possible to go to the heavily sprayed provinces and to focus programs on severely disabled people and avoid a whole category of phrases and words in history that is frankly history. So we're trying to make it easier for both sides. The second is that when you get down to reality down to where people are living in the centers, the family, the center visited for example with no offspring. What you can do is both provide programs that help those families and those communities build family assets. By this I mean physical assets of equipment better roof, better bathroom and scholarships for able-bodied siblings. So when the parents pass away the family structure can still support these now hapless, helpless adults. This needs to go hand in hand with investment in the institutional assets such as training capacity building. There's a very simple protocol developed by the Washington Consensus on Disability that can be applied to train village council members in Vietnam how to identify the particular kinds of disability and to help people qualify for assistance programs. There is also a public-private partnership that has been going on for seven years in Da Nang that shows how you can both help people directly while building institutional capacity. It's tough love in and out three years we're done. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I think today's event really focused on a couple of things. We can see how personal this issue is, how it affects individuals, families but it has also national and geopolitical implications and I think the other message that struck me is what a few people who are committed to try to make something better can do and I'd like to thank the three panelists here today and ask you to join me in thanking them not only for their comments but for their work in this regard. Thank you very much.