Dương Quỳnh Hoa

Dương Quỳnh Hoa (1930–2006) was a notable member of the National Liberation Front (Việt Cộng) in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and a member of its provisionary government, serving as a cabinet member.

Early years

Born in 1930, Hoa was from a southern upper-class family, which had been Frenchified during the colonial era. After completing her secondary schooling in Vietnam, she moved to Paris in the 1950s to study Medicine. It was in Paris that she became a communist. Upon finishing her degree, she returned to southern Vietnam, which following the partition of Vietnam following the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Conference had become part of the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam. During this period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hoa spied for the communists, as she socialised with the Saigon elite at cocktail parties with the inner circle of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the American advisors in Vietnam, who were oblivious to the fact that the upper-class southerner was a communist.

War time activities

Early in 1968 when the Tet Offensive broke out, Hoa and her husband, Huỳnh Văn Nghị, a mathematician, fled Saigon to a NLF hideout in the jungle. There, the couple's son died of encephalitis. Although she never recovered from the personal loss, she put on a brave face in an interview with American journalist Stanley Karnow, quipping that her son was "only one among millions".

Critic of the status-quo

Following the war Hoa founded and became the director of the Centre of Pediatrics, Development and Health in the now renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

After the reunification of the country, Hoa eventually became a vocal critic of the new government. She stated "I have been a communist all my life, but now I've seen the realities of Communism, and it is a failure — mismanagement, corruption, privilege, repression. My ideals are gone." At the time, the failure of the rice harvest and declining food rations had seen record levels of malnutrition at the hospital that she ran.

In 1990, she declared to Karnow that "Communism has been catastrophic. Party officials have never understood the need for rational development. They've been hypnotized by Marxist slogans that have lost validity — if they were ever valid. They are outrageous." Talking of the corruption practiced by the officials and their wives, she said that it was equivalent to what occurred in South Vietnam: "This is very much a feudal society, whatever its ideological veneer."

Agent Orange class action lawsuit

During the Vietnam War, Hoa was working Biên Hòa, Sông Bé, and Tây Ninh, which were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide used by the U.S. Military, which has since been shown to be carcinogenic. Long after the end of the war, in 1998, Hoa was diagnosed with breast cancer; her blood test in 1999 also showed high levels of dioxin, a carcinogenic compound present in agent orange.

In 2004, as part of Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA), Hoa was one of the first three Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange to take part in a class action lawsuit.

Prior to the legal action, Hoa had long been outspoken about the impact of Agent Orange, especially in her capacity as director of Ho Chi Minh city's Centre of Pediatrics, Development and Health. Speaking to The Washington Post in 1990, Hoa said that "cancer and other diseases attributed to Agent Orange [were] beyond the capabilities of Vietnam's strained medical structure" as the country rebuilt itself after the war. Hoa had also been critical of the Vietnamese government's reluctance to seek accountability from the US government. She said in an interview in 1996:The government is afraid. They refuse to talk about war crimes and dioxin because it might damage relations with the United States. It's a time of peace, a time of normalization... I think the government is more concerned with money now than (with) Agent Orange.