Deadly Showers

Weak response to yellow rain

A seven-man United Nations team flew into Bangkok last week to investigate one of the more controversial issues to come before the international organization: accusations that the Soviet Union, through its ally Viet Nam, has for the past six years been waging chemical warfare in Cambodia and Laos.

Indeed, the team's visit itself is controversial. Just one year ago, a similar U.N. group looked into the same accusations, only to report that the evidence appeared to be inconclusive. But subsequent American and Canadian studies giving detailed evidence of deadly "yellow rain" attacks have forced the launching of a new inquiry, and the hope is that this time the U.N. will find some real answers.

Scores of eyewitness accounts by refugees fleeing into Thailand tell the same story. Attacks in remote mountain jungles of Indochina have, according to a State Department estimate, killed at least 7,000 people. Typically, a plane sweeps in low over an isolated village, spraying a yellowish cloud or dropping bombs that burst in a shower of sticky beads. The rain, says the survivor of an April attack, feels "wet like rain and hot like chilies." The lethal ingredient of yellow rain is a poorly understood class of mycotoxins, or fungal poisons, known as trichothecenes, that apparently kill by rupturing blood vessels and inhibiting the blood's clotting ability. Within minutes of a yellow rain attack, villagers' eyes start to burn; soon after that, their skin erupts in blisters, and as internal bleeding begins, they vomit blood.

Despite mounting evidence that Viet Nam is using Soviet chemicals in its battle against anti-Communist insurgents in Laos and Cambodia, there has been little international outcry. A chief culprit, U.S. State Department officials complain, is the U.N., which had been conspicuously reluctant to investigate the U.S. charges vigorously. In a speech in West Berlin last year, then Secretary of State Alexander Haig charged the Soviets and their allies with violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical warfare and the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. One month after Haig's charge in West Berlin, the first U.N. team went to Thailand, but it visited only a handful of refugee camps during a brief eleven-day investigation.

While conceding that chemical warfare agents had perhaps been used, the U.N. investigators cited problems in verifying the sources of yellow rain samples, as well as questionable diagnoses of alleged yellow rain victims, concluding that the evidence was insufficient to "prove or disprove the allegations." Critics charge that the findings were no coincidence, since the head of the department sponsoring the investigation was a Soviet. Says a U.S. diplomat: "The performance was lackluster at best."

In the U.N.'s defense, officials argue that the international organization is "caught in a political vortex," needing incontrovertible evidence before being able to condemn a superpower. Meanwhile, for the victims of the deadly yellow showers, the raindrops keep falling.

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