Before we can move from Luang Prabang to our next destination, the Plain of Jars, we need to talk about bombs. During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped over 2 million tons of explosive ordinance over Laos in 580,000 bombing missions, in an attempt to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply train. That's the equivalent of one planeload every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. During the war, American bombs killed 30,000 civilians, blew up countless valuable livestock, and left thousands of villages burning. It's estimated that 30% of these bombs failed to detonate, leaving the country littered with unexploded ordinance (UXO). The worst of these are cluster munitions, which contain hundreds of individual bomblets or bombies, which are candy-colored tennis balls of lethal explosive. They look a lot like toys, and there are about 80 million of them littering the Lao countryside. This is what a cluster bomb does when it explodes:
Since the war ended, 20,000 people have been maimed or killed because of UXO explosions. Forty percent of them are children. That's about 300 people every year, almost every day. Nearly a third of the country is contaminated by UXO: all 17 of the country's provinces, a quarter of all villages, 41 of the 47 poorest districts, and a quarter of usable farmland. Subsistence farmers have no choice but to risk their limbs or their lives on their farmland, because the other option is starving. Should something happen, that person's family must somehow survive. Sometimes that means sending children to work instead of to school, furthering a cycle of poverty that has kept Laos among the 20 poorest countries in the world.
As Laos continues to industrialize and build infrastructure—like the hydro-electric dams on which its financial hopes are pinned—poor farmers are being forced to work land that could kill them. And continued poverty drives the resourceful to extract precious metal from UXO. Shell casings and scrap metal become animal troughs, house supports, shovels, hoes, bowls, buckets, boats, spoons, knives, ladders, cowbells, and pedestals for satellite dishes. Most of what gets picked up is harmless, but sometimes, it kills. MAG tries to educate as many people as possible about the dangers of UXO in free workshops and seminars, but money is limited.
In January, the US promised to spend $12 million on UXO clearance, victim assistance and risk education in Laos. Since the bombing ceased, the U.S. has provided $62 million, 40% of which has been allocated in the last five years (otherwise known as the Obama administration). That means that for 39 years, the average amount the US put towards cleaning up its own mess was around $2 million per year. By contrast, the US spent $17 million a day (in today's dollars) in bombing Laos for nine years straight. The US lost the Vietnam War. Two years later, despite the bombs and the CIA's attempt to stir up rebel forces, the communist Pathet Lao successfully overthrew the Royal Lao in 1975, only two years after the bombing stopped.
Although these numbers are staggering, what is most shocking to me is that I learned none of this in school. I had no idea about the US government's involvement before going to Laos. For more information, I recommend the Mines Advisory Group and Legacies of War. And this year a new book of photographs was published, documenting the ongoing ravages of UXO.
(The photographs framed in grey are part of a MAG-sponsored photography exhibit that we saw in Luang Prabang.)
No comments:
Post a Comment