Michael Batson

Luang Prabang, the jewel of Laos, a UNESCO heritage site, situated at the confluence of the Mekong and Kham rivers is home to 32 pagodas, and famous chill out place for overseas visitors.  Once the capital of Lane Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants, Luang Prabang is the old royal city of Laos.  The peaceful town beside the Mekong is blessed with the country’s finest old Buddhist temples. Chief amongst them is Wat Xieng Thong, the Temple of the Golden City.  This former royal monastery is a complex of graceful wooden structures in the classic Luang Prabang style with its elegantly curved roof sweeping low to nearly ground level. Also in Luang Prabang is the former royal palace, now a museum, and well worth a visit.

While most visitors come to see this and other sights, the town is home to another less popular destination, but one that should be on every visitor’s list of “must see” places, the Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme, for Lao has the unwanted distinction of being per capita the most heavily bombed nation in the world.

In the early 1960s, US president Kennedy made a policy statement guaranteeing the peace and neutrality of Laos.  To ensure these objectives successive US administrations ordered destruction on a neutral country, the like of which has never before been witnessed in the history of human kind.  More than half-a-million US bombing missions were carried out between the years 1964 to 1973. 

This equates to one plane load of bombs delivered every eight minutes round the clock for nine years!  US pilots admitted later they were not even sure what they were bombing.  At night, infra-red detectors would indicate ground targets, but whether these were livestock, soldiers, civilians or wildlife, it was impossible to ever know, they were just bombed.  These include more than 266 million anti-personnel sub-munitions, or “bombies”, released from cluster bombs. 

Cluster bombs are viewed as little more than air-delivered landmines. They are just as indiscriminate and unreliable. The “bomblets” they spray out over a wide area linger on the battlefield just as long, leaving a legacy of horrific injury and death for those who have the misfortune to live there, usually civilians and particularly children, who pick up munitions which failed to detonate on impact.

An example of one of these hideous weapons can be seen in the display attached to the office.  A rusted bomb recovered by the Programme intact which contains hundreds of tennis ball size bombies.  Just looking at this one example gives an indication of the size of the problem faced by this impoverished nation struggling to cope with an immense problem.

One-third of all ordnance dropped on Laos failed to explode.  At risk of sounding macabre, it’s a wonder then that the Pentagon failed to take munitions manufacturers to task over this prodigious level of poor quality control.  Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to remain in the ground until today.  One person in Laos is killed everyday because of UXO dropped by the US.  Not only is UXO the cause of death and mutilation, there is clear evidence of the correlation between the prevalence of UXO and poverty.  The heavier the contamination, the more impoverished the people.

The Programme employs just over 1000 staff of whom 677 are clearance personnel and eight international advisors, some from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG).  The Programme’s tasks include not just clearance of UXO but survey tasks, but community education and awareness programmes. 

Despite the huge legacy of its military involvement in Laos, the US appears reluctant to contribute any form of assistance in solving the problem, and Laos, despite assistance from some other nations struggles to cope.  UXO Programme vehicles in two of the most heavily contaminated provinces, Phalanxay and Savannakhet north of Pakse, are in such a poor state they hamper UXO operations.  Often trucks have to be push started and five or six staff are required to perform the task, often having to travel to do so.  Such inhibitors are a major problem in the work of clearing bombs and other UXO from farmland, largely because of all the time it wastes.

In 2008, UXO Laos estimated they could clear all bombs from agricultural land throughout the country within 16 years.  However, in Savannakhet there are only 72 people working on UXO clearance, and so far only 10 percent of agricultural land has been cleared in the four most affected provinces of the country.

Not totally without heart, the US has agreed to assist, and recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding promising  financial assistance through the State Department of US$ 44,060 (yes, that’s US$44,060 in total) for establishing a medical fund for UXO victims in two provinces, one of which is among the most contaminated provinces in the country.

At the Lao UXO office there is a display of collected UXO, thankfully rendered harmless, and donations can be made, though it is advised that receipts for these be obtained.  I bought a t-shirt for such a worthy cause, you know, to bolster Uncle Sam’s miniscule contributions.  While the woman in attendant handed me my receipt, I noticed that she removed the carbon paper for the next person, thereby leaving no record of their purchase.

A DVD shows the work of the Programme, which is narrated by one of the international advisors to the UXO Programme, an Australian working for MAG, who had trained with the Australian army.  Coincidentally, he said his brother was also a deminer.  One day he was called to a school year where a child had just been killed by UXO.  Another UXO, an American bomb was buried nose in to the ground, where it had landed over 30 years ago.  One local had already tried to unscrew the tail of the weapon for scrap but reported that he had given up as the metal had seized.  The Australian advised him not to try again.

Paradoxically, a cottage industry has built up around the trade in scrap metal.  Local populations exploit the commercial value of metal and sell what they can to dealers, who buy scrap for US$1.50 per kilo and explosives for US$2.50 per kilo. Dealers then on-sell their purchases to smelters who melt down and recast the scrap.  This scrap foraging has been described as self-exploitation, where risk of engagement with ordnance and value realised is balanced against the ‘availability, drudgery and output of other possible activities.’  In Laos, selling scrap metal has become one of the few ways to survive.

Some Lao UXO operators and translators are ex-monks, “they’ve got the temperament” said the Australian.  Though one ex-monk, having worn the saffron robes for 12 years, admitted to making up for lost time with alcohol and women after he’d stopped being a monk.