Part of what Laos Essential Artistry is about if "Giving Back" and one of the causes we support is an awareness of the huge UXO problem in Laos. We have had emotional meetings with families devastated by the death of a family member by UXO and have talked at length with people from MAG (Mines Advisory Group) and PCL (Phoenix Clearance Limited) two of many groups, NGO and commercial, involved with clearing UXO from heavily bombed land in both northern and southern Laos. On this blog, under our page on "People Making a Difference" we highlight the work of Jim Harris and his NGO, We Help War Victims, who works tirelessly to help villages and people living daily with the threat of UXO.
We are writing this post now because we just became aware of an excellent video on YouTube that clearly communicates the problems Laos faces with UXO. The video appears below.
Wow, what a surprise to see my local paper, The Sacramento Bee, publish the editorial at the bottom of this post about banning cluster bombs! The editorial ran April 2, but I feel it's still important to post and comment on. They even mention Laos! Which they should, since the US dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of WW II. The photo of the man with his three young daughters I’m including here, because my summer 2003 educators group met him six days after his wife was killed by a bombie, one of the most common kinds of cluster bombs. Let me tell you the story of Bounpheng before reading the editorial.
Bounpheng is a medical assistant in the Lao army earning about $15 (150,000 kip) a month. Life had been a constant struggle for him and his wife and three daughters, ages 5, 3, and 1, and finally after five years he and his wife saved enough money to buy a small plot of land which they then planned to develop into a rice paddy. One morning in early June 2003 he, his wife and children all walked to their newly acquired land where he and his wife then began the arduous work of preparing it for rice planting. In the middle of the land, there was a pile of dirt that looked like a termite hill. He and his wife tried to flatten the termite hill and as noon time approached his wife told him to leave early to take care of the baby so she could continue to work a little bit more. As soon as Bounpheng turned away, he heard a loud explosion and saw his wife laying on the ground covered in blood.
There was no one near he could call for help and so he picked up his wife’s limp and lifeless body and carried it back to his home. His five year daughter carried the baby and all were crying, wondering what had happened to their mother.
Back at his home other villagers came and saw there was nothing they could do for his wife, but saw that he too had been injured and was taken to the hospital. The village helped him out with the funeral of his wife, but he was not provided any compensation by the government and his army unit only gave him 25,000 kip, about $2.50
He and his wife had thought the land was safe, as it had been farmed before, and the termite hill was small, but as his wife had been chopping at some roots there must have been a bombie lodged unseen.
Where life had been a struggle before his wife had died, but with the hope that together they could work together at improving their life, no life seems overwhelming, with little hope. Bounpheng is an orphan and so doesn’t have any relatives to help him with taking care of his children and often has to take his children to work.
I’ve gone back several times and have given him a couple of hundred dollars and this last December when we were driving from Sam Neua to Phonsavan we stopped by and I was glad to see that he recently got married and all his children looked healthy. We gave him copies of all the books Big Brother Mouse has published for children in Laos for his daughters and he seemed to be in good spirits. We will continue to visit him whenever we are driving between Sam Neua and Phonsavan, which may be fairly often as they have now canceled flights from Vientiane to Sam Neua so the best way to get to Sam Neua is to fly to Phonsavan and rent a vehicle to drive (all day) to Sam Neua.
The editorial from the Sacramento Bee is below Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, April 2, 2007
Anyone traveling through Laos, Cambodia or other recovering war zones is likely to come across children and adults who have lost limbs or eyesight after stumbling across a long-buried bomb.
Every few days, a civilian somewhere is killed or maimed because of remnants of past wars. It could be a farmer in Afghanistan running his plow across a field or a child in Kosovo who picks up what seems to be a harmless chunk of metal.
Over the last decade, more than 150 countries have unsuccessfully pressed the United States and other countries to sign a treaty banning the use of land mines. Yet even as they crusade on that unfinished task, widespread use of another indiscriminate weapon of war -- cluster bombs -- has increased the threat to civilians.
"Cluster bombs" are a catchall term for munitions that armies have stockpiled all over the world. They can be dropped from planes or fired from artillery. Once in the air, these munitions disperse smaller "bomblets." These bomblets are designed to explode in the air or when hitting their targets, and can be effective in taking out an area of infantry and armor. Yet many of these bomblets prove to be duds and fail to detonate. This results in hundreds or even thousands of tiny bomblets left behind, later exploding when someone disturbs them.
Although not alone in deploying these weapons, the United States has been a major user and supplier of cluster bombs.
During the war in Indochina, U.S. forces dropped thousands of cluster bombs in Laos. These leftover bomblets have killed or injured 11,000 people in Laos since the war ended, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Cluster bombs have also caused high civilian casualties in Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Lebanon.
No law or treaty will ever ensure that wars are carried out cleanly, with no cost to civilians. But there are steps that nations can take to limit the after-effects of war. In the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein of California and Patrick Leahy are now urging their counterparts to take one of those steps.
For the second year, Feinstein and Leahy have introduced a measure to ban the sale, use and transfer of cluster bombs that have a dud rate of 1 percent or more. To win over reluctant senators, the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act of 2007 doesn't call for an absolute phaseout of these weapons. Instead, it bans their use where civilians are known to be present.
Even with such concessions, this bill faces an uphill fight. The Pentagon has long defended its use of cluster bombs, describing them in a 2004 report as "a versatile weapon ideally suited to attack time-sensitive area targets in a fluid battlefield experience."
According to the Pentagon, restrictions on cluster bombs would force commanders to deploy increased numbers of other missiles or bombs -- the same argument that was once made against banning land mines.
Misguided arguments against the Feinstein-Leahy bill have also come from some pro-Israeli activists, who claim the bill is targeted against Israel. This is a red herring. While Israel's use of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon last year has certainly focused attention on their indiscriminate use, Feinstein says she first became alarmed about cluster bombs after learning about their legacy in Southeast Asia.
More than 40 countries have joined in the campaign to end or widely restrict the use of cluster bombs. The United States needs to participate in this effort. If pro-Israeli groups were to recognize the moral imperative of this cause and its true origins, it could turn the tide.
Between 1964 and 1973, the United States conducted a "secret" war, dropping over two million tons of bombs on the mountains and jungles of Laos. Many of these bombs - especially a newly developed weapon called a "cluster bomb" - failed to explode when they hit the ground, leaving the landscape littered with millions of unexploded bombs, as dangerous today as when they fell from the sky three decades ago.
Dubbed "bombies" by Laotian villagers, these eye-catching but deadly orbs, as brightly colored as exotic fruit, are still found by children playing in shallow dirt, in the clefts of bamboo branches, or in the furrows of fields where farmers still till the soil by striking the earth with a hoe.
In 1964, as the Vietnam War was intensifying, the United States attempted to staunch the flow of North Vietnamese people and supplies moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which detoured through Laos before heading into South Vietnam. Laotian Communists, backed by North Vietnam, were fighting in a civil war against the U.S.-supported Royal Lao government. Because the United States signed the 1962 Geneva Accords prohibiting American military involvement in Laos, the bombing, organized by President Kennedy, the CIA and the Air Force, was kept secret, both from Congress and from the American people, to pursue a covert strategy for ridding the countryside of Communists. Initial targets were Communists troops, supply depots and lines of communication. Later, to prevent the soldiers from having access to men and materials, the U.S. began to bomb farms, villages and towns. The consequences for Lao civilians were devastating. American planes delivered the equivalent of a B-52 planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. More bombs were dropped on Laos at that time than on Germany and Japan combined during World War II.
In the last three decades more than 12,000 people, many of them children, have been killed or injured by bombies or other unexploded ordnance (weapons). With an estimated 90 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos, many experts consider Laos to be the most heavily ordnance-contaminated country in the world.
BOMBIES tells the untold story of the deadly legacy of unexploded cluster bombs in Laos through the personal experiences of villagers, activists and others who courageously deal with them on a daily basis.
Bombies examines the problem of unexploded cluster bombs through the personal experiences of a group of Laotians and foreigners and argues for their elimination as a weapon of war. Unfortunately they are still a standard part of the US arsenal and were dropped both in Kosovo and now Afghanistan.
This is an outstanding video which should be in all K-16 video collections. But what’s amazing, and really tragical, is that if you asked 99.9% of educators whether they have ever seen the video, they will tell you no. And recently I emailed Bullfrog films asking them how many K-16 schools in California have purchased the video and they said 3, only THREE in the entire state of California! One was my school district, one was UC Berkeley and one down in southern California. Compounding this problem is that none of the Central Valley PBS stations played the video when it first came out. Why would Bay Area PBS stations promote and show the video, but KVIE and KIXE ignore it? I emailed KVIE and they told me that they didn’t think it was something their members would be interested in. Again, tragical.
To order the video contact http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/bombie.html
The video is really powerful, but when my summer 2003 tour group went to Xieng Khuang and visited with a man and his three daughters whose wife/mother had been killed by a bombie just two weeks earlier, the tragedy of UXO in Laos was made all too REAL. If you look at the “Laos Tours Revisited” photo album on this site and go toward the end you can see more photos and read more about the family and what’s being done about UXO in Laos (Photos 186-192).
The Lao word in the center of the heart above translates literally as nam jhai, "water" "heart". An act of nam jhai, of water flowing from the heart, is an act of kindness, an opening of the heart. A quality highly respected by the Lao and Thai people.
