Legacy of a secret war
Cluster
bombs have been a favourite of the military for 40 years, but their
devastating effect on countries like Laos and Iraq has led human rights
groups to call for their prohibtion.
One February morning in southern Laos, a farmer named
Viengtong was clearing a hillside in preparation for planting. As
he walked through the grass, making long swings with his machete,
his thoughts must have been those of any family man – the welfare
of his wife and three small children, the prospects for his farm and
his animals. He could not have known that the next swing of his arm,
bringing the long blade down onto a small metal object hidden in the
long grass, would tear his world apart.
A sudden blast pierced the morning air as the cluster
bomb exploded; Viengtong collapsed to the ground, his left arm severed
below the elbow, his eyesight gone forever, his hearing damaged beyond
repair. But he was one of the lucky ones.
Laos is one of the most heavily bombed places on
Earth. Between 1964 and 1973, the US air force secretly dropped more
than two million tonnes of explosives on this impoverished rural nation
in an attempt to quell a communist uprising against the Lao government
and to prevent the North Vietnamese Army using the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Many of these bombs failed to detonate, leaving as many as 25 million
pieces of unexploded ordnance (UXO) scattered across the country.
Since 1975, these bombs have killed and maimed over 11,000 people.
Laos is a beautiful country of craggy limestone mountains,
emerald rice paddies and colourful tribal groups - but its idyllic
surface belies the hidden danger. “We find bombs in villages
and towns, in schools, in rivers, in the forest and in agricultural
land,” says Bounpheng Sisavath, spokesman for UXO Lao. “Most
of the contamination is cluster bombs dropped by American planes during
the war.”
Cluster
bombs were the most commonly used weapon by the US Air Force over
Laos. They consist of a large bomb casing, packed with hundreds of
small explosive sub-munitions known as bomblets. At a certain altitude,
the casing breaks open, scattering the bomblets and turning large
areas into killing fields. The bomblets are designed to detonate on
impact, but 10 to 30 per cent of those dropped on Laos failed to explode.
Millions still lie buried close to the surface, waiting for the slightest
disturbance to set them off.
Even one cluster bomblet can cause terrible damage.
Upon detonation, its metal casing breaks into jagged fragments that
are propelled at ballistic speed for up to 150 metres. Often, several
people are injured in one blast; around half of the victims die immediately
while many die later, unable to reach a hospital.
“Modern cluster bombs are pretty horrific,”
says Rae McGrath, a Nobel laureate who has spent decades campaigning
against landmines and cluster bombs. “Those who survive get
burns, blast effects; they get fragmentation. Blinding is very common;
and they very often loose one or two limbs. Those things are horrific
when they happen in war, but when they happen in peacetime, they don’t
just affect that person and their family; they affect the whole community.”
UXO Lao is agency responsible for clearing these
deadly bomblets. In the eight years since its creation, its staff
– mostly drawn from local communities – has cleared over
3000 hectares of land, removing almost half a million pieces of ordnance.
It is impressive work, given its annual budget of only $5 million,
but is only a drop in the ocean.
Around
2/3 of Laos is contaminated with UXO, directly impacting the safety
and livelihoods of a quarter of all villages. In some areas, the scale
of contamination beggars belief. In one man’s home and garden,
they found over 430 bomblets, including one under his bed.
But constraints of time and money mean that full
clearance of land using metal loop detectors is only possible in high
priority areas such as farmland, schools and hospitals. In the rest
of the country, roving teams can respond to emergency requests from
villagers who find bombs on the surface, but complete removal of contamination
is practically impossible.
For this reason, UXO Lao’s Community Awareness
teams are a crucial way of reducing casualties. “They visit
villages for up to a week, organising discussions with the villagers
and using puppets to teach the children,” says Mr Sisavath.
“The difficulty for us is to change people’s attitudes
who have been living with UXO for over 30 years.”
The realities of life in Laos makes their job difficult.
Even those who know the risks are often forced to enter areas they
know to be contaminated. Many upland Lao practice shifting cultivation,
necessitating the clearing of new land every year. For many impoverished
farmers, daily life is a choice between the danger of UXO and the
certainty of hunger.
Bomb metal has also become an important source of
income, and many are willing to risk their lives to get it. Walk the
streets of any town in the most heavily bombed parts of Laos and you
will see bomb casings converted into lamps, chairs, flowerpots or
fence posts. The high-quality American steel is particularly prized
by blacksmiths, who fashion it into hoes, knives and sickles.
The
result is that people are still dying. “I’ve seen as many
as 80 killed in a year,” says Mr Sisavath. “Most of the
victims are men, because in Lao culture men work in the fields.”
For those who survive, the effect on their lives
can be devastating. Viengtong’s family had to sell their land,
home and animals to pay medical bills that were half their annual
income. His wife, Gong, worked as a labourer to keep the family going
while his daughter had to drop out of school to look after her younger
siblings and her disabled father.
This is a story repeated all over Laos, and it is
having a disastrous effect on the country as a whole. Laos is one
of the world’s poorest countries, ranked 135 out of 175 nations
on the UN human development index. Out of a population of 5.2 million,
half are malnourished and without access to safe drinking water.
The Lao government has set strong development goals,
but their progress is severely hampered by the presence of UXO. Every
time a school, hospital or sanitation project is implemented, the
land must first be painstakingly cleared by bomb disposal teams –
a process that can take up to two months and cost $3500 per hectare.
“In the future, it will be a bigger problem
because we need more land,” says Mr Sisavath. “We have
already cleared land for many villages, but they demand more for rice
fields.” Laos also has one of the fastest growing populations
in the region, pressuring its ability to feed itself. At the current
rate, it will take another 25 years to clear all the priority land
for agriculture and development.
While Laos has struggled to overcome the devastating
effects of cluster bombs, their use has continued in conflicts across
the world. US and UK armed forces used cluster bombs extensively in
the first Gulf War, Kosovo and Afghanistan. During the recent invasion
of Iraq, coalition forces dropped over 14,000 cluster bombs containing
almost 2 million submunitions.
The coalition armed forces maintain that cluster
bombs are lawful weapons that do not cause excessive humanitarian
problems. In an official statement, the British Ministry of Defence
said cluster bombs provide “a unique capability against certain
legitimate military targets, such as dispersed armour units,”
and that their use in Iraq was, “consistent with our obligations
under international law; against legitimate military targets; and
on occasions when they are the most appropriate weapons system.”
The MoD also says it has gone out of its way to minimise
civilian casualties, by only using the most accurate and reliable
cluster bombs and restricting their use near urban areas. It says
it has taken full responsibility for post-war cleanup, removing over
900,000 bomblets and conducting an education campaign about the dangers
of UXO in schools in the Basra area.
Steve Goose of Human Rights Watch (HRW) does not
agree that coalition forces did all they could to minimise the humanitarian
impact of these weapons. “US and UK ground forces behaved very
poorly with respect to cluster munitions in the Iraq War,” he
says. A Human Rights Watch report claims widespread cluster bomb attacks
in Baghdad, Basra and other cities killed and injured hundreds of
civilians. Mr Goose says that most of these attacks used cluster bombs
that, “had acknowledged failure rates under testing conditions
of 14 to 16 per cent,” and there were, “undoubtedly many
tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of cluster duds
that were left behind from the fighting.” Hospital records show
hundreds of civilian casualties from sub-munition duds by the end
of May 2003, he says.
The
Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which has been clearing mines and UXO
in Northern Iraq for 12 years, describes a similar situation. “Areas
were carpeted with cluster bombs,” says Irena Kuszta, spokeswoman
for MAG. “Just after the war, in one week in one area, 52 were
killed and 63 were injured,” – more than were killed during
the fighting. MAG has made good progress in decontaminating the land
and the victim rate in the north has now fallen to pre-war levels,
but it may take many more years to remove all dangerous material.
“We know that every mine and bomb cleared is a life saved and
we’ve cleared over a million,” says Ms Kuszta. “We
can’t say how many more we’ve got to clear, we’ve
just got to keep going.”
In light of the situation in Laos, and the ongoing
humanitarian problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, a group of more than
80 NGOs, including the International Committee for the Red Cross and
HRW, launched a campaign for a total moratorium on the use of cluster
bombs in November last year. They are also calling for the creation
of a legally binding framework that will govern their future use and
ensure that those who use cluster bombs take responsibility for clearing
up afterwards.
HRW has been raising the problems of cluster bombs
for years and Mr Goose says they have been effective in raising awareness
in the armed forces. While the US Army is still lagging behind, the
Air Force has, “taken steps to address the two key problems
that we point to, that is the inaccuracy of the weapon and the long-term
problem posed by the number of hazardous duds left behind. In the
last five years, the Air Force has put a lot of money into trying
to find technological solutions. They have also taken greater care…to
avoid using the weapons in populated areas.” No governments
have backed the call for a moratorium.
Other campaigners are more sceptical that any technological
or tactical changes will make the weapons safer. Rae McGrath believes
the technical problems of cluster bombs are so fundamental they will
never be safe to use. “We were told before the first Gulf War
that we could look at failure rates of one in a thousand,” he
says. “What we’ve seen on the ground since then, through
various conflicts, is a continuing high failure rate and an impact
that almost exactly mirrors what we saw in Southeast Asia. If they
could make something that didn’t cause them this embarrassment,
they would make it. There are just so many weaknesses in the delivery
of the weapon that it’s never going to be reliable enough.”
Even if new, more reliable designs are successful,
this may not solve all the problems. “The US has a policy now
of procuring future submunitions that have a failure rate of less
than one per cent,” says Mr Goose, “but at the same time
they’ve said, ‘We are going to hold on to our entire existing
arsenal and give ourselves the freedom to use all of these older,
more unreliable systems’.” Only a tiny percentage of the
cluster bombs stockpiled in warehouses around the world will ever
be safe to use, he says, “the vast majority of the billions
of submunitions that are out there are going to need to be destroyed.”
Ultimately, the purpose of the campaign is to ensure
that no other countries experience the devastating long-term problems
suffered by Laos. At present, only a handful of areas in the world
are seriously contaminated with cluster bombs, none of which come
close to Laos in their severity. “It’s more of being on
the cusp of a disaster than already being a disaster,” he says.
“That’s why we are anxious for people to learn about the
dangers and to take action now before these things get used on the
kind of scale we saw with landmines in previous decades.”
