A deadly harvest of cluster bombs in Laos

Richard Lloyd Parry
Xieng Khouang province, Laos

Viengkeo Kavongsone had lived in fear of such a catastrophe all his life ' in the jungle, the paddy fields or on the mountain, but never in his own back yard. It was late afternoon when it happened, and his wife, Van, and three young children were at home in their village in the province of Xieng Khouang in northern Laos. They were clearing the ditch which drains away the rain water from their little wooden house. The tin shovel scraped upon something hard and metallic ' and that was the last thing that they knew.

The explosion peppered shrapnel into the legs of Van and her 6-year old daughter, Phetsida. The oldest boy, Soulideth, took the blast in the face and may lose his sight. Closest to the explosion was the youngest boy, 6-year old Bounma. 'He was the littlest,' said his father as he stood by the hospital beds of his wife and surviving children, 'and he was right next to it.' The blast threw the child twenty feet out of the ditch, and he died immediately ' the latest victim of a spectral war that came to an end a generation before he was born.

The south-east Asian nation of Laos is not a country in conflict ' in fact few places in the world are so torpid and peaceful. The weapon that killed Bounma was a tennis ball-sized pod of ball bearings which fell to earth when Lyndon Johnson was US president and the Beatles were at the height of their powers. It was a cluster bomb ' one of the most stubborn, long lasting and cruelly undiscriminating weapons of modern war.

Cluster bombs can be dropped from planes or fired from artillery. They consist of an outer casing which splits open to release as many as 700 individual 'bomblets' ' or bombis, as they are called in the Lao language. They scatter over an area as large as three football pitches; they are designed to explode on impact, spreading blast and deadly fragments over soldiers and armoured vehicles in a 30-yard radius. But invariably, between ten and forty per cent of the bomblets fail to go off.

Unlike landmines, there can be no precise record of where they fell. Unlike larger bombs, they are small, innocuous-looking, and often colourful ' almost as if designed to attract the attention of playful children. And like the bomblet that killed Bounma, they can survive hidden in the ground for a generation, beneath homes, schools and paths, until the chance touch of a spade or a curious hand triggers them into deadly life.

'I remember when the bombis fell,' says 54-year old Mr Viengkeo, who was a teenager at the time. 'I remember seeing them falling. I taught the children to be careful: 'If you see something and you don't know what it is, leave it and tell an adult.' But I had no idea there was a bomb there all the time, under my home.'

It is forty since American B52 bombers scattered them across Laos in the so-called 'Secret War', intended to drive back communist guerrillas and block supply lines for US enemies in neighbouring Vietnam, but finally the world has started to take notice of the cruelty of cluster bombs. Next month in Dublin, some hundred governments will gather to finalise an international treaty to restrict the use of the weapons.

Many countries, including the victorious communists who still govern Laos, are pressing for a complete ban. The world's biggest military powers, including Russia, China and the United States, are refusing to take part in the negotiations. And then there are those governments, including Britain, which want to retain the right to use certain kinds of cluster bomb.

'We refer to cluster bombs as the weapon that never stops killing,' says Peter Herby, of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is lobbying for an unconditional ban. 'It's bad enough when civilians get caught up and injured in conflict. But for us it's repugnant when killing goes on for years and decades simply because of the wrong choice of weapon. In the end politicians have to decide that some weapons are beyond the pale.'

The first cluster bombs were dropped by the Luftwaffe on Grimsby in 1943, and since then they have been used in more than a dozen conflicts including the Korean War, Afghanistan, the Falklands and Kosovo. The momentum for the present treaty negotiations gathered after 2006 when the Israeli army fired four million bomblets onto southern Lebanon, where they continue to cause civilian casualties. But no nation in the world has suffered more from cluster bombs than Laos.

Between 1964 and 1973 when the Secret War was abandoned, US planes flew 580,000 missions and dropped two million tones of bombs on Laos ' a third more than they used on Nazi Germany. These included 277 million cluster bomblets. Assuming a failure rate of 30 per cent, 84 million of these are still lying in the ground. These, at least, are what the US owns up to ' Lao government officials estimate that the true figure may be double.

The best figure for casualties caused by cluster bombs is 4,847 since the end of the war, almost half of them children. This is based on incomplete information ' a comprehensive nationwide survey currently being undertaken is expected to reveal a figure much higher. And human death and mutilation is only part of the havoc which the weapons cause.

Domestic livestock, such as buffaloes, goats and elephants, are also vulnerable to the bombs. The scattered nature of the bombis means that the presence of just a few can make it dangerous or impossible to use agricultural land, effecting livelihoods in an already desperately poor country. Forestry is similarly affected, as are the new industries, such as gold mining and hydro-electric dams, with which Laos is attempting to haul itself out of destitution. Even tourism is affected: the Plain of Jars, a mysterious series of archaeological sites and a candidate for World Heritage status, is in an area profoundly contaminated by unexploded ordnance.

In the meantime, deadly explosives have become a visible part of everyday life. In the town of Phonsavan there fences made of shell casings. Unexploded bombs are forged into axes, sickles, cow bells, rice cookers, belt buckles, boats and ladders. One particular cluster bomb with a tripod shaped fin is commonly fitted with a light bulb and used as a lamp. There is a lucrative trade in the scrap metal of unexploded bombs which claims many lives every year.

'This familiarity is a real problem,' says Joe Pereira, a British occupational therapist whose charity COPE, supplies prosthetic limbs to cluster bomb victims. 'People grow up with bombs in their houses and so when they see them in the forest they don't appreciate the danger.' One poor farmer turned up to get a replacement for the prosthetic leg which he had made himself from the only materials available to him ' a stump of wood and the metal from the same kind of bomb which had blown off his leg in the first place.

The Lao government, assisted by foreign organisations including Britain's Mines Advisory Group, has teams of deminers who patiently detect, uncover and blow up unexploded bombs. But the scale of the task is out of all proportion to the resources available. 'Since 1994 we've cleared only 0.15 per cent of the province,' says Kingphet Phimmavong, bomb clearance head for the province of Xieng Khouang. 'At this rate to complete the job it will take us several thousands years.'