UXO
UXO. Unexploded Ordnance. I had never heard this term before, but it is one whose three letter acronym millions of Laos over the last four decades have grown up with and feared.
Professing my ignorance, I also wasn’t aware before last week of the extent, the sheer scale, of US bombing in Laos during the Vietnam War. I found out through a visit to the superb COPE visitor center in Vientiane.
Laos holds the record for the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world, the result of more than half a million bombing missions conducted in the skies over the country from 1964 to 1973.
What’s even more terrifying is the lethal legacy the bombing left behind — a land littered with explosives poised to awaken at the slightest disturbance. These are the “unexploded ordnances”, or UXOs.
Up to 30% of bombs dropped on Laos in that nine year window failed to explode on impact, leaving approximately 80 million cluster munitions, known as “bombies”, hidden in the forests, undergrowth and paddy fields of Laos, waiting to explode. They continue to pose a threat to farmers, kids and other civilians every day, over four decades after the end of the bombing campaign and the Vietnam War.
A foreign and mad war turned the soil itself from a fertile life source — fruits, rice, coffee, spices in abundance — into a capricious agent of death, destruction and fear.
Farmers have told stories about how they slipped into poverty for fear of planting areas of land known to or rumoured to be contaminated with UXOs. Like an evil spirit, the UXOs haunt and curse the land and the communities which depend on it.
The exorcists have been out in force over the last decades to expunge the land of this curse. Up to 3,000 UXO identification and disposal experts roam the land, 50m² grids at a time. They first map out the most lethal and the safe zones, then proceed to exorcise the land, starting with the most haunted of fields and forests.
With up to a third of the country contaminated, their task could take up to a century to complete. In the meantime, the casualties, the maimings, and the tales of terror continue to tick in. Since the bombing campaign ended in 1973, up to 20,000 Laos have been killed or maimed by UXOs. That’s on top of the 50,000 impacted during the bombing campaign itself. About 40% of the victims are children, who often mistake the sometimes colourfully painted spherical devices as toys.
Thankfully, casualties are occurring at a much lower rate than before. On the back of UXO clearance operations and educational programs, the numbers of deaths from UXOs has been falling, but still stands at around 100 every year. For more on the extent and the impacts of UXO in Laos, see this fact sheet produced by Legacies of War.
A number of organisations are also helping those injured by UXOs to get their life back together. Those lucky enough to survive explosions are often burdened with debilitating limb injuries, or even missing limbs, which can affect their ability to work, to farm and provide for their family.
Since 1997 the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE) initiative has been providing prosthetic limb services in some of the most heavily impacted areas. The walls of their visitor center in Vientiane are filled with dozens of stories of individuals who have managed to get their lives back on track thanks to prosthetic arms and legs. Here are just two such stories:
The UN Convention on Cluster Munitions
On 3 December 2008 the UN Convention on Cluster Munitions was signed in Oslo. It came in to force in two years later. The convention “prohibits all use, stockpiling, production and transfer of Cluster Munitions” and is strongly worded — “never under any circumstances” — and to the point. As of September 2018 it has been signed by 108 states.
There are some gaping gaps in this map of signatories, however. Most notably, the US, Russia and China.
US:
Astonishingly — or maybe not, depending how cynical (or realist) you are — the US has not signed the convention. Responsible for all of the unexploded cluster munitions in this most bombed per capita country, as well as UXOs in Vietnam, and modern cluster bombs in Iraq, the US maintains that cluster bombs are still a valid and useful form of explosive whose “collateral damage” (i.e. unintended deaths) can be lower than other forms of explosives. Here’s the US statement from October 2016:
“It strongly remains the US view that when used in accordance with international humanitarian law, cluster munitions with a low unexploded ordnance rate provide key advantages against certain types of legitimate military targets and can produce less collateral damage than high-explosive, unitary weapons.”
Having said that, in recent years the US’s use of cluster munitions has been limited — one strike in Yemen in 2009 and use in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There is regression in the air, however, as at the end of 2017 the Trump administration ended a long-standing US military policy not to use cluster munitions that have a rate of failure to explode on impact of more than 1%.
China:
It was of interest to me too that China is not a signatory to the convention. China has no history of using cluster munitions, and says that it has never used them. In 2014 China stated that it “ascribes to the goal and principles” of the Convention. However, it excuses itself from taking the next logical step of signing because of “national conditions and national defence needs,” whatever exactly that means. China also holds numerous objections to the nature of the Convention — that it was negotiated outside of UN auspices, for example. The Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor has all the details here, last updated in 2015.
China’s statements at the Fourth Meeting of the Parties to the Convention of Cluster Munitions in Zambia in 2013 also seem to imply a bias toward working bilaterally to increase countries’ capacity to clear UXOs.
Behind China’s somewhat ambivalent position on the Convention, the country does manufacture quite a range of cluster munitions, for both the People’s Liberation Army and for export. To whom exactly the munitions are exported is unclear, but the remnants of Chinese manufactured cluster munitions are reported to have been found across many of the Middle East’s major conflict zones.
U — X — O
Here are three letters I had not seen in combination before. My trip to Laos last week opened my eyes to what they mean for generations of Laos, the suffering and fear they continue to wreak, and the politics, hope, progress and setbacks to implementing a global ban on the production and use of the “bombies” that created UXOs.
I’m not to sure how to end this article other than to say that I hope this was informative for you too, and if you are ever in Vientiane do pay a visit to the COPE visitor center. It is both informative and extremely moving.
