Forty years ago  a bomb dropped on Laos every nine minutes. This continued for twenty-four hours a day seven days a week  for nine years and became one of the worst kept secrets of the US war on Vietnam. In all, over 50, 000 Laos people have died as a result of the bombs and more die still every year. Laos has the distinction of being the most bombed country in the world. Over 1.6 million tonnes of bombs were dropped from the air all over Laos with the bulk dropping near to the border with Vietnam on what has been named the Ho Chi Minh trail. The problem is that roughly thirty percent of those bombs didn’t explode. They just dug themselves into the soil and waited. Cluster bombs of the type that were dropped in Laos contain dozens of ‘bomblets’ that separate from the delivery vehicle and scatter before impact. Unexploded ‘bombies’ are in effect, anti people landmines.

Now the truth of the secret bombing campaign is told daily, weekly or monthly depending on which area you live in with loss of limbs and eyesight or life in farmers, in maimed and crippled children and of an infrastructure that can only dare to scratch at the surface of their agricultural land for fear of disturbing an unexploded mine or striking one of the hundreds of thousands of little bombies littering the soil of Laos. Progress in clearing Laos of the areas is slow. It wasn’t until the early nineties that the US revealed the data required to map the bombs but a look at the areas so mapped reveals the tide of a red monsoon.

Funds spent on training bomb experts, on educating villagers and on dealing with bombs in specified areas is a huge problem. The current budget is less than $USD3 million a year. This despite requirements to be much less than the amount spent on bombing Laos which was then 17 million US dollars every twenty four hours. In order to reach current land clearing targets of reducing death and injury from land mines from double to single figures, the Lao government‚ National Regulatory Authority (NRA), which oversees UXO clearance, victim assistance, and risk education alongside partner organizations and international donors, requires up to U.S. $28 million in funding over the next 10 years.

With limited funds, UXO workers have to prioritise spending. Preference in clearing is for the poorest or most marginalized communities and to respond to requests for land mine clearances from villages that discover mines and file a request. The problem is that there just isn’t the funding to clear everyone’s land. Despite a Congressional mandate for U.S. $5 million for bomb removal in Laos this year and in subsequent years, the State Department is requesting only U.S. $1.9 million for fiscal year 2011.

In the meantime there is a deadly harvest going on. Every poor Laos villager knows about the bombs, they don’t need to be educated about that. Land mine shells are used for above the ground gardens (The gardens are above the ground because its dangerous to dig in the ground), they are used as building material and as barbeques, and they are smelted down to make tools and candlesticks. They know that a mine can fetch half a year’s income or roughly 200 USD in the scrap metal market, a bombie can earn ten dollars. War still pays. Now before you start shaking your head, take a moment to consider this. If you were a poor farmer struggling to make a living from a land that you fear to put a spade in and came across two hundred dollars worth of anything in the jungle, wouldn’t you be tempted? Wouldn’t you sit there with this seemingly benign object (after all it has sat there without exploding for forty years) and wonder at your chances of making a quick buck? Would you know the process even for reporting the UXO, would you be prepared to go through all the paperwork and bureaucracy entailed to have the mine cleared? Would you even be aware that such a scheme exists?

Or would you know the fellow who knows the fellow who buys scrap metal for such amazing riches? The scrap metal dealer is probably more known to some villagers than the UXO clearing team. It’s a horrifying reality. The people who clear the mines and train the people to clear the mines say that, going by current estimates and funding, they should have the land clear of bombs in about three thousand years. That’s a long time to wait for the guy to come and defuse a bomb that you could very well make a lot of money on. You also have to remember that these people have lived with bombs for forty years. It’s the way we live with cars. We know they can kill us but still we use them and sometimes we use them unsafely. But we need them to get to work so we can improve the quality of our lifestyle.

It’s the same for the Laos people. They also need to have some work and if there weren’t so many UXO’s lying in the soil then farming could move from subsistence to more lucrative farming. Such as the organic coffee trade now happening in cleared areas and bringing a much-improved quality of life to the farmers participating. Roughly around three hundred people and countless more die or are injured by these bombs annually.  Children are the biggest casualties whichever way you look at it. If you extrapolate the annual figure of current death from UXO in Laos and multiply it by the amount of years it will take to clear the land then 900,000 people who haven’t even been born yet are doomed to die.