The legacy of the Vietnam war continues to haunt neighbouring Laos, with ongoing deaths and maimings from leftover bombs and mines some 40 years after the war ended.
Canada had contributed more than $2 million towards clearing operations between 1996 and 2011, but cut funding last year.
Senior officials in Laos have been urging Canada to return with financial support towards the $30 million annual international clearance effort.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is expected to announce a return to funding clearance operations today, Tuesday, during his trip to the Lao People’s Demorcratic Republic, a communist country. The announcement of a $1-million contribution will be managed through a United nations agency.
Although Laos was not involved in the war, it was used as a supply route-known as the Ho Chi Minh trail- by Communist forces in Vietnam.
As such it became a target for American bombers which dropped an estimated 2-million tons of bombs along the supply route from 1964 to 1973.
It’s estimated that around 20 percent or more did not explode. Among the various types of ordnance were cluster bombs, large containers each containing hundreds of small bomblets. It’s again estimated that of the 270-million bomblets, 80-million failed to explode with all this unexploded ordnance (UXO) littering more than a third of the country.
In a poor country like Laos, not only are the subsistence farmers at risk, but to augment meager income, people look for bombs to sell as scrap metal. About 100 people a year become casualties, 40% are children, and about 60 percent of the causalties result in death. Large areas of needed potential farmland are also too dangerous to use.
For years the US gave between $2-2.5 million for UXO clearance, upping that to $9 million in the 2012 budget
In spite of years of clearing efforts, it’s a slow process with only about 1% of the UXO’s cleared.
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