Unexploded ordinance continues to litter the
countryside, taking limbs and lives
A
demining team carefully removed a pile of rusty explosives – each one still
able to kill or maim – from a quiet ploughed field in Quang Tri Province where
fierce fighting once raged in the Vietnam War.
Shortly
after the lethal mortars and grenade launcher rounds were taken away, an
anxious farmer in her 50s marched over to the team during their recent mission.
The farmer, Van Thi Nga, had stumbled across the relics while growing
vegetables, the main source of income in her village, which sits along the war’s
former demarcation zone and is strewn with hidden explosives.
“I’m
afraid of more bombs but I need to work,” she said. “I have to risk death just
to earn money.”
But
there was no time for sympathy as the busy team frankly told her to report
others if she sees more. The bomb disposal experts then did a brief sweep with
a metal detector and left to their next call to destroy an unstable bomb in a
nearby rice paddy.
Demining
teams, either run by Vietnam’s army or international groups, face an epic task
in which roughly 20 percent of the country, 40 years after the war ended, is
littered with unexploded ordnance – bombs, mines, munitions and other
explosives.
This
central Vietnam province is the worst-hit region, with more than 80 percent of
the land still peppered with deadly devices after 350,000 tons of them were
used here. In total, almost four times more firepower was deployed on Vietnam
during the war than in all of World War II.
Around
10 percent of the explosives are believed to not have detonated and up to
800,000 tons of unexploded weapons remain. That’s even beyond the 635,000 tons
of bombs that US forces dropped in the entire Korean War.
“The
contamination in Vietnam is huge,” said Portia Stratton, country director of
Mine Advisory Group, the largest non-profit demining group in Vietnam. “We’re
still finding the same number of explosives that we were finding [when we
started here] 15 years ago.”
‘Lagging behind’
Introduced
in 2010, Vietnam’s mine action strategy came years after other infested nations
including its neighbors, Laos and Cambodia, which were also heavily bombed to
jam communist supply routes in the war.
“Vietnam
is lagging behind a lot of other countries that have significant levels of
contamination,” Stratton said. “We still don’t have a full picture of what our
efforts have achieved.”
Since
the end of the war in 1975, war remnants have killed more than 42,000
Vietnamese and injured at least 62,000 others, according to preliminary
statistics by the government. But with no national database in place, incidents
and demining operations cannot be accurately tracked while affected remote
areas go unnoticed, advocates say.
In
March, the Vietnam National Mine Action Center was launched to provide more
oversight in the secretive state, which already had similar mine action bodies
at the national level.
Stratton
warns that the new center may serve as another bureaucratic layer and further
delay mine action services that often take up to one year to get government
approval.
In
2009,the country gained lower middle-income status but the distinction has
created a sort of Catch-22 paradox as foreign donors redirect funds elsewhere.
“There’s
more of a challenge now to enable us to secure funding,” said Rickard Hartmann,
country director for APOPO, a Belgium-based demining group. “We are very happy
that Vietnam is developing but at the same time more and more donors are
reducing their support.”
The
50-member APOPO group began operations in January after the German non-profit
Solidarity Service International pulled out its 160 personnel from the area,
leaving a two-thirds reduction in skilled labor, he said.
Prime
Minister Nguyen Tan Dung recently called on the global community to boost
support saying that “since the explosive contamination is so great, Vietnam
truly needs assistance and support.”
Vietnamese
officials claim that $10 billion is required to completely rid existing UXO – a
feat that would take up to 300 years for the country to do on its own, they
say. Around 35,000 hectares of unsafe land is cleared annually but the state
has ambitious plans to nearly triple that target to 100,000 hectares if
external aid is increased. Yet the government spends about $80 million on mine
action, or less than 0.20 percent of its national budget.
Deputy
Minister of Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment Nguyen The Phuong
acknowledged that the meager funds “could not meet the actual needs of mine
action activities.”
He also
cited poor coordination between state and provincial entities, lack of human
resources, and technology and equipment shortages as other factors hindering
progress.
A 2012
assessment on Vietnam’s mine action program, conducted by the Geneva
International Center for Humanitarian Demining, revealed that the government
and state-connected private investors bankrolled 92 percent of activities from
2007 to 2011. The government currently expects foreign donors to cover about
half of the estimated US$368 million required for mine action from 2013 to
2015, according to a 2013 update on the national strategy. But foreign donors
only doled out $8.7 million for mine action in 2012, with the U.S. contributing
more than 40 percent of the total, the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor
reported.
Vietnam
might be entitled to more foreign aid if they signed the Mine Ban Treaty and
the Convention on Cluster Munitions that prohibits their use. Even so,
landmines are seen as legitimate weapons for border security. Officials also
reject the cluster bomb pact since the 10-year deadline for member states to
finish land clearance is unrealistic to them, they said.
Ironically,
cluster bombs would likely delay the country due to how they were dispersed in
the war. Hundreds of cluster bombs – each about the size of a tennis ball –
were packed inside large air-dropped canisters that scattered the bomblets over
wide swaths of the countryside. Although designed to explode on impact, many of
them did not.
Enlisting local help
To deal
with the funding shortfalls, bomb experts rely on villagers to be their eyes
and ears for war remnants.
“To
clean up every bomb and mine in Vietnam is impossible,” said Hien Ngo,
spokesperson for Project Renew, a demining group that also empowers locals.
“It’s a daunting task that will never likely be achieved, so we want to make
sure that the land is safe by educating people about the risks.”
Ngo has
already seen the value of his group’s education programs that are taught in
schools and to those who come to their mine action visitor center in the
province’s largest city.
He
recalled when a 12-year-old boy halted a crew driving to another call and led
them to a cache of 180 explosives concealed in the dense jungle.
“The
boy learned what to do after he visited the center,” he said. “Now people are
helping us report explosives.”
Nguyen
Xuan Tuan, 29, wished he knew the dangers of war relics before he scavenged for
scrap metal at a deserted U.S. military base back in 2002.
After
his friend found something on a metal detector, Tuan sliced the ground with his
shovel. But as he dug deeper, he struck a cluster bomb.
The
blast severed his right hand, cut deep scars across his body and knocked him
into a three-day coma.
“I woke
up seeing my parents crying and I realized that I was in a miserable
situation,” he said. “The only thing I could do was cry and think that this was
the end of my life.”
Tuan,
one of the nation’s five Ban Advocates that campaign against cluster bombs
worldwide, is now using his experience to educate others throughout the
province.
“I’ve
been very lucky to be exposed to the outside world,” he said. “In rural areas,
many voices are not being heard and people do not receive the assistance they
need.”
Sean
Kimmons
This originally appeared in Asian
Correspondent, with which Asia Sentinel has a content-sharing agreement
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