Viengkeo Kavongsone had lived in fear of such a catastrophe all his life - in
the jungle, in the paddy fields, 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 that drains rainwater
from their little wooden house.
The tin shovel scraped upon something hard and metallic - and that was the
last thing they recalled.
The explosion peppered shrapnel into the legs of Van and her six-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,
Bounma. “He was the littlest,” his father said 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 six metres (20ft) 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 that fell to earth when
Lyndon Johnson was US President and the Beatles were at the height of their
powers.
It was part of a cluster bomb - one of the most stubborn, long-lasting and
cruelly undiscriminating weapons of modern war - scattered by American B52
bombers in the so-called “Secret War” intended to drive back communist
guerrillas and block supply lines for US enemies in Vietnam.
Cluster bombs consist of an outer casing that splits open to release as many
as 700 individual “bomblets” designed to explode on impact, spreading blast
and deadly fragments over soldiers and armoured vehicles in a 30 metre
radius. But invariably, between 10 per cent and 40 per cent of the bomblets
fail to detonate.
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 lie in the ground for a generation until the chance
touch of a spade or a curious hand triggers them into deadly life.
“I remember when the bombs fell,” said 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.”
Finally, the world has started to take notice of cluster bombs. Next month in
Dublin, about a hundred governments will gather to finalise an international
treaty to restrict their use.
Many governments, 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 US, are refusing to take part in the
negotiations. And then there are those governments, including Britain, that
want to retain the right to use certain kinds of cluster bomb.
“We refer to cluster bombs as the weapon that never stops killing,” said 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. The momentum
for the present treaty negotiations gathered after 2006 when the Israeli
army fired four million bomblets on to 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 aircraft flew
580,000 missions and dropped two million tonnes of bombs on Laos. These
included 277 million cluster bomblets. Assuming a failure rate of 30 per
cent, 84 million of these are still lying in the ground.
The best figure for casualties caused by cluster bombs is 4,847 since the end
of the war, almost half of them children. Deadly explosives have become part
of everyday life. In the town of Phonsavan there are 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.
“This familiarity is a real problem,” said Joe Pereira, a British occupational
therapist whose charity, Cope, supplies prosthetic limbs to victims. “People
grow up with bombs in their houses and so when they see them in the forest
they don't appreciate the danger.”
Battle lines drawn
— About a hundred countries will meet in Dublin next month to negotiate the
last details of a draft treaty on cluster bombs. The biggest military
powers, including the US, Russia, China, Pakistan and India, are not taking
part
— Britain wants the term “cluster bomb” to be defined as a device with ten or
more “bomblets” - which would allow it to continue using the M73 bomb, with
only nine
— Britain also argues for exemption of the M85 because of its
“self-deactivation device”. Such “smart cluster bombs” are said to have a
failure rate of 1 per cent, but when used by Israel in Lebanon in 2006, up
to 10 per cent failed to explode or deactivate
— Other controversies focus on the amount of time countries would be given to
stop using cluster bombs, and over military co-operation between states that
had signed a treaty and those that had not
