President Obama’s historic trip to Laos, the first trip there by a sitting U.S. president. Obama has so far refused to issue a formal apology for the secret U.S. bombing campaign in Laos during its war on Vietnam. From June 1964 to March 1973, the U.S. dropped at least 2 million tons of bombs on the small, landlocked Southeast Asian country in what would become the largest bombing campaign in history. That’s the equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years—more than were dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Laos authorities say as many as one-third of these bombs did not explode at the time. This week, Obama pledged $90 million to help clear Laos of the unexploded U.S. bombs.
“For the United dates, one of the wars from our history is the conflict called the Vietnam War. It’s a long and complicated conflict that took the lives of many brave young Americans. But we also know that despite its American name, what we call it, this war was not contained to Vietnam. It included many years of fighting and bombing in Cambodia and here in Laos. But for all those years in the 1960s and ’70s, America’s intervention here in Laos was a secret to the American people, who were separated by vast distances and a Pacific Ocean, and there was no internet, and information didn’t flow as easily. For the people of Laos, obviously, this war was no secret. Over the course of roughly a decade, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than Germany and Japan during World War II. Some 270 million cluster bomblets were dropped on this country.”
Jerry Redfern talking:
The $90 million that Obama pledged, at first, sounds like a lot, but really, when you run the math and do the numbers, you see that it’s actually a fairly nominal increase in the overall spending that America has been spending for the last several years for cleaning up the problem in Laos. And when you put it in context of the amount of UXO, the amount of unexploded ordnance, that remains in the ground and in Laos at this point, it’s really a fairly small amount.
The numbers that everybody talks about, and that you brought up, they’re accurate as far as we know. That said, we also know that that is the low estimate of it. The 580,000 missions, we know that there were many more. The records that the 580,000 missions came from were incomplete; large parts of the data source originally were destroyed and are missing. And we also know that large numbers of airplanes that were sent to do bombing runs in Vietnam, for example, came back over Laos to bases in Thailand and, on their way back, would randomly drop their loads in Laos. And we have no records whatsoever of those loads that were dropped. So we don’t actually know how much was dropped in the first place. We know it’s more than the numbers that we talk about. So, we can’t say, as a percentage, at all, how much has been cleared to this point. To this point, in terms of land in Laos, roughly 1 percent of what they think, of what many experts believe, to be the contaminated area in Laos has been cleared at this point.
– President Obama announced the $90 million. While he announced this, he did not quite offer an apology to Laos. Now, again, the amount of bombs that we’re talking about that were dropped on this tiny country, One of the things that we said was the U.S. dropped at least 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, the equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years—more than were dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.
the increase in money be clearing, going forward. And we know that—it’s a bit hard to say, because it takes different amounts of money to clear different types of ordnance when it’s in the ground. We know that last year, roughly, overall, there was $40 million—or, this year is budgeted for roughly $40 million for clearance in Laos, I gather, right? And if you’re to divide up $90 million by three over the three-year period, they’re talking about increasing roughly $30 million a year going forward. When we sort of did a back-of-the-envelope calculation yesterday and the day before on how much extra clearance this can do, Obama is roughly saying—and again, this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation—maybe another 225,000 pieces of UXO, another 225,000 bombies, to be cleared from Laos. But if you look at the overall guesstimate number of perhaps 80 million-some remaining in the ground in Laos, you can see that that’s just a tiny fraction of what remains in Laos at this point.
Karen Coates talking:
I did not expect him to issue a formal apology. I don’t think that that is typical of what American presidents do in a situation like this. I think that the Lao people would have loved to have heard an apology, but I’m not sure that they necessarily expected one, either. But what I do know from talking to many Lao people over the years is that they—they welcome his presence. They welcome the opportunity to create a new relationship with the United States, as President Obama has outlined. And so, I have a lot of questions, going forward, as to what exactly is going to come of his statements about working with the Lao people, the Lao government, to help develop the country, which is exactly what the Lao people—when we’ve talked to survivors of accidents and people who have survived through the bombing campaign, what they say today is that they want to put the war behind them, and they want to grow in the future, and they would love the help of the United States government in doing that.
– one of the less-known impacts of these bombs is on the access to food in the country, because 80 percent of people in Lao rely on their land to grow food.
the presence of unexploded bombs is—it’s an incredible impediment to food security, because if you have bombs in your field or the possibility of bombs in your field, you’re afraid to go out there and dig. It’s dangerous to dig in most of Laos. And as a farmer, you have to do that every day. So, people are constantly putting their lives at risk. And there are large tracts of the country that could be put to agricultural use, but haven’t been for 40 years because of the presence of bombs.
Jerry Redfern talking:
I’d like to say that there are approximately 15,000 people who are direct victims of UXO accidents still living in Laos to this day, who are physically directly affected by exploding ordnance. But actually, millions of people in Laos still live in fear of UXO in the ground. So just saying that there are only 15,000 is a bit of a misnomer, perhaps. It’s something that Obama brought up. That said, as well, I’d also like to say, not to come off as this being completely bad, it is great that the United States did offer more money to do further clearance, but we just feel that he could do more. He could have offered more.
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Karen Coates
co-author of Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos and senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
Jerry Redfern
co-author of Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos and senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
— source democracynow.org