By Edmund Laidler
The Context
Since the end of the Second Indochina War, Laos has held the damaging distinction of being the most bombed country per capita in history. Despite remaining officially neutral throughout the conflict, large swathes of Lao countryside attracted the considerable attention of the American War machine, as it tried to destroy the myriad supply lines of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and disrupt the flow of weapons, food, and people from North Vietnam to South. Importantly, this attention came largely in the form of saturation bombing, despite reportedly sophisticated enemy detection and mapping systems, and perhaps most indefensibly in the use of ‘bombies’.
The legacy of this today? Estimates suggest that approximately a third of the dropped explosives failed to detonate, leaving somewhere in the region of 80 million pieces of unexploded ordinances (UXO) lying in wait in the fields and forests of a country which, officially, had not even entered the war.
The Impact
Whilst the impacts of UXO in Laos are numerous and severe, we will here focus on two - the actual harm done by UXO since the close of the war, and the threat of harm that UXO represents. It is thought that 20,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO post-war, with an estimated 40 casualties annually even now, almost 50 years on. Most unfortunately, these incidents disproportionately affect children, who find and play with pieces of UXO, unaware of the danger they pose. This seemingly interminable collateral damage, a term itself coined in Vietnam, is an apt example of the ‘Shadows of War’ - those unintended consequences that are often overlooked when assessing the impact of a conflict. In this way, they are also analytically problematic, as these fatalities prove hard to categorise, blurring the distinction between war and non-war violence, and perhaps therefore supporting Hobsbawm’s idea of a single protracted and global war.
Although the numbers of victims of UXO incidents is decreasing, the threat of harm most certainly persists, impacting on the daily activities of communities. The mapping of ‘contaminated’ areas continues to improve, but as settlements grow there is increasing pressure to use land which is known to contain UXO, with subsistence farmers the group most often forced to accept these risks. Whilst post-war casualties may be considered difficult to categorise, the threat of harm, being intangible, is even harder to measure. This should by no means detract from the impact this threat has however, as many families continue to live in constant fear of an unseeable enemy.
To adapt the concept of a continuum of violence, UXO most certainly represents a continuity of violence and harm post-war, and raises the importance of reassessing what we consider to be the impacts of war, given their long lasting effects. In a more abstract appraisal, Laos might be seen as experiencing Simone Veil’s affliction - a feeling beyond suffering (the pervasive and persistent nature of the threat of harm), characterised by necessity (the inevitability of the consequences of global conflict, in this instance the Cold War), and chance (Laos suffers largely by virtue of neighbouring Vietnam and possessing the terrain favoured by the Viet Cong). However expressed, it is clear that the impacts of UXO are not only severe but also still prevalent.
The Significance
Aside from their debilitating and often life changing influence on individuals and families, these impacts have a wider significance. Historically, wars have certainly had lasting social and economic consequences, and some would even argue there is no such thing as post-conflict, as conflict is inevitable and constant even in peacetime. However, the onset of wide scale high explosive bombing campaigns, or the American way of bombing, has brought a new dimension to the continuation of war, as earlier alluded to. The harmful legacy of UXO goes against suggestions that we are living in the most peaceful era in history, or at least suggests this view may be too western-centric, with conflicts not decreasing in frequency and scale, but rather taking place further afield and thus being less noticeable to European and North American audiences.
The contrast in different experiences of war is perhaps even greater when assessing its impact on development. Where some global actors may benefit from the functions of war (by expanding their influence or in arms sales for example), the countries upon which war is imposed continue to suffer from the scars of the battleground decades later, Laos being no exception. Having large tracts of land contaminated by UXO hindered the mining and agricultural industries, on which the country largely relied, meaning economic growth in the final quarter of the 20th Century proved elusive (thankfully, Laos has since fared considerably better owing to a burgeoning service export sector). This supports the dominant liberal view of war as development in reverse (although this viewpoint is contested).
The detrimental effects of conflict on Lao development have been compounded by the relatively limited level of assistance the country has received post-war. That just 0.55% of UXO was cleared from Laos between 1996 and 2010 shows the scale of the problem (this video demonstrates just how slow and expensive a process UXO removal can be). Different states’ experience of war, as exemplified by UXO in Laos, can be used to critique a number of modern theories on conflict, from the idea of war becoming less deadly, to Scheidel’s conception of violence as ‘A Great Leveller’. These critiques might be considered especially pertinent given that the methods of war that hold such grave consequences have been and still are being replicated elsewhere.
All this being said, there is cause for optimism. From organisations like COPE working to limit the impacts of UXO related injuries, to individual enterprise using recycled UXO in everyday life, the resilience and ingenuity of communities shines through, despite the legacy of war in which they live. Perhaps if more attention was paid to the lessons we should be learning from such wars, their legacies would be far shorter, and far less harmful.
See here for the important distinction between the terms ‘Lao’ and ‘Laotian’
Reference List
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