US
urged to hike Laos bomb-clearing
aid By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Disarmament activists and
former US ambassadors are urging Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to increase US aid to Laos
to clear millions of tonnes of unexploded
ordinance (UXO) left by US bombers on its
territory during the Indochina War during her
brief visit to the country Wednesday. The visit,
scheduled to last only a few hours on a hectic
eight-nation tour by Clinton designed in part to
underline the Barack Obama administration's
"pivot" from the Middle East to Asia, will
nonetheless be historic. No sitting US secretary
of state has visited Laos since 1955.
Sources here said Clinton is considering a
US$100 million aid commitment to support
bomb-clearing efforts over a 10-year period. Such
a commitment would more than double the nearly
$47 million Washington
has provided in UXO assistance since 1997 when it
first began funding UXO programs in Laos.
"While Secretary Clinton's visit
celebrates a promising future for US-Lao
relations," said Ambassador Douglas Hartwick, who
served as Washington's envoy in Vientiane from
2001 to 2004, "I hope she also affirms to the Lao
people America's steadfast commitment to help Laos
and the international community to resolve this
legacy once and for all by clearing Lao land of
deadly bombs."
Hartwick was one of six
former ambassadors to Laos who last year publicly
urged Clinton to travel to Laos and adopt the
10-year, $100 million UXO proposal - originally
put forward by a Washington-based organization,
Legacies of War - on her way from last year's
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
summit in Bali, Indonesia.
Administration
policymakers, however, evidently decided to put
off the trip until this year's regional summit in
Cambodia, Laos's next-door neighbor.
Over
the past year, Washington has intensified its
courtship of China's southern neighbors, notably
Myanmar, with which relations have improved
dramatically since Clinton's visit there - also
the first by a secretary of state since 1955 -
last December. Before arriving in Phnom Penh late
Wednesday, she spent Tuesday in Hanoi before
traveling on to Vientiane.
Between 1964
and 1973, more than 2.5 million tonnes of US
munitions were dropped on Laos - more than was
dropped on Germany and Japan combined during World
War II - making what was then the poorest country
in Southeast Asia the most heavily bombed nation
per capita in history.
With some 2.5
million inhabitants at the time, an average of one
tonne of bombs was dropped for every man, woman
and child in Laos.
Up to 30% of the bombs
failed to detonate. Their remnants not only cause
several hundred casualties a year, but also
effectively prevent Laotian farmers from
cultivating hundreds of thousands of hectares of
fertile land.
Some 20,000 people have been
killed or maimed by UXO over the past 40 years,
according to Legacies of War. An estimated
one-third of Lao land is still littered with the
deadly ordinance.
Unlike with Vietnam and
Cambodia, Washington never severed diplomatic
relations with the communist government that
eventually took power in 1975. It nonetheless took
17 years - until 1992 - for the US, whose top
priority initially was to account for the nearly
600 US servicemen killed or missing in action in
Laos, to fully normalize ties. Normal trade
relations were formalized only seven years ago.
Washington first provided funding for UXO
clearance in 1997 under president Bill Clinton and
maintained aid at an average annual rate of about
$2.6 million. In 2009, it rose to $3.5 million and
then to $5 million in 2010. Led by Democratic
Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Senator
Richard Lugar, Congress approved $9 million for
this year.
The Senate Appropriations
Committee has recommended that $10 million be
approved for 2013, but that amount could be a
harder sell in the Republican-led House of
Representatives.
Proponents of the aid are
hoping that a public commitment by Clinton will
enhance the chances for Congressional approval for
the $10 million and a longer-term commitment which
they believe will be necessary to leverage
additional resources from other donor countries
and agencies.
"The people who continue to
suffer from the bombings are ordinary Lao
villagers," said Channapha Khamvongsa, Legacies'
executive director. "We are hopeful that after
witnessing the human impact of UXO in Laos
first-hand, the secretary will re-affirm the US
commitment to helping Laos solve this problem once
and for all."
The challenge remains
formidable. While more than 1 million UXO are
estimated to have been destroyed or cleared to
date, it is believed that nearly 80 million are
still scattered across the country.
"UXO/mine action is the absolute
pre-condition for the socio-economic development
of [Laos]," according to a two-year-old study by
the UN Development Programme, which has worked
with the government of Prime Minister Thongsing
Thammavong to develop a plan to focus clearance
efforts on high-priority areas.
"[E]conomic opportunities in tourism,
hydroelectric power, mining, forestry and many
other areas of activity considered main engines of
growth for the Lao [Peoples Democratic Republic]
are restricted, complicated and made more
expensive," according to the UNDP, which has
estimated the funding needs to significantly
reduce the UXO problem in Laos at $30 million a
year sustained over a 10-year period.
While the US is the single largest donor
to the UXO program, others, notably Japan, the
European Commission, Ireland, Switzerland,
Luxembourg, Germany, and Australia, as well as UN
agencies, have also contributed to the program.
Led chiefly by the UXO funding,
Washington's total bilateral aid program to Laos
has grown from to $12 million for the current year
from about $5 million in 2007. In addition to the
$9 million for the UXO program, Washington has
focused aid on the health sector and
counter-narcotics.
In a related
development on Monday, Human Rights Watch (HRW)
urged Clinton to halt all aid to the Somsanga drug
detention center until the Lao government conducts
a full and independent investigation into
human-rights abuses allegedly committed against
detainees there, including children.
In
March, 12 UN agencies also called for Somsanga and
other drug detention centers in Laos to be closed.
"The Lao government and the US State
Department claim that Somsanga is a modern
healthcare center," said Joe Amon, HRW's health
and human-rights director. "But a decade of US
funding hasn't changed the fact that it's a brutal
and inhumane detention center where the Lao
government puts undesirable' people."
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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