Editorial: Undoing a deadly legacy in Laos

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Laos [google]

Brendan Smialowski / Pool via AP

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, greets Phongsavath Souliyalat, who lost his forearms and sight from a blast of an unexploded bomb left over from the Vietnam War, in Vientiane, Laos.

William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” The truth of these words was clear last week as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Laos.

Indelibly tied to the Vietnam War, Laos was officially neutral in that bloody conflict. However, enemy supply lines to Vietnam ran through the Southeast Asia nation, making it a target for heavy bombing by the United States, starting in 1964.

Nearly a decade later, the bombing and the war ended, amid the sorrow of 58,000 U.S. dead, untold casualties among Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian populations, and a Southeast Asia roiled by newly murderous regimes.

The worst of the dictatorships eventually fell, and the region inched toward recovery. Laos began cooperating in efforts to find American MIAs, but tension with the U.S. remained — in part because Laotians continued to die by the hundreds each year from “unexploded ordnance.”

They still do.

The remnants of those long-ago bombing runs are the past that “is not even past.”

It is estimated that a third of Laos' arable land cannot be used because it is laced with explosives dropped there by the aerial bombardment.

The intensive use of cluster bombs, each containing numerous bomblets, created a deadly problem that is difficult and expensive to clean up. Efforts and funding to do so have accelerated since the mid-1990s, but much more work remains.

Last week, Clinton became the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit Laos in 57 years — one more step in getting past the past.

Among Clinton's goals for the trip was to bring attention to the ordnance cleanup dilemma.

Source: Ocala.com