Part 2

The last visit of the day was to the COPE visitors centre. Not for the faint-hearted, but nonetheless important. To give a fair account of this visit, I want to be factual about what it signifies and the local perspective (from Tony), and then share a few thoughts of my own.

COPE is a charitable organisation tasked to raise awareness of the issue of unexploded ordnance in the country and support the human victims of the exploding bombs by providing artificial limbs, walking aids and wheelchairs.

The centre gives the facts as they are known and then uses local stories, photographs and internationally made videos to garner financial support to fit prosthetic limbs to the victims they can reach.

Just a recap of the facts if you missed these in an earlier post. Not known to me before visiting the centre, it was cluster bombs dropped during the Vietnam War that caused such lasting problems. Cluster bombs are missiles that drop thousands of small bomblets across wide areas. 580,000 bombs were dropped on Laos ; this equates to one every 8 mins for 24 hours for 9 years. This is 270 million bomblets. 80 million bomblets were left undetonated by the end of the war and have subsequently killed or maimed 20,000 people. 40 % were children. These bomblets on the ground are shown in photograph below.

Each day 3000 people work in Laos to survey and clear land with the aim of clearing all land by 2125. A further 100 years! The US has been the biggest supporter of this process spending $355million so far and other countries like Norway, Japan, Canada, the UK and Australia also contribute.

Tony doesn’t express any negativity towards the US here, although I suspect it lives deep inside his DNA. He only voiced concerns about the intermittent flow of funds and a view that any shortfall would be picked up by China, but more transactional and a price would be paid over time. Chuckling nervously he said that China may end up taking the country as payback.

I wanted to read more. Leading me to a few points. Firstly, it seems clear that the US has taken responsibility for its actions signing a partnership agreement with the Lao Government to help rid the country of all ordnance. Secondly, however, when it disbanded USAID in Jan 25 the support for Laos folded along with it. I have read in a Lao newspaper from the time the “profound betrayal” felt by the Lao people when Elon Musk ( tasked to break up USAID) referred to its recipients as “the biggest source of fraud in the world”. Since this time a further $24 million dollars have been committed by the USA Government l, but these funds expire in April 2026. Finally, in 2008 most world countries ratified the CCM agreement ( International Convention for cluster munitions) banning them from use. Exceptions here were : Isreal, Egypt, South Sudan and North Korea. Nor did the US ratify, instead committing to improving the technology so that the droplet bombs more successfully detonate.

I am left with a few thoughts. Firstly that the current US President will not know the history here, feel any responsibility nor care about the real human beings affected here. If this was a different President things would likely be different.

At the same time it is reported that both sides in the Ukraine war have used cluster bombs. The Ukrainian one’s, if true they were used, were likely from the US arsenal.

Maybe my final word here is that all wars are bad and morals go out of the window – for everyone.

But, then there are the human stories of courage. In the centre, I saw pictures of smiling young faces once prosthetics had been fitted and the child joyously goes back to school and play. One thing that is clear is that there is no stigma to this. Every child in Lao society is ‘knowing’.