MCC and the removal of unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Laos

Individual articles from the Summer 2020 issue of Intersections will be posted on this blog each week. The full issue can be found on MCC’s website.

The 1960s marked the height of the cold war, a superpower conflict that would later create a heart-wrenching challenge for MCC workers in Laos. The United States and the Soviet Union struggled for strategic advantage amidst the rise of anti-colonial liberation movements around the world. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the result was over a decade of turmoil, war, genocide and displacement. 

As Lao villagers returned to their destroyed homes after the war, injuries and deaths became the unrelenting legacy of the war that had passed.

In Laos, the primary U.S. military involvement was a massive secret air war (1964-1973) which tallied 580,000 bombing missions, the equivalent of one bombing mission every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. The air war dropped more than 270 million cluster munitions, small tennis-ball sized bomblets that sent tiny shards of steel flying through the air at ballistic speed. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of these bomblets failed to detonate on impact, littering Lao villages, fields and forests with millions of lethal explosives. As Lao villagers returned to their destroyed homes after the bombing ceased, injuries and deaths became the unrelenting legacy of the war.

In the wake of the bombing, MCC opened a small program in 1975 to assist Laos with recovery and small-scale economic development. Having aligned with the communist bloc, Laos was largely closed to the U.S., save for a tiny contingent of seven U.S. embassy staff and two representatives each for MCC and Quaker Service Laos. As the only U.S. citizens with permission to travel around the country, the MCC and Quaker workers became the sole U.S. witnesses to the painful aftermath of the U.S. bombing campaign.

Bouavanh Maneevong uses an MCC-donated metal detector to search for bombies, in this 1994 photo. After Mines Advisory Group (MAG) began working with MCC, more sophisticated metal detectors and protective garments were used. (MCC photo/Pearl Sensenig)

As they visited villages made of bamboo and thatch, they saw U.S. bomb containers everywhere, some still bearing the name of the U.S. corporation that had produced them. Over lamp-lit meals of sticky rice and spicy sauces served on dishes made from melted-down bomb containers, Lao villagers quietly told MCC workers of family members lost to the ever-present bombs. Amid this warm hospitality the question of responsibility hung silently in the air. MCC workers struggled for words. What did peace theology have to offer in these settings?

What followed was more than a decade of experimentation, much of it without success. MCC imported a custom-made tractor with a chain flail and heavy shielding to protect the driver, hoping that it would safely detonate the cluster bomblets. After months of testing it proved ineffective, and Lao villagers continued to live and die among the bomb-laden fields. It was a time of great sadness.

Hope finally appeared on the horizon when the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an agency devoted to clearing landmines and other UXO, was formed. In 1994, MCC and MAG collaborated with the Lao government to establish the UXO clearance project. The first 20 deminers were trained and began clearance operations that fall. It was a noble beginning, but woefully inadequate in the face of tens of millions of unexploded cluster munitions scattered across thousands of acres of landscape.

Amid the urgency of day-to-day clearance operations, the project raised larger questions. More cluster bombs were being dropped by the U.S. in places like Iraq and Kuwait. Might our relationship with the villagers of Laos move us to join the fledgling movement to ban cluster munitions? And what would justice look like in Laos? Should the U.S. government be pushed to provide significant financial support for UXO clearance and victim assistance?

MCC learned several lessons through its work in Laos in the aftermath of war:

The paradigms of peacemaking/service and justice/advocacy are not mutually exclusive.

• The impact of war on a land and a people extends for generations, long after the media turn to other crises.
• The enormous destruction and harm done to Laos without the knowledge of the U.S. citizenry is alarming. Our government is not always a reliable source for truth.
• Clearing the land of UXO is tedious and dangerous work, requiring an enormous expenditure of resources. The harm cannot be undone. Prevention of conflict, when possible, is a better way to reduce human suffering than relief after war, although both are important.
• By giving numerous presentations in U.S. Anabaptist contexts about the UXO problem in Laos, we learned that many white Anabaptists engage much more naturally with paradigms of service and peacemaking than with the paradigms of justice and advocacy. Raising funds to clear Lao villages of U.S. bombs unleashed a flood of energy and creativity among Anabaptist congregations. Yet the discovery in 1986 of cluster munition component manufacturers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, raised compelling concerns about the silent complicity of Anabaptists with the systems of war. What would it mean to keep faith with the villagers of Laos in settings where the machinery of war was embedded in local economies and income taxes?
• The paradigms of peacemaking/service and justice/advocacy are not mutually exclusive. The UXO project itself provided crucial information and data that later became the foundation for effective advocacy, an important complement to the storytelling that had become the hallmark of MCC’s early interpretive work on Laos.
• The broader efforts to ban cluster munitions and gain strong U.S. government support for UXO clearance in Laos were capably led by other agencies, rather than by MCC. Legacies of War, an education and advocacy agency begun by Channapha Khamvongsa, a Laotian-American woman, was largely responsible for persuading the U.S. government to greatly increase its support for bomb clearance in Laos. President Obama traveled to Laos in 2016 and gave a major speech describing the years of suffering caused by U.S. bombing and pledged US$90 million in support of bomb clearance. It was as if a great historical harm had finally been acknowledged. Perhaps those like Channapha, whose people have known great harm, have the keenest passion for justice and the greatest determination to find healing.
• Finally, the UXO project in Laos has taught us that within every act of service and peacemaking, a strong movement for justice waits to be born.

In 2019, the UXO project in Laos marked its twenty-fifth anniversary. Having long outgrown MCC, the project now employs several thousand workers who clear an average of 600 pieces of lethal ordnance every day. By all estimates, the work will continue for decades.

Titus Peachey served with MCC U.S. in several peace education roles from 1986 to 2016 and before that as MCC co-representative for Laos from 1980 to 1985.

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Learn more

For stories, images and videos about the early years of MCC work on UXO in Laos, see: http://civilianpublicservice.org/storycontinues/advocacy.

For a timeline of MCC and Quaker work on UXO issues in Laos and support for the international campaign to ban cluster munitions, see: https://mcc.org/sites/mcc.org/files/media/common/documents/mennonitequakertimeline.pdf.

For MCC’s Peace Office Newsletter devoted to stories and analysis of MCC’s work on cluster munitions, see: https://mccintersections.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/pon_2008_04-06_vol-38-no-2_cluster-bombs-again.pdf.

For news of Legacies of War’s advocacy work to gain significant U.S. government support for bomb clearance and victim assistance in Laos, see: http://legaciesofwar.org/.

Spinning a safety net: community-based natural resource management in Laos

In the heart of southeast Asia lies Communist Laos, a landlocked country of seven million people, a country of 49 ethnic groups and as many native tongues, with an ever-changing geography unified by the mighty Mekong River flowing down from China and Thailand and out into Cambodia. Most Laotians are paddy rice farmers, relying heavily on the pulse of the river and the timing of the monsoon season. When conditions are favourable, villagers grow paddy and upland rice, the country’s all-important crops, and raise chickens, ducks, pigs, buffaloes and frogs. Women also make an income from weaving done in the shade of stilted houses. During seasonal food shortages villagers turn to communally-managed pieces of forest and hillside to fill food gaps. This article will explore how these community-managed resources have been negatively impacted by the presence of developers and argue that increased knowledge of legal land rights and community conflict resolution are necessary in order to strengthen the ability of communities to protect and once again manage their own resources.

In the average Lao meal, reliance on forest products is abundantly evident: fat, crispy fried insects, fermented river fish paste, steamed and boiled greens and bamboo shoots, wild mushrooms and small game. These dishes are all eaten with scoops of one of the 15,000 varieties of fragrant sticky rice grown throughout Laos. In homes, bamboo is used for traps and building materials, rattan creates baskets and brooms, and barks, leaves and roots are dried to make medicine.

Use of forest areas are traditionally negotiated among different villages and are generally managed through light harvesting and the delineation of forest territory into land for production, conservation and protection. In some forests food may be gathered, but trees may not be cut, hillsides may not be cleared and fires may not be lit. In this way, village authorities control the extent of harvesting and ensure the forest environment is not degraded.

On the banks of the Nam Xan River, the small village of Ban Thitnoon recently had the visit that changes the lives of so many villages: the arrival of developers in shiny black SUVs. Before their eyes, village leaders saw their seasonal food shortages disappear in a haze of promises for a luxury tourist resort that would lead to education, a market for villagers’ goods and a financial safety net for hard years. The contract between the developers and village authorities was signed and work began. Villagers awakened too late to the painful realization that the developers had misrepresented their intentions and had instead dug an open-pit mine in a fast grab for mineral resources that resulted in flooding and chemical runoff into the surrounding water.

During a visit from representatives from Laos’ National Assembly, the village mediation unit of Ban Thitnoon reached out for help. A government representative was dispatched to investigate, and the sham developer took the profits and left. With that victory under their belts, the small village of Ban Thitnoon was left to survey the damage: 70% of their paddy lands were permanently flooded and unusable, the water was polluted and degraded and the forest cover eroded away in a number of places. A village that had been seasonally food insecure was now in crisis. Ban Thitnoon’s story is all-too-common in Laos.

MCC has worked to address the threat posed by developers to traditional Laotian community-based natural resource management by raising awareness of villagers’ legal land rights. So, for example, since 2009 MCC has worked on a food security project with the Xaysomboun Provincial Department of Agriculture. MCC staff have explained to village authorities in the area their right to refuse contracts with developers, their rights to negotiate contracts and their options for legal recourse in the case of disputes over contracts. In Tha Thom district, MCC works with elected Village Mediation Units (VMUs) to strengthen their capacity to defend villagers’ legal rights and their ability to take recourse when developers fail to obtain permission or go beyond the bounds of negotiated contracts. MCC also works with local government officials to obtain land certificates for individual families, helping them prove their right to use specific land and thus increase their legal ability to retain their land. As the Landesa Rural Development Institute observes, “secure rights to land are a critical, but often overlooked, factor in achieving household food security and improved nutritional status” (Landesa Rural Development Institute, 1). Secure long-term land tenure is essential before farmers can invest time in agricultural development training on matters such as soil improvement, animal forage, techniques for better rice yields, fruit tree cultivation and animal raising.

In a period of unprecedented development in Laos, villagers are relocating throughout the country to make way for hydroelectric development, plantations, mines and other economic development projects. Such mass internal migration can result in serious disputes, especially as different ethnic groups come into contact for the first time, knowing little about each other’s customs. MCC assists in training VMUs to help solve conflicts that arise in both of these situations. As a result, VMUs deal with a variety of concerns, ranging from serious land boundary conflicts to disputes of the “your-cow-ate-my-vegetable-patch” variety. If these disputes can be solved locally, and in culturally-appropriate ways, it relieves the overburdened justice system and contributes to social cohesion. Laos has been described as having “the resource curse,” the seeming blessing of abundant natural resources undermined by weak regulation and powerful neighbours. With perseverance and the increasing interest of government and civilians, legal education about villagers’ land rights can protect this vital set of resources and keep the shelves of these natural food cupboards stocked for generations to come.

Emily Nigh is agricultural advisor for MCC Laos, based in Vientiane.

 Learn more:

 Landesa Rural Development Institute. “Landesa Issue Brief: Land Rights and Food Security.” 13 (March 2012). Available at https://www.landesa.org/wp-content/uploads/Landesa-Issue-Brief-Land-Rights-and-Food-Security.pdf

Baird, Ian G. and Bruce Shoemaker. “Unsettling Experiences: Internal Resettlement and International Aid Agencies in Laos.” Development and Change 38/5 (September 2007): 865–888.

Ministry of Justice Law Research and International Cooperation Institute. “Customary Law and Practise in Lao PDR.” (July 2011). Available at http://www.la.undp.org/content/lao_pdr/en/home/library/democratic_governance/customary-law.html