Contamination and Impact

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) experienced the heaviest aerial bombardments in history during the Indochina War of the 1960s and 1970s which left it with the world’s worst contamination from unexploded submunitions in addition to extensive contamination by other explosive remnants of war (ERW), including air-dropped and ground-fired unexploded ordnance (UXO) as well as antivehicle and antipersonnel mines.

Lao PDR continues to state that cluster munitions contaminate approximately 8,470km² and overall contamination by UXO covers up to 87,000km² (around 35% of the Laotian territory).[1] Such estimates, however, are based on bomb targeting data that clearance operators have found bears little relation to actual contamination on the ground. The National Regulatory Authority (NRA) reports that 14 of Lao PDR’s 17 provinces and a quarter of all villages are contaminated by UXO,[2] but insufficient survey has been conducted to provide a credible estimate of the total contaminated area in the country or priority development areas.

Cluster munition remnants

The United States (US) dropped more than two million tons (1.8 billion kg) of bombs between 1964 and 1973,[3] including more than 270 million submunitions (known locally as “bombies”). Lao PDR has reported 623,070 unexploded submunitions were destroyed between 1996 and the end of July 2013,[4] but there is no reliable estimate of the extent of contamination remaining.

Clearance teams have found 29 types of submunition, including most commonly BLU-26, BLU-24/66 and BLU-63.[5] Unexploded submunitions accounted for close to half (49%) of all items cleared in 2013.[6] UXO Lao, Lao PDR’s largest clearance operator, reported in 2011 that during 15 years of operations, submunitions had accounted for 49% of all items cleared.[7]

The NRA identifies submunitions as the most common form of remaining ERW contamination and responsible for close to 30% of all incidents.[8] Submunitions are also said to be the type of ERW most feared by the population.[9] UNDP has reported that as a result of submunition contamination “economic opportunities in tourism, hydroelectric power, mining, forestry, and many other areas of activity considered main engines of growth for Lao PDR are restricted, complicated and made more expensive.”[10] The extent of their impact has given rise to calls for a survey and clearance strategy that gives priority to tackling cluster munition remnants.[11]

Other explosive remnants of war

Clearance operators have reported the presence of at least 186 types of munitions in Lao PDR but the extent of residual contamination from other ERW is not known.[12] These reportedly range from 20lb fragmentation bombs to 2,000lb general-purpose bombs and sometimes bigger items.[13] Other major causes of incidents are artillery shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, and air-dropped bombs.[14]

Mines

All sides in the war laid antipersonnel mines, particularly along borders and around military bases and airfields. A 1997 Handicap International (HI) survey found mines in all 15 provinces it surveyed, contaminating 214 villages,[15] and clearance operators have estimated Lao PDR may have 1,000 mined areas.[16] The remote location of many of these areas means that mines had little impact, are not a clearance priority, and made up only 0.3% of the more than 82,000 items of ERW cleared by operators in 2013.[17] The NRA, however, has stated that “with a steady expansion of land use ‘mined areas’ will become areas for growing concern.”[18]

Mine Action Program

The NRA, created by government decree in 2004 and active since mid-2006, has an interministerial board chaired by the deputy prime minister and composed of representatives from 11 government ministries.[19] Until 2011, the NRA came under the supervision of the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare. A decree issued in June 2011 appointed a minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, responsible for rural development and poverty reduction, as Vice-Chair of the Board together with the Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs.[20] A further decree in November 2011 appointed Deputy Prime Minister Asang Laoly as President of the NRA board.[21] In November 2012, Bounheuang Douangphachanh, a minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and chairman of the National Committee for Rural Development and Poverty Eradication, was appointed chairman of the NRA Board.[22]

The NRA’s structure and role was set out in an “agreement” released in November 2012 defining it as the “secretariat for the Party Politburo and the Lao government for the overall management and consideration of policy matters, planning, projects and coordination of the implementation of the Lao PDR National Strategy for the UXO sector for the entire country.”[23] Its role includes setting policy, coordinating and regulating the sector, accrediting operators, setting standards, and conducting quality management. It also has the mandate to serve as the technical focal point for matters relating to international weapons treaties.[24]

The NRA has four sections: Administration and Finance, Planning and Cooperation, Quality and Standards, and Operations and Information. This includes a single quality management team. UNDP has supported a technical advisor as well as a program and finance advisor. Sterling International LLC, funded by the US Department of State, provided a technical advisor supporting quality management and operations at the NRA, a second advisor supporting national operator UXO Lao, and a third advisor providing support to both organizations as required.[25]

The army set up a humanitarian demining unit of 15 personnel in February 2012 in line with a government directive to develop a humanitarian mine action capacity. NRA chairman Bounheuang Douangphachanh said several times this number would be trained in future years. The unit received explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) training at the UXO Lao training center funded by the US Department of State. The NRA said it would receive accreditation and operate subject to NRA quality assurance; however, the team has since stood down.[26]

Strategic planning

Lao PDR embarked in 2010 on “Safe Path Forward 2” (SPF), a plan for 2010−2020, a revised version of which was approved by the government on 22 June 2012. The strategy identified six general goals, including reducing the number of casualties each year from 300 to less than 75[27] and releasing of an average of 200km² a year—more than triple the 2013 rate of clearance and land release. It called for release of priority land through data analysis, general survey, technical survey, roving response, “and/or, finally, full clearance.”[28]

The government has also set priorities that move UXO clearance from a humanitarian-oriented program to a development-oriented program more closely tied to government socio-economic development plans. In 2010, the government adopted UXO clearance as a ninth Millennium Development Goal, targeting removal of all UXO from priority agricultural land by 2020.[29] Announcement 93, published by the government in November 2012, stated all provincial and district development projects affected by UXO must undergo survey and clearance before implementation and must also allocate funding to cover the cost.[30] The government has identified 64 priority areas planned to become small rural townships, 167 focal sites to consolidate and “stabilize” remote rural communities, and more than 1,680 priority projects.[31]

By mid-2014, however, there was little clarity how these initiatives will be put into practice.

The NRA consulted with provincial and district authorities in 2013 about how this announcement could be implemented. By June 2014 it had opened six provincial offices attached to offices of the National Council for Rural Development and Poverty Eradication, and it planned to open three more before the end of 2014 to facilitate coordination in identifying priority areas and tasks.[32] In 2013, the NRA also started drafting a new multi-year workplan, which it hoped to present by the end of the year, intended to align the UXO clearance sector with broader development goals. Lao PDR told the April 2014 Standing Committee meetings it was still preparing the work plan.[33]

Land Release

Operators cleared a total of 64.86km² in 2013, nearly 20% more than the previous year, largely a result of a near doubling of the area released by commercial companies. The number of accredited commercial operators increased from seven to 11 in 2013, accounting for just under half the amount of land cleared in 2013 but for only 3% of total items destroyed.[34]

In contrast, the amount of land released by NGOs fell by 14% in 2013 but the number of items they destroyed still increased, an outcome that may reflect a greater emphasis on survey and a shift from request-based to evidence-based clearance. Operators have also focused clearance on cluster munition strikes and tackling other UXO through roving tasks, which destroyed 49% more UXO in 2013 than the previous year.[35]

Five-year summary of clearance

Survey in 2013

The NRA has identified survey as a sector priority since 2011, but as of mid-2014 had not yet approved a survey methodology or procedures. The NRA had planned in 2011 to conduct a District Focused Approach non-technical survey that would complete survey of the 41 most contaminated districts in 2013. The NRA halted that approach in 2012, concluding it “didn’t answer all the questions we wanted to know.”[36] By mid-2014 it was still seeking to balance a cautious official approach to risk management with the growing concern of operators and the donors that fund them, to focus on survey and deploy clearance assets only on defined hazards.

NRA discussions with operators in 2013 and the first half of 2014 were held up by issues including the criteria for releasing land by non-technical survey and the level of evidence required to deploy teams for more time-consuming technical survey. A NRA draft document on survey procedures circulated in June 2014 called for full technical survey of uninhabited areas.[37] By the end of June 2014, the NRA expected to reach a consensus on survey methodology within a matter of weeks, paving the way for a pilot survey not later than August involving representatives of the NRA, UXO Lao, and all NGOs to be conducted in three areas of high-, medium-, and low-density contamination.[38]

NPA has continued conducting the Cluster Munitions Remnants Survey, described as a form of quick technical survey, which it started in 2011. Working in three southern provinces of Saravane, Sekong, and Attapeu with 15 teams trained for survey and EOD and 20 non-technical survey teams, NPA surveyed a total of 66.5km² in 2013, of which 38.68km² was confirmed as hazardous area and 28.55km² was found to have no contamination. In the process, NPA cleared more submunitions through survey than some operators did through clearance, destroying a total of 11,617 submunition remnants (9,729 in the course of survey) and 1,093 other UXO items.[39] After three years of testing and refining, the survey approach is broadly endorsed by other international NGOs but the NRA had not endorsed it as a national standard.[40]

Battle area and roving clearance in 2013

Area clearance reported by UXO Lao, the biggest operator working in nine provinces, inched up by 9% in 2013, roughly the same rate of increase it reports in most years, but it also recorded bigger increases of around 21% in submunitions and other UXO destroyed in the course of area clearance operations. In line with the government priorities, UXO Lao is shifting its operating focus from tackling local clearance requests to larger, more development-linked tasks, although tasking and work plans vary widely from province to province.[41]

In 2013, Mines Advisory Group (MAG) worked with around 300 operations staff in the northern provinces of Xieng Khouang and Khamouane, focusing on survey and clearing about a quarter of the area released the previous year but also sharply reducing the ratio of land cleared to items destroyed.[42] The Solidarity Service International (SODI), funded by Germany and working in the north in Kamkheut district of Bolikhamxay province with 71 staff, similarly put more emphasis on survey and converted a battle area clearance team to survey in September 2013. APOPO took over management of SODI teams in Lao PDR in 2014 with a commitment of continued German funding until March 2015. It planned to focus on developing survey and data analysis, reporting a sharp fall in the average area cleared per item destroyed in the first three months of 2014. It also planned to work with provincial authorities on building local capacity for planning and prioritizing. However, government delays in approving a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) prompted German authorities to end its funding at the end of August 2014, leaving the future of the program in doubt.[43]

In southern Lao PDR, where NPA and HI already work, HALO Trust started operation in 2013 in two eastern districts of Savannakhet province with close to 100 operating staff funded by the US. In 2013, teams surveyed 4.47km², identifying 15 confirmed hazardous areas (CHAs) covering a total of 1.03km². HALO expected staff numbers to rise to over 200 with two-year funding awarded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in 2014.[44]

Much of the increase in area clearance in 2013 was accounted for by local commercial companies working on a range of infrastructure and commercial tasks, but their contribution to tackling contamination as measured by items cleared was small (less than 4% of submunitions destroyed in 2013) and the degree to which they will bring capacity and resources to bear on development priorities remains uncertain. International commercial operators continued to work mainly on tasks linked to mining ventures. BACTEC (Battle Area Clearance, Training, Equipment and Consultancy) was invited by DFID to bid for funding in 2014 but was unable to submit a proposal after the NRA declined to endorse it.[45] Meanwhile, local media reported a Malaysian company, Giant Consolidated, as saying EOD teams were “working daily” on the route of a planned $5 billion, 220-kilometer railway linking Savannakhet and the Vietnam border and had already cleared significant amounts of UXO, but the NRA had no information on which operators were active in the project.[46] 

Battle area clearance in 2013[47]

Roving clearance operations 2013[48]

Support for EOD

Funding for the UXO sector in 2013 totaled US$41 million, up from $30.3 million the previous year, helped by a rise in US support from $6 million to $9 million. The US has pledged a further increase in its support to $12 million in 2015.[50] The government reported contributing $4.9 million to UXO sector funding in 2013, however this included $4.7 million in tax exemptions.[51]