The Laotian border with Vietnam is still pockmarked with craters

Mary Stucky: During the Vietnam War, Laos became per capita the most bombed place on earth. Today, the mountainous jungle near the Vietnam border is still pockmarked with craters from U-S bombs.   These were cluster bombs, each about the size of a tennis ball.   About a third never exploded.  Aid worker Roger Rumpf says that’s about 80 million unexploded bombs littering the countryside.

Roger Rumpf: “They’re everywhere.  You walk down a path, you move anywhere, you gotta watch what you’re stepping on and you’ll probably be stepping on a few underneath the ground.  They’re hidden– you cannot see them anymore.”

Stucky: They may be hard to see, but they can be found.  Laotians go looking for the bombs using cheap metal detectors.  They dig up the bombs and sell them to scrap dealers.

Most people in Laos are subsistence farmers so collecting scrap is their only way to earn cash.   Pong Sy regularly hunts for what the Lao call “bombies.”

Pong Sy hunts for "bombies."

Pong Sy (in Lao)

Stucky: Sy says this earns him about five dollars a day.  In Sy’s village nearly every family hunts scrap and everyone knows someone who’s been injured or killed in the process.    Just last year, two of Sy’s cousins died collecting scrap when the bombs they picked up exploded.

In Sy’s village nearly every family hunts scrap and everyone knows someone who’s been injured or killed in the process.    Just last year, two of Sy’s cousins died collecting scrap when the bombs they picked up exploded.

Since that time, the price of scrap metal has dropped dramatically — almost in half.  But people here keep on collecting bombs, according to Tom Morgan.  He’s with the Nobel-prize-winning anti-land mines organization, the Mines Advisory Group.

Tom Morgan: “People make a choice between being able to support their family or not and if the only choice they have is being involved in the scrap metal trade that’s what they’ll do even though they know there are risks involved.”

Stucky: At this foundry right in the city of Paksan, trucks pull up loaded with scrap — all kinds of stuff — old pipes, chains, fans, table tops and some bombs and bomb fragments – everything dumped into a fire of molten metal.

Scrap yard in Thakek, Laos

Jim Harris: “It’s an accident waiting to happen. Somebody’s going to die here.”

Stucky: Jim Harris is an American who works in Laos educating people about the dangers of the bombs. Accidents in these foundries are common – even deaths.  In one foundry the Mines Advisory Group found 25 thousand pieces of live ordinance.

Jim Harris took me to meet a scrap dealer in the town of Tahkek.

Woman speaking Lao

Stucky: She told us, yes she buys bombs, but she’s careful and knows how to handle them.  Harris isn’t so sure.

Harris: “She just stepped on a bombie half I wouldn’t step on because we don’t know what’s underneath it. See, she’s picking up and tossing them around we don’t want to stay here too long.

This man lost part of a leg collecting bombs for scrap

Tom Morgan (Mines Advisory Group): “The sad truth is that while people can get away with it for a certain period of time in the end they will die carrying on those activities. Because if you haven’t been trained and you don’t have genuine authentic technical skills in the end you will come across a bomb that you think you know how to diffuse and you don’t because some of them are essentially booby trapped or variations of the standard type that don’t work in the same way and in the end those people all die.”

Stucky: An estimated 50,000 people in Laos have been killed or injured by bombs since the end of the war.  And UNICEF says about a third of those who die collecting bomb scaps are children.  One of them was a 9 year old named Hamm. Three years ago Hamm and two friends went looking for scrap. Hamm’s father, Khamphong Saykhampnaya was out tending his buffalo and heard the explosion.

Hamm, Khamphong Saykhampnaya

Khamphong Saykhampnaya speaking Lao

Stucky: Saykhampnaya says when he rushed over, his son was still alive – though the friends were dead.  The father says they managed to get Hamm to a hospital but they couldn’t save him.  So Hamm’s parents took him home to die.

Outrage over continuing deaths led to an international treaty that would ban the use of cluster bombs and require that remnants be cleaned up.   Ninety-eight countries have signed on, though not the United States.

President Obama has taken the step of outlawing the sale and export of cluster bombs outside the United States.

But back in Laos, the bombs remain and people continue to risk their lives harvesting this dangerous cash crop.

For the World, I’m Mary Stucky, Boualapha Province, Laos.

(All photos by Mary Stucky)

• BBC coverage: People of Laos suffer bomb legacy
• The Mines Advisory Group

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MARCO WERMAN: Yesterday Hillary Clinton was in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She traveled east to a war zone to speak out against rampant sexual violence there. But she also focused on the causes of the conflict. That includes Congo’s lucrative minerals trade. Armed groups in the east fight to control the mines and then use the proceeds to fund their operations. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports.

JEB SHARP: Congo’s mineral wealth is legendary. Its mines supply some of the most valuable metals in the world including tungsten, tin, and coltan. And the United Nations as well as advocacy groups have long documented the way the trade in minerals there fuels the conflict in the eastern part of the country. Colin Thomas-Jensen is with the advocacy group Enough.

COLIN THOMAS JENSEN: The lack of state authority coupled with abundant natural wealth in Congo allows armed groups to control mines, to control taxation routes, and to make tons of money. And in the case of eastern Congo we estimate that armed groups make anywhere from $100 to $180 million last year from taxation and trade in illegal minerals.

SHARP: And Thomas-Jensen says there’s a good chance that some of those minerals are ending up in your cell phone.

THOMAS-JENSEN: Every time your cell phone vibrates the vibration is helped and caused by a little piece of tungsten. That’s what tungsten’s used for. Tin is used for solder to hold electronic parts together. And coltan, or tantalum, is a critical element in cell phone batteries.

SHARP: So when Hillary Clinton called on the international community yesterday to start looking at steps to try to prevent the mineral wealth of the DRC ending up in the hands of those who fund the violence advocacy groups were heartened. Amy Barry is with the group Global Witness in London.

AMY BARRY: Even before she arrived, Secretary Clinton’s choice of countries was important. We were struck by the fact that a number of countries that she visited were effected in one way or another by what’s known as the resource curse. So when did she did speak about the issue of minerals, mineral wealth in the DRC, as an underlying driver of the conflict, that was something that we do see a form of progress.

SHARP: Global Witness has been documenting the problem of so-called conflict minerals for a long time. The group put out a new report on Congo just last month. According to Barry the report showed that all the armed groups in eastern Congo, including the national army, are involved in the mines. And yet the issue is rarely discussed in coverage of the conflict she says.

AMY BARRY: Often the focus of press reports or political dialogue on the conflict in the DRC is around political differences between the groups of between the countries, Rwanda and the DRC for example, or ethnic divisions. In actual fact Global Witness has been saying for a long time that the underlying economic drivers, this vast natural resources wealth, is something that really must be addressed if the conflict is going to come to an end.

SHARP: As for those steps Clinton mentioned, Barry says companies buying, trading, and processing minerals as well as end users like computer and cell phone manufacturers should find out where their minerals are coming from. She says governments can take steps to make sure that happens as well as help the government of the DRC take back control of the industry inside its own borders. And of course consumers themselves can put pressure on both governments and companies. Again, Colin Thomas-Jensen of Enough.

THOMAS-JENSEN: The best way to put pressure on any industry is through consumers and I think what we’re starting to see, and it’s early yet, what we’re starting to see in the United States is a growing number of people who are aware of the situation in eastern Congo, appalled by it and who are learning about this connection between the trade and conflict minerals and consumer electronics. The minerals that are fueling this war are components, are critical elements of cell phones, laptops, mp3 players.

SHARP: What Thomas-Jensen doesn’t want is for companies to simply pull up stakes and take their trade elsewhere as some companies have already done. The idea isn’t to boycott minerals from eastern Congo, or have a moratorium on mining there; that only hurts the Congolese. What advocates do want is for companies to make sure any minerals they do buy aren’t passing through tainted hands, much as the diamond industry learned to avoid the so-called blood diamonds from West Africa that once fueled conflict there. For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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