Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Melody Kemp lives in Laos. She says: "I have lived and worked in Asia for 20 years and have a Muslim foster family. I work largely in the area of labour, although my writing muse is increasingly insistent I divorce the Minotaurs of capitalism and join her at the keyboard. I live in Laos and am working with Lao colleagues to assist the revival of Lao creative writing. I am editing a book of Lao short stories: like walking through wet plaster, but nowhere as bad as attending a meeting of the NSW Right... as well as getting the Peoples Economic Sanctions going, trying to write my own stuff and preparing training programs for Burmese and Shan workers. Writing a proposal to update my book, support some dying friends by remote control... and deal with Mekong humidity which makes me feel like a wet drag queen with droopy feathers....Just as well there are seven days in working week."

by Melody Kemp

In the years of the American war in Indochina, the tiny landlocked country of Laos became the most heavily bombed country on earth. Some 30 million tonnes of bombs rained down on the population of Lao in a deluge of death and destruction. And still, each year at least 400 Laos are killed by Unexploded Ordnance (UXO). Not mines, as in Cambodia, but unexploded bombs, missiles, and bombies - brightly coloured anti personnel cluster bombs particularly attractive to children.

It is fitting in a time of media dominance of events like war, and our increasingly short term memory for horror, to remind ourselves that long after CNN packs its cameras, BBC reporters take off their flak jackets, and the ABC has filed the footage, the aftermath of war goes on. And on. And on.

More Lao are killed each year by the long-term effects of that war than died in each of the recent train bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai, and almost twice as many as the 218 Australians killed in Bali. Lao was not a combatant nation - under international law the country was neutral - and yet 40 years later the Lao people continue to be collateral damage from one of the USA's illegal wars.

Ancient monuments such as 13th century Buddhist wats (temples) were flattened and the famous Plain of Jars, where huge stone urns lean drunkenly into the blasting wind, was not spared. The 10 meter craters remind those of us who now walk the paths cleared by the British-sponsored Mine Action Group how terrifying was the retribution for allowing foreign fighters on your soil, albeit unwittingly, and how very unfortunate it is to be on the flight path to and from northern Vietnam and the US air force bases in Thailand. As much as anything, Lao was bombed because you cannot land a bomber with ordnance on board. The capital of Xien Khuang province, where the Jars now rest in relative peace, was completely destroyed. The only reminder of its existence are the remnants of a French Colonial portico and a large sitting Buddha, whose carbonised face frowns down in a look of seeming disgust.

What we do not see in the footage of the bombings in the various wars in the Middle East, is that explosives nullify soil fertility. You can still see dry splat marks on the once verdant hillsides of Lao where nitrites resulting from the explosive force have created a biologically inhospitable landscape. Forests where people forage for food have never recovered from the defoliant chemicals. Heritage objects are lost to the world and, most of all, there's the damage to lives and livelihoods.

At risk of making wide generalisations wars are largely waged on poor nations by richer nations. The people being bombed and strafed and whose settlements are reduced to dust are usually dirt poor farmers. Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, all ravaged by rural and urban warfare are largely agrarian. Buried missiles make farming a dangerous business. Most of the Lao deaths and serious injuries happen when men and women go into the forest looking for food, or attempt to plough land for planting and blast blows off lower limbs and causes lower abdominal injuries like perforated intestines, bladder, uterus. Some injuries happen when men, in particular, go looking for scrap metal to sell for recycling. The amount they receive, about 40 Australian cents a kilo, is wildly out of balance with the risk taken and can be taken as an indicator of how impoverished the nation has become. Similarly, in Iraq young men driven by poverty hoard and sell tank parts often contaminated with depleted uranium (DU), which can cause cancer and kill them even if the war doesn't. DU, which has a half life of 45 billion years, now contaminates the fertile delta of Southern Iraq, the nation's breadbasket.

It will take over a hundred years to clear UXO from the nine Lao provinces where it lies like monsters in wait. The bombing ended in 1973 but UXO is still present in 37 per cent of Lao territory, some 87,000 square kilometres.

Last year Lao received US$9 million to help clear UXO. Almost none of this was from the USA, but from other donors. Compare this with the daily cost of the Iraq war of US$195 million per day. The point is not only to remind the rest of the world about Lao but to rethink the 'one bang and it's gone' attitude to war.

Lebanon was by all accounts just recovering economically from 18 years of Israeli occupation and civil war, during which time investment in infrastructure and nation building was minimal. The once beautiful nation was crushed like a beetle under the boot of war.

Young Iraqis talk about how beautiful their homeland was in a new film by James Longley, Iraq in Fragments. This nation of wonders that, in their antiquity, are part of world heritage, is now simply footage of rubble with men dancing in anger and not in jubilant or ecstatic joy. So, as in the destruction of Lao's temples and built heritage, we are all bombed ... we all lose and continue to do so. Instead of assisting with consolidation, money goes into rebuilding.

So then what happens? Of the 147 health centres promised to Iraq by US President George Bush, the American company Halliburton, charged with their reconstruction, built only twenty. Prior to the invasion, a team of US academics representing the Center for Economic and Social Rights reported that Iraq's health system afforded primary to tertiary health care to over 93 per cent of the population. This is because the term 'Ba’athist' refers to a philosophy of pan Arabic Socialism, not a commitment to terror.

Schools and universities educated Iraqis to be some of the best qualified people on earth. Now weapons are the teachers. Revenge is the thesis.

War is not just personally destructive. It keeps the people under the blanket of enforced poverty for years. Proud nations become client states or vassals, as is Lao. It kills and maims for years, it beats upon the memory, it flares in dreams, its rubble remains in corners like toxic dust.

Vientiane, Laos, July 2006