Clearing the Path

By Imbert Matthee

(This article was originally published in SDIA’s  magazine, IN CONTEXT. To get a printed copy, please send $4.00 along with your name and address to Susila Dharma International Association, 777 Campbell, Greenfield Park (Montreal), Quebec J4V 1Y8, Canada.)

When I first set eyes on the old Dong Ha combat base, nothing but a pair of rusted gate pillars marked its entrance. By then, it had been more than a quarter century since the Americans had abandoned it and there were few signs that this had once been home to 50,000 troops from the third Marine Division.

We had just left a fairly busy street near the centre of Dong Ha, now the fast-growing capital of Quang Tri Province. But once through the rusted gate, we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a wasteland: a barren, haggard terrain of red dirt covered with shrubs and small groves of scrawny trees hanging on to life under a relentless tropical sun. I looked around and spotted some empty cinder-block barracks, some Vietnamese graves, a sand quarry and a scattering of ‘homes’ I was later told belonged to squatters. Unlike the busy street we just left behind, there were no cars, mopeds or bicycles here. The town’s growth and traffic simply parted ways, like a stream around an island. And for good reason. This was Dong Ha’s Ward 8, one of the most highly contaminated and dangerous sites in the former Demilitarized Zone region at the 17th parallel.

400 students from Ward eight elementary Peace School in Dong Ha, Vietnam now get an education on grounds once too dangerous to walk on. (photo by Erin Fredrichs)

Leftover wartime ordnance is less problematic for people in such places as England or Germany. Not so in developing countries with a land mine problem. Although it’s difficult to get precise numbers, nearly 100 million land mines and untold pieces of unexploded ordnance (UXO) litter the world. If you were to map the world with color-coding, using red as the highest level of contamination, it would show an intermittent band of hot, red spots roughly around the equator and loosely connecting such regions as the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Central America. Trouble spots in Africa, such as Angola and Mozambique, aren’t too much further to the south. In all, 140 million people are threatened in some way by the presence of land mines. Every 30 minutes, someone somewhere in the world gets killed or injured by this deadly debris. Two in every five victims are children.

The effects of this ‘pollution’ on development are far-reaching. In places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan, where explosives were used during several decades of civil war, they severely limit access to food. During a conflict, land mines are often placed tactically along roads, near power stations or drinking water supplies. Cluster bombs are used similarly to cripple infrastructure and restrict an enemy’s ability to function. This adds to the burden of reconstruction after war, thus further hampering development.

There is also the burden of land mine accident survivors on society, its work force, and its public health system. In Afghanistan, one in every ten adult males is a mine survivor. The country has to receive vast sums of foreign aid to help support its health care system, which tends to be accessible in larger cities but not in the smaller communities where most of the accidents happen.

While there may be domestic and foreign support for the immediate treatment of life-threatening injuries in most developing countries, this is rarely the case for the kind of long-term treatment necessary to fully rehabilitate land mine accident survivors. These patients need proper orthopaedic care, psychological treatment, special skills training and other forms of socioeconomic support. Almost every survivor suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which can lead to depression, which in turn can lead to substance abuse and domestic violence, thus further adding to the need for and cost of treatment, if treatment exists at all.

But, why do developing countries find it so much harder to rid their countryside of wartime UXO? The answer in one word: money. It can cost up to $1,000 to detect and destroy a single land mine, depending on the type and the place where it is found. One estimate puts the cost of removing all land mines in the world at $57 billion—providing no new conflicts break out.

The United States, which spends more money removing land mines and unexploded ordnance around the world than all the other countries combined, has devoted more than $1.3 billion to help do the job since the early 1990s. As a result, places such as Kosovo are now considered ‘mine-safe’ (not ‘mine-free,’ mind you) and others are considerably safer than they were just after the conflict. But other mine-affected countries are still decades from being accident-free or threat-free. In places like Vietnam, where less than ten percent of all wartime munitions have been cleared, it will take many generations to eliminate this obstacle to growth and peacetime development.

This brings us back to the reason why I set eyes on the old Dong Ha combat base in the first place. At that time in late 2000, Kristen Leadem, James Hathaway, Martha Hathaway and I, a group of friends in the USA, had just formed Clear Path International. Although we have since narrowed our mission to providing accident survivors with medical and socioeconomic services, at that time, it still included land mine removal and we had interest from the Freeman Foundation in Vermont to pursue the clearance of a large section, 110 acres, of the base.

It took us almost two years and two million dollars to get it done. We found more than 500 pieces of UXO. The most painstaking part of the project was the phase in which the Vietnamese de-miners we recruited and trained ran into the base’s former garbage dump. Littered with c-rations, boot shanks and all sorts of metal objects, the detectors went crazy and every signal had to be investigated. This is part of the reason why clearance can be so expensive. However, the results were gratifying. Measured by how much Ward eight flourished after the job was done, it gave me a new appreciation for just how big an obstacle the wartime explosives are. When I go back now, I have trouble distinguishing it from the other neighbourhoods in Dong Ha where life thrives. Most of that development was funded by the government and some by other foreign non-governmental organizations. Clear Path’s so-called ‘end-use’ contribution was an elementary school, the Peace School, where almost 400 children from Ward eight are getting an education without running the risk of finding a cluster bomb during recess.