"Three Children Killed, Three Inured By War Era Cluster Bomb in Vietnam"

[GreenPartyVoter]

DORSET, Vermont / GIA LAI PROVINCE, Vietnam - June 9 - Three children were killed this week and three others injured when they discovered a baseball-sized cluster bomb left over from the US-Vietnam war and played with it as if it were a toy. The children, ranging in ages from two to eleven years old, found the cluster bomb in a river near their homes in Vietnam’s central highlands and attempted to remove the BB-like pellets on the outside of the bomb casing.

The resulting explosion killed three children, aged six, nine and eleven years old, immediately and three others remain hospitalized.

Although the Vietnam War ended over 30 years ago, by some estimates over 350,000 tons of bombs that did not detonate when dropped remain in the ground. Since the conflict ended in 1975, nearly 40,000 Vietnamese have been killed by these devices and thousands more have been injured.

Clear Path International serves landmine and bomb accident survivors, their families and their communities in former war zones in Southeast Asia. This assistance takes the form of both direct and indirect medical and social services to survivor families as well as equipment support to hospitals. Current Clear Path projects are in Vietnam, Cambodia and on the Thai-Burma border. More information about Clear Path International can be found on the web at www.cpi.org.

http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0609-07.htm

[Kutjara]

1. Bombs and mines: the gifts that keep on giving, n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. My first thought as well

[1620rock]

2. Killing...it's what we do. eom

[acmejack]

4. Fortunately they're illegal under the geneva convention

So are land mines, so the US would never use either one of them. :sarcasm:

[Solo_in_MD]

5. I was not aware clusters munitions were illegal

or that the US had signed up to stop using all forms of mines everywhere. Any URLs or other citations handy?

[acmejack]

9. I certainly do!

Citation

Sorry I just had to do it, but please do read on.

While the cluster bomblets are not banned outright, they have been banned form anti-personnel use: This is a much more reasonable link to some top notch educational material! http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=3410

[Solo_in_MD]

12. Not sure that is quite true

http://www.refugeecamp.org/learnmore/landmines/dictionary.htm indicates that land mines are not completely banned. More the 1997 Ottawa treaty only applies to those nations who have signed the treaty, and most of the big guys have not. Many other sources back that Mine Ban Treay is only applicable to signatories.

As for sub munitions, I found nothing in the citations or elsewhere that bans them, only discussions that they are harmful to civilians long after their tactical employment due to ones that fail to detonate initially. NGO are claiming coverage under the Ottawa Treaty, but I did not see where the UN or other nations were. Regardless Ottawa is by its desing not binding on non-signatories.

[acmejack]

13. I am not an attorney, just an ordinary citizen.

Apparently you are much more familiar with the ins & outs of the law than I. I am but an average person, horrified by the slaughter and mutilation caused by these unspent munitions years, even decades later. My first experiences with these issues was as a child on Okinawa in the fifties, where there was plenty of unspent munitions of every conceivable variety laying about.

Unlike fine wine, art or beautiful ladies, these explosives do not age well. That is the true extent of my knowledge. That and this:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~[e-mail]/mmonk.jpg

[driver8]

6. I lived on Guam as a kid in the early to mid 70's and kids were always

finding artillery and grenades left over from WWII. There was usually at least one article a month about a kid being killed or injured.

The Air Force used to give lectures at schools telling children what to do if they found unexploded ordinance. They always gave us a demonstration of the damage that these things can do.

[Kutjara]

7. Yeah, I lived on Saipan around the same time...

...and live WWII ordnance was always turning up. When they expanded Isley Airfield into Saipan International Airport, the bulldozers would regularly set off some bomb or other buried in the boonies.

[driver8]

10. Saipan? Was there a US military base, there?

[Kutjara]

11. Not an active one, but...

...there was still a hell of a lot of stuff lying around from WWII that noone had bothered to clean up. Isley Field was the main heavy bomber base on the island during the war and it seems like several ammo dumps were just abandoned in 1947 when the base closed and allowed to rot until they were rediscovered during airport construction in the early 1970s. The situation on Tinian was the same.

My dad was Chief of Construction for Micronesia at the time, and he was always telling stories of having to call in the Corps of Engineers to deal with WWII ordnance that seemed to get dug up on every major project he worked on. One or two Micronesian workmen a year would get blown up by it.

I don't know how much is still there, but on my last visit to Saipan four years ago, much of the island was still covered with boonies, so I'm guessing there's still a lot.

[ulysses]

8. collateral damage.

GOD, war is great.