Phonsavan, Laos - June 17, 2008
We went to see the ‘Plain of Jars’ near Phonsavan, Laos, today. We’d spent a day or two in Luang Prabang, the UNESCO protected heritage village between Vang Vieng & coming here, but I actually found this more interesting. Luang Prabang was neat in the sense that we got to see a silk weaving centre and it had tasty food (besides the silkworm poo tea, which we tried but could definitely not be termed tasty), but it didn’t stand out too much from the other semi-westernized towns we’ve visited recently. It was pretty, but not in a particularly memorable way for us. These jars though, they were pretty neat, for all the fact they’re jars.
To begin with, they’re pretty massive. All made out of stone, some were taller than me, while the majority seemed to approximately reach anywhere between my waist & my shoulder. Thick walled, too, at least 5 to 10 inches. There were some sandstone, some granite, some others. Quite a process to make something like that, especially considering they’re estimated to have been created somewhere between 500 BC and 500 AD.
The jars have been found in various areas, some of which are open to the public, some of which aren’t.
The three sites we were able to visit are considered ‘mostly’ cleared of UXO’s (Unexploded Ordnance). There are other sites but they just aren’t safe enough for visitors yet. I found the ‘mostly cleared’ a little daunting, but I’ll get into the UXO issues here shortly. As it was, we just stuck to the path and were fine.
The paths through the jar sites have been what’s-known-as ‘sub-surface’ cleared – teams have gone down into the earth below the paths and cleared out buried UXO’s. Stray off the paths though and you could potentially be in trouble. So far they haven’t had the money/people to sub-surface clear the off-path areas, so while the areas outside the paths have been ‘surface cleared’, in this country that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean much. There could be loads of UXO’s still below the surface, and rains can expose more. Thus it was that we were permitted to visit only 3 of the known sites, and made sure to stick to the paths.
The first site had the largest jar, which was easily a foot or two taller than me. Spread around it on the hill and below were various others, all in a relatively grassy area and mostly without their lids. Site Two had a bunch of jars spread out among trees, which was particularly picturesque, but Site Three was even more beautiful as it involved a walk through rice paddies up to a small garden-like area with all sorts of jars, complete with a view of the aforementioned rice paddies. The third site also definitely had the feeling of a cemetery, which is what archeologists think the jars were used for – to bury the cremated remains of the dead. Locals, on the other hand, think that the jars were used by giants back in the day as whiskey glasses… To each his own theory, I suppose. Either way, visiting these massive ancient jars placed seemingly at random in the countryside was pretty cool.
Back to the Unexploded Ordnance, aka UXO’s. In Phonsavan (Northern Laos), after visiting the jars, we went to the museum put together by MAG (Mines Advisory Group), an organization that works to clear places like Laos and Cambodia of Unexploded Ordnance left over from the war.
The big deal with Laos is that it wasn’t supposed to be bombed. Through a very informative display & videos we’ve found out a little more about it:
From my understanding, in the early 1960’s, the US, along with various other countries including Vietnam, agreed & signed compliance with a set of documents known as the Geneva accords. These accords gave Laos a status of peaceful non-involvement in the war. Basically Laos was to be considered off-limits to all sides, it wasn’t to be part of the war and no military personnel were to enter it. Both Vietnam & the US broke this accord very shortly however, the US to the tune of more bombs than were dropped on Europe & Japan combined in the whole of the second world war. All on Laos, a tiny little country in South-East Asia, which happened to be located next to Vietnam.
There appear to be two main reasons for this bombing, neither of which helps much now in terms of dealing with the aftermath. To begin with, the Vietnamese very early on started using Laos as a route for anything from soldiers through supplies – Laos being handily geographically parallel to Vietnam. I think it was called the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US, perhaps obviously, wasn’t too keen on this. So it began what was known as the ‘secret war’, a war it seems American civilians were told nothing about until much later.
In 1964, the US broke the recently signed Geneva Accord and started sending in military to Laos. It had them pretend to be civilians, and told them to claim they ‘got lost’ should they ever be caught. The US also started bombing Laos, both to try to get at the Vietnamese but also to put a stop to a group of Lao communists known as the Pathet Lao who were in effect Laos’ political leaders (Communism being of course the ultimate evil in US ideals at this time). So the bombing started. Lots of bombing. The equivalent of one planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. Seem a bit excessive? Perhaps. Why so much? Well the second main reason would be because American bombers flying from Thailand to targets in Vietnam would often encounter bad weather. Under instructions not to land with cargo still intact (also because it was considered ‘unsafe’), the bombs would be released on the way back, on ‘secondary’ targets in Laos… There was a lot of bad weather.
Where do UXO’s come in? Here, UXO’s (unexploded ordnance), are the estimated 30% of bombs dropped on Laos (considered to be approximately 2 tons of bombs per inhabitant at the time) which for one reason or another never exploded and now, deceptively innocent, pepper the countryside. Visibly and not so visibly.
The common bomb in use at the time was the cluster bomb, which is one big canister containing a whole bunch of little bombs known here as ‘bombies’. The small often tennis ball or pineapple sized/shaped bombies contain hundreds of ball bearings, meant to explode out and do serious harm to whoever is within range, be it in war times or now, 40 years later.
As one interviewee in a film we saw said, ‘bombs were not built to be taken apart’. There are major setbacks in the whole bomb disposal process, not the least of which being that now, 30-40 years later, these little bombies can be anywhere from underground to embedded in a tree – and are a whole lot more unstable than they were to begin with.
The people here are very poor, but part of the reason for this is because they can’t expand. There is no way for them to safely expand & create more fields to grow more crops, or build larger villages, because bombies can be anywhere, even in areas considered originally to be safe. We saw a film with a guy who lost an arm & leg when trying to dig a new hole for his bedpost and hit a bombie, in his own house. And one of a schoolchild who, while kicking pebbles on the much used road by the local school, encountered a massive undetonated cluster bomb. Add in the fact that the villagers can make more money collecting money from metal scraps than raising crops, and you have the added temptation of trying to find UXO’s & attempting to self-dismantle without experience. A lot of bombie fatalities occur to kids, for whom bombies can look like interesting toys or fruit (the pineapple-shaped bombies) until they prove deadly.
You learn more about world issues like this and you start to feel like you’re in an inescapable nightmare. Yet we can just fly back to Vancouver and forget about it, if we so wish, because we don’t have bombies littering our backyards (we just have the perpetrators sitting there).
We received t-shirts for our donation of pay for a week’s worth of work by a UXO clearance worker, but somehow will have to figure out a way to continue supporting the project.
