Yesterday, Democracy Now! had a great interview with the Legacies of War “Voices from Laos” speakers! On April 25, CISR will sponsor this speaker’s tour. Join us to hear it from 7-8:30 p.m. at JMU’s HHS 1302. It’s free and open to the public. 

FYI, since 1993 the U.S. has invested $62,061,333 in conventional weapons destruction (CWD) programs in Laos for clearance and safe disposal of mines and UXO munitions, as well as survivor assistance and risk education. Last year when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Laos, she pledged to do more, and more money was allotted to this effort. 

Forty years ago, on March 29, 1973, the “secret” U.S. bombing that devastated Laos came to an end. By that point, the United States had dropped at least two million tons of bombs on Laos. That is the equivalent of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years — more than on Germany and Japan during World War II. The deadly legacy of the Vietnam War lives on today in the form of unexploded cluster bombs. Experts estimate Laos is littered with as many as 80 million “bombies” — or baseball-size bombs found inside cluster bombs. Since the bombing stopped four decades ago, as many as 20,000 people have been injured or killed as a result. To mark International Day of Mine Awareness, we speak to a Laotian bomb survivor and a leader of an all-women bomb clearance team in Laos. Thoummy Silamphan and Manixia Thor are speaking at the United Nations today and are currently in the United States on a tour organized by Legacies of War.

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Photographer’s Images Reveal Human Side of Landmine Saga

HARRISONBURG — A woman in South Sudan walks through tall grass. She steadies a water vessel on her head with one arm, and has her child wrapped, cradled at her back.

Her path to pick up water, though, goes directly through a minefield.

Sean Sutton, a veteran “conflict” photojournalist, and Mines Advisory Group (MAG) marketing and communications director, documents scenes like this one, which he captured in a black-and-white photograph, to educate and influence the public and policymakers on explosives left behind after an armed conflict ends.

“People don’t have a chance with landmines in the ground,” Sutton said.

Sutton of Manchester, England, returned from South Sudan two weeks ago, where he spent a month photographing MAG activities and the people affected by the scraps left from war.

Sutton spoke Sunday evening at Transitions in Warren Hall at James Madison University to kick off the Center for International Stabilization and Recovery’s (CISR) Post-Conflict Recovery Week. An    exhibit of his photos was unveiled Sunday night at the center.

CISR, based at JMU, publishes a journal on humanitarian mine removal and the practices and methodologies in clearing explosive remnants of war, according to the group’s website.

Kenneth Rutherford, the center’s director and a JMU political science professor, lost both of his legs after driving over a mine in Somalia in 1993, where he worked at a humanitarian aid office.

Rutherford said that while he lay in a hospital bed he wrote his eulogy in his head and decided to become a teacher like his father.

“I’ve been blessed. I’ve had wonderful medical care,” Rutherford said. “A lot of amputees I meet around the world don’t have the support that I have.”

Sutton’s photographs revealed some of those victims.

Black and white photos showed scarred bodies, blinded children and people missing limbs, all from land mines, unexploded ordnance, cluster munitions and other remnants of war.

Sutton said most of the victims he met knew they were walking into dangerous areas.

“Basically people will risk themselves because they don’t have a choice,” Sutton said of the people who must walk through fields of hidden and buried explosives to get water or firewood.

But the photographs told a broader story than just destruction. Sutton’s work also portrays hope through the rebuilding process.

MAG’s efforts to remove explosive materials from war-torn regions including Libya, Iraq, Vietnam and Cambodia, showed land and waterways, formerly unusable because of the concentrations of explosives, being re-plowed and re-fished.

Sutton showed a picture of a man tossing a fishing net into a canal that he used to avoid before MAG workers, many of whom are trained to help the nations where they work, swept and cleared the area of 50,000 square meters.

“They only found six mines,” Sutton said. “Just a few mines can block an incredibly valuable resource.”

Sutton told about Lao PDR, better known as Laos, which is littered with cluster bombs and other explosives left from the Vietnam War. The explosives were dropped, and left, by both sides of the conflict.

“Every year they find more and more, just like stones in a field,” Sutton said, making land un-tillable.

He explained that these people don’t want a handout, just assistance with something they don’t have the means to do themselves.

“All they want is to stand on their own two feet,” Sutton said.

“It was interesting to see how he used his pictures perfectly … to convey the message that he wanted,” said Chris Belcourt, a junior international business marketing major, who attended the lecture.

“Southeast Asia is home to me,” Belcourt, 21, said, explaining that the pictures could have been taken near where he grew up in Indonesia.