Today is the twentieth anniversary of the official opening
of the first bridge across the Mekong River, from Nong Khai in Northeast
Thailand to Thanaleng just south of Vientiane in Laos.
I had the honour and pleasure of chairing the tri-nation
steering committee during the first three years of its life – from the establishment
of the committee until the inauguration of construction, and I made a point of
attending the official opening on 4 April 1994. Here are some of the photos:
View of the carriage-way just prior to the opening
Guard of honour awaiting the arrival of VVIPs
Australian Ambassador Michael Mann with wife Monique
and Lao Vice-Minister (L) and Minister (R)
Lao military awaiting the arrival of their President
Arrival of President of Laos
President of Laos and King of Thailand seated for ceremony
Paul Keating with Lao Prime Minister Khamtai Siphandong
With my Lao colleague Vice-Minister Seune Phetsanghane
With my Thai colleague Mr Singh
Some of the key players including Janet Holmes à Court, whose company John Holland constructed the bridge,
and Lao Minister Madam Khempeng Pholsena
In April 1994 then Prime Minister Paul Keating visited Laos
for the official opening of the Mekong Bridge, the first ever bridge across the
Mekong, which crosses the river from the Thai provincial capital Nong Khai to
the village of Thanaleng, just south of the Lao capital, Vientiane. It was constructed as an Australian aid
project, and I had the privilege to serve as the Chairman of the
Australian-Lao-Thai Steering Committee which negotiated the arrangements and oversighted
the construction.
The day before the official opening of the bridge Paul
Keating attended the official opening of the border facilities, on the Lao side
of the border, which were also constructed as an Australia aid project.
The border facilities of necessity include a traffic
interchange; Thailand drives on the left hand side of the road and Laos on the
right.
The opening of the border post was also attended by the
Prime Minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers) of the Lao PDR, Mr Khamtai
Siphandon, seen here meeting with Keating at the opening.
And just for the record, here is the official plaque.
The following opinion piece written by me appeared in the Monday 2 May edition of TheAge:
We must do more to help rid the world of these foul weapons
Paul Barratt
May 2, 2011-05-12
Legislation on cluster bombs puts our troops in an ambiguous position.
The Senate is about to consider legislation to ratify Australia's accession to the United Nations Convention on Cluster Munitions. Regrettably, the legislation is far too weak.
Cluster munitions are weapons that open in midair and disperse smaller bomblets - anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds - into the target area. They are valued militarily because one munition can kill or destroy many targets within its impact area, and fewer weapons systems are needed to deliver fewer munitions to attack multiple targets.
The fundamental criticisms of cluster munitions are that they disperse large numbers of submunitions imprecisely over an extended area, and that they frequently fail to detonate.
Bomb disposal experts have found that the failure rate can be as high as 30 per cent of the bomblets in the cluster. The unexploded bomblets are difficult to detect, and can remain widely dispersed explosive hazards for decades.
Australia played an active role in the negotiation of the UN Convention, and signed it on December 3, 2008, the day it was opened for signature. The convention became binding international law for states parties on August 1 last year. The legislation now before the Parliament is designed to give effect to our obligations by creating new criminal offences for Australians who behave in ways at odds with the convention.
The United States regards cluster munitions as militarily useful, has no intention of eliminating them from its arsenals, and has no intention of joining the convention. This creates a balancing act for the Australian government. We want to ratify the convention, but we want also to continue to engage in joint military operations with our non-signatory major ally.
The convention tackles this issue with inter-operability provisions that enable states parties to continue to operate with non-signatories to which they are allied.
Those provisions, however, are heavily restricted by the convention's categorical prohibitions not to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, transfer, use or expressly request the use of cluster munitions. They are restricted also by the positive obligations to promote the norms the convention establishes, to notify non-signatories of our obligations under the convention, to encourage them to join the convention, and to make best efforts to discourage them from using cluster munitions.
Regrettably, the bill before the Senate is at odds with these obligations. It permits us to facilitate continued use of cluster bombs by non-signatories. It specifically permits foreign forces to base their cluster bombs here or to transit them through Australian territory.
It also permits members of the Australian Defence Force to assist in the use of cluster bombs in joint operations with foreign forces.
Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic told the Senate committee inquiring into the legislation that it could be interpreted to ''allow Australian military personnel to load and aim the gun, so long as they did not pull the trigger''.
Remarkably, the legislation also flies in the face of a recommendation of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and permits Australian entities to invest in the companies that produce these munitions.
Legislation in these terms is clearly at odds with a convention whose central purpose is to prevent the use of cluster munitions and ensure the destruction of all national stockpiles, and which imposes on all parties obligations both to encourage non-signatories to join and to discourage them from using cluster munitions.
Eliminating the use of cluster munitions is a vital humanitarian concern. The scourge they represent is illustrated by Laos, the most bombed country in history on a per capita basis. From 1964 to 1973, about 270 million cluster submunitions were dropped on Laos.
Estimates of the numbers of bomblets remaining in Laos vary. The relevant Laotian government agency estimates the country is host to 80 million as yet undetected bomblets. They are in every province, and 25 per cent of Laotian villages are contaminated by unexploded ordnance, 37 years after the end of the fighting. Three hundred Laotians a year are killed or maimed by them. Forty per cent of the victims are children, usually performing livelihood activities such as tending animals.
At the current rate of clean-up of these munitions it will take another 3000 years to render Laos safe. More than half the population of this at-risk country was born after the conflict ended, but they must still endure its consequences.
In signing the convention on cluster munitions, Australia has agreed with a proposition in the preamble that we are ''determined to work strenuously towards the promotion of its universalisation and its full implementation''.
If we are serious about that, we will need to do much better than the bill now before the Senate, and will need to pursue much more active diplomacy to bring about the worldwide elimination of cluster munitions.
Paul Barratt is a former secretary of the Department of Defence and deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is a treaty that was adopted on 30 May 2008 on Dublin, and opened for signature on 3 December 2008 in Oslo.
The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) signed the treaty on the day it was opened for signature, and ratified it on 18 March 2009.
As well as being one of the poorest countries in the world, Laos is one of the most afflicted by cluster munitions as a result of US bombing in the years 1964-73. The ordnance dropped included about 260 million cluster bombs (see Lao National Regulatory Authority for UXO/Mine Action [UXO-NRA] website here). Not bad for a country whose population only reached 3 million in 1974 (see here). That’s 90 bomblets per caput.
There is a substantial failure rate for these munitions, leaving large numbers of bomblets to lie in wait for unsuspecting farmers, foresters, fisherfolk, children and wildlife. On the subject of failure rates a January 2011 Congressional Research Service paper (see here) has this to say:
There appear to be significant discrepancies among failure rate estimates. Some manufacturers
claim a submunition failure rate of 2% to 5%, whereas mine clearance specialists have frequently
reported failure rates of 10% to 30%. A number of factors influence submunition reliability. These
include delivery technique, age of the submunition, air temperature, landing in soft or muddy
ground, getting caught in trees and vegetation, and submunitions being damaged after dispersal,
or landing in such a manner that their impact fuzes fail to initiate.
UXO-NRA estimates that there are of the order of 80 million live bomblets remaining in the country, a figure which looks as though it is based on taking the upper estimate of 30% failure rate for 260 million bomblets – probably not unreasonable given the geographical characteristics of Laos.
The CRS report cited above quotes the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as estimating the number of unexploded cluster bomblets at between 9 million and 27 million, which looks on the low side to me, the upper estimate representing a failure rate of only 10% and the lower one being more in line with manufacturers’ claims of 2-5% failure. It nevertheless represents between 1.5 and 4 bomblets for every man woman and child in Laos (current population about 6.5 million).
The impact of this on Laos is horrifying. According to UXO-NRA (here):
- All 17 provinces in Laos suffer UXO contamination
- 25% of all villages are UXO contaminated
- 50,000 plus victims of UXO of all kinds (1964-2008)
- 20,000 casualties post-war (1974 on)
In the last decade there have been 300 UXO casualties per annum, of which 30% were caused by cluster bombs. Children represented 40% of the casualties.
As a State Party to the Convention Laos has quite onerous obligations under Article 4.1: it is required:
... to clear and destroy, or ensure the clearance and destruction of, cluster munition remnants located in cluster munition contaminated areas under its jurisdiction or control ... as soon as possible but not later than ten years from [the date of entry into force of the Convention].
Given that, 37 years after the cessation of hostilities, less than 1% of the bomblets have been made safe, this will require a remarkable acceleration of activity. A 4 September 2010 article (New case for US reparations in Laos) by Melody Kemp in Asia Times Online (see here) says:
... at the current rate of clean-up, UXO Laos/NRA estimates it will take 3,000 years to completely clear the country of all the explosive remnants left behind from US bombers.
The Convention imposes rather modest requirements upon States Parties that have used cluster munitions in another State Party (and of course none upon countries which are non-signatories, which include the United States, Russia, China and Israel): the using State Party is simply “strongly encouraged”
... to provide, inter alia, technical, financial, material or human resources assistance to the [other] State Party, either bilaterally or through a mutually agreed third party, including through the United Nations system or other relevant organisations, to facilitate the marking, clearance and destruction of such cluster munition remnants.
The United States will of course strongly protest that, even though it is a non-signatory to the Convention, it is contributing to the disposal of UXO in Laos. In Clearing the cluster bombs in Laos (The Guardian, 30 September 2010) US chargé d'affaires in Vientiane Peter Haymond responds (see here) directly to Melody Kemp’s article cited above, taking exception to her implication “that the United States has done little to assist in clearance of unexploded ordnance”. Unfortunately the figures he cites rather underline Kemp’s point:
This fiscal year, the US state department will spend more than $5m in Laos on a range of UXO-related activities, including more than $3.5m to fund the mine and UXO clearance operations both of the Lao government's own UXO clearance agency and of international clearance organisations operating in Laos.
Taking the ICRC’s estimates of unexploded submunitions, that $3.5 million represents between 13 and 39 cents per bomblet. I don’t think you get much bomb disposal for that sort of money.
One of the more interesting assignments of my public service career was to chair from 1988-91 the tri-national Australian-Thai-Lao steering committee which negotiated the agreements for the construction of the first bridge over the Mekong River, from Nong Khai to Vientiane, and which oversighted the construction.
Some recollections from that assignment will be the subject of a later post, but one aspect deserves a mention now.
One of the strong wishes expressed by the Lao authorities when we got down to detailed discussion of the project was that the bridge should be wide enough and strong enough to carry a standard Thai railway locomotive, so that in the fullness of time an extension to the Thai railway system could be built through to Vientiane.
The sceptics in Canberra laughed; the bridge itself was going to be a failure, and there was no possibility that it would ever carry trains. Laos would never have a railway line.
The Lao request seemed reasonable enough to me, and we did build the bridge to the appropriate specificiation.
So it was with considerable satisfaction that I learned in March last year that the new service was to be inaugurated on 5 March 2009 (see They said it would never happen ...)
Against that background of scepticism it was with considerable interest that I read the article High-speed rail between Yunnan and Myanmar on the agenda in China Business News, 22 November 2010 (access the full report here). It begins:
Construction of a high-speed rail link between Yunnan province and neighboring Myanmar, part of a project to upgrade transport connections with Southeast Asian nations, will start in about two months, a top rail expert said.
The line, from Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, will be 1,920 kilometers long, said Wang Mengshu, an academic of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Trains will run at about 170-200 km/h once it is completed, he added.
Wang, who is also a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, has been involved in Chinese high-speed rail projects from the outset.
Wang told China Daily that a high-speed rail connection between southwestern China and Cambodia is also under discussion. And an exploratory survey for another route that would link Yunnan and Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is under way.
The three new rail connections being developed, along with another linking China and Vietnam, will form a network that is likely to be completed within 10 years, Wang said.
“The project, which aims to boost cooperation between China and Southeast Asian nations, will greatly enhance the economic development of China’s western regions,” said Wang.
On this basis I would be prepared to wager a good bottle of red that Laos, one of the poorest countries in the world, and characterised by rugged terrain, will have high speed rail before Australia does. We have been talking about it for twenty five years and will still be talking about it in twenty five years’ time.
