Hidden bombs stalk Vietnamese as states seek treaty

DONG HA, Vietnam, Mar 8 (Reuters) In the same week that dozens of countries declared plans to ban cluster munitions, a boy was killed by the explosion of a steel ball he picked up and threw while tending livestock.

The boy was not in one of the present-day war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon, but in Vietnam, where the battlefields were silenced more than 30 years ago.

The American and Vietnamese armies left behind cluster bombs like the one that killed 15-year-old Pham Hoai Son and wounded another boy in both legs during February's Lunar New Year festival, traditionally time for celebration, not mourning.

''It is sinful that the war has an impact after all these years, that the bombs and the landmines are still there,'' the boy's distraught father, Pham Van Cuoi, said in the family's small concrete dwelling in rural Tu Chinh village about 40 km north of Dong Ha, capital of Quang Tri province.

The painstaking, dangerous work of removing unexploded ordnance, or UXO as it is known, is taking much longer in Vietnam than anyone wishes, researchers and ordnance experts say.

Explosives, rockets and shells still prey on peasant farmer families in their gardens, rice paddies, rivers and fields.

Scavengers who sell metal play with death searching for ordinance or storing munitions in disorderly scrapyards typical of Quang Tri, especially near the war-time demilitarised zone, and in nearby Quang Binh province in central Vietnam.

These provinces were targets for one of the heaviest aerial and sea bombardments in history in the 1960s and 70s war.

A paucity of information on casualties and the location of ordnance are cited by Vietnamese and international groups as among the obstacles to quickening the pace of clearance, despite improvements in technology and declining death tolls.

''In Quang Tri province at the current speed of the de-mining and the clearance level, it will take 100 years,'' said Hoang Nam, coordinator for Project Renew in Dong Ha, a group funded by the US-based Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

Quang Tri, Quang Binh and Ha Tinh provinces have been jointly surveyed for ordnance by experts from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and a unit of the communist-run country's Defence Ministry.

They plan to survey and remove ordnance from more provinces this year, but an estimated 350,000 to 850,000 tonnes of weaponry remains scattered across all 64 provinces, government figures show.

BAN PROMISE On February 23, four days after the death of the Vietnamese teenager, 46 countries promised at a conference in Oslo, Norway, to try next year to introduce an international ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

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