I am not disabled but the special sports chair I am strapped into levels the playing field for those among us who are physically impaired. In theory. In reality, the field is anything but level. The disabled players who have practiced and competed here at the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) are much more adept at the sport of wheelchair basketball, which demands an athletic stamina and dexterity that many of us guest participants have never known and will never acquire.
The makeup of our audience is as unusual as that of the two teams on the court. In suits and ties and other evening attire, foreign diplomats and representatives from international humanitarian organizations - including my own U.S.-based nonprofit, Clear Path International - have come via multiple buses from many hotels throughout Lao's capital city to visit programs run by the Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise, or COPE, in partnership with the NRC.
This is just one of many side events offered at the First Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions. It is appropriate that the four-day conference (Nov. 9-12) is being held in the country most heavily bombed during the Vietnam War, a country that more than three decades later has the largest cluster munitions problem in the world.
Roughly 3 million tons of bombs were dropped on Lao soil, the majority of which were cluster munitions. It's estimated that a third of those failed to explode on impact and lay dormant, sometimes for many years, until disturbed by a curious child, farmer or other villager. Thousands of people have been killed or maimed here since 1963 and unexploded ordnance (UXO) continue to claim about 300 Lao lives each year. About half of all victims are children who discover the ball-shaped cluster munitions or "bombies" while playing near their rural villages.
Clear Path International, which provides medical and socio-economic assistance to UXO victims, their families and their communities in other Southeast Asian Countries and in Afghanistan, is just beginning a new program in Lao PDR with funding from the U.S. Department of State Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement. So the conference has provided a perfect introduction for myself and four others from CPI to the ongoing and unmet needs of people here, and to the programs already helping war victims reclaim their dignity, health and economic security.
The meeting brings together state parties to the treaty, United Nations agencies, international organizations, civil society and cluster bomb survivors to lay the groundwork for implementing the convention adopted two years ago and translating its objectives into action. The convention establishes international law to ban the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions and mandates their destruction.
On May 30, 2008, following negotiations in Dublin, 107 states adopted the convention. That same year, 94 governments signed the treaty in Oslo. Early this year, the convention achieved a milestone when the 30th ratification was deposited at the UN, triggering its entry into force on Aug. 1, when it became binding international law.
As of this posting, with the current meeting still in progress, 108 countries had signed and 43 of those had taken the next step and ratified the convention, becoming state parties legally bound by its provisions.
While the United States is not a signatory, it has spent millions of dollars clearing unexploded ordnance and providing support services for victims in numerous countries. CPI programs in Vietnam, Cambodia, along the Thai-Burma border, in Afghanistan, and now in Lao PDR have been made possible by such funding.
And the five of us here in Lao on behalf of CPI, our executive director, myself as communications director, and program managers from the countries in which we work are proud to participate in this historic event. I know my colleagues took great pleasure in documenting my own performance on the basketball court, in dress pants and pumps no less.
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