Another Legacy Of War

In his guest column "The Six Points Of War," pub­lished here on Nov. 18, Ells Bartlow opened his narrative with a description of war's casualties. In all, the wars fought by Americans, including the Civil War, resulted in the loss of about 1 million American lives.

We commemorate these losses, these personal sacri­fices, these tragic ends to often heroic lives every year on Memorial Day and rightly so. What gets overlooked in most discussions about the legacy of war, however, is the toll it takes on civilians. We're not just talking about what's clinically referred to as "collateral damage," the loss of civilian lives during the conflictitself. In this column, we'd like to draw attention to peace time casualties of war and to this week's Heartbeat column about the work of Clear Path International, a hu­manitarian nonprofit I helped found more than a decade ago and in which my wife, Karen Matthee, has recently taken an active role as communications director. Since we took over the Times, several readers have expressed an interest in this work. If the phrase "peacetime war casualties" sounds like an oxymoron, it's not. The consequences of armed strug­gles are long-lasting and often forgotten after the actual fighting ends. One might even argue that if the decision to go to war required a socio-economic and environmental impact statement, there might never be another battle.

Consider, for instance, that more than 35 years since the war in Indochina ended civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are killed or injured almost every day by accidental explosions of wartime cluster bombs and landmines. One out of every fivevictims is a child, while most of the young adults who are hurt weren't born when the war occurred.

This is true elsewhere in the world where these muni­tions have been used, going back as far as World War I in Europe and perhaps even further to the late 1800s. Doz­ens

of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are affected by tons and tons of ordnance that takes decades and enormous amounts of money to clear.

None of these single accidents generate headlines. They often involve individuals or, tragically, groups of kids in a school yard where curious youngsters are bound to roam and encounter ordnance that wasn't found and cleared before, particularly in the countryside.

Worldwide, landmines and cluster bombs claim vic­tims every 20 minutes - roughly the time it might take you to read this Opinion Page. When you add these inci­dents up to the tens of thousands of casualties every year, there's no question it has the same impact as well pub­licized natural disasters, such as tsunamis, earthquakes and floods.

We founded Clear Path International, based on Bain­bridge Island, because we wanted to help address this silent legacy of war and help the victims and families who have to live with its consequences in rural economic conditions that are challenging at best.

Our mission is purely humanitarian. We don't argue about who was right or wrong at the time of the conflictor who has responsibility for the results now. Those debates don't matter to a young teenager (say, our own son's age) who has just lost his leg in an accidental ex­plosion while he was out in a rice paddy herding water buffalo. The people Clear Path serves in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and Afghanistan, have benefittedgreatly from the compassion and generosity of individual donors, charitable foundations, service clubs and our own government through a little-known unit within the U.S. Department of State called the Officeof Weapons Removal and Abatement.

This week, we begin the first in an occasional series about the international efforts of Clear Path. We hope it will answer readers' questions about its mission and programs. For more details, please visit www.cpi.org.