South Korea Helps Vietnam Solve Wartime UXO

South Korea on June 14 agreed with Vietnam to push ahead with a joint project to remove land mines and leftover unexploded ordnance (UXO) at the sites of hard fought battles in the Southeast Asian country. The support will help Vietnam remove massive minefields that are a legacy of the Vietnam War. Under the agreement signed by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense, the project, which is scheduled to begin in the second half of the year and run through 2020, will mark the KOICA’s funding of 62% of the entire bill worth $32.20 million. Both sides plan to implement the project on 8,000 hectares of former battlefields in the two central Vietnamese provinces of Quang Binh and Binh Dinh and to provide people permanently injured by land mines with vocational training. The project also includes the establishment of an information system to manage the locations of land mines and UXO and the status of their removal, and the implementation of safety education aimed at preventing local residents from being hurt by them. South Korea and Vietnam reached a basic deal on the project in 2014, when Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, made a visit to Seoul. In Vietnam, about 40,000 people have been killed and another 60,000 injured by UXO since the end of the war in 1975. Only 3% or 4% of an estimated 800,000 tons of UXO sprayed in the country has been removed. Due to the rising costs of UXO removal, the Vietnamese government has been seeking support from the international community. (www.koreaherald.com June 14)