One of the many Vietnamese children affected by their parents’ exposure to Agent
Orange.
Rwandan refugees in ex-Zaire have deforested areas in their search for food and firewood.
Worldwide
it is estimated that there are some 65 million functional land mines strewn around
the countryside posing a threat to inhabitants and wildlife in 56 countries from
Angola to Nicaragua, Eritrea to Laos. |
From destroyed vegetation
to health hazards, the environment has been a systematic casualty of recent wars
and pays the price long after peace returns
 Concern about
the environmental impact of warfare began in earnest with Operation Ranch Hand, the
U.S. campaign to defoliate Viet Nam’s jungles and flush out guerrillas during the
late 1960s. American military aircraft sprayed some 70 million litres of extra-strong
herbicides, mostly a formulation known as Agent Orange, over the country between
1962 and 1971, dousing 1.7 million hectares, often several times over. By the end
of the war, a fifth of South Vietnam’s forests had been chemically annihilated, and
more than a third of its mangrove forests were dead. Some forests have since recovered,
but much of the land has turned, apparently permanently, to scrubby grassland.
An
unwarranted experiment in chemical warfare
From
the start there was concern that Agent Orange was toxic to humans as well as trees.
In 1964, the Federation of American Scientists condemned Operation Ranch Hand as
an unwarranted experiment in chemical warfare. But the operation continued until
a spate of reports in 1970 and 1971 that Agent Orange was causing birth defects.
Soon research showed that 2,4,5-T, one of its two main constituents, caused malformations
and stillbirths in mice and contained dioxin, a by-product that turned out to be
one of the most poisonous substances known to science. It disrupts the body’s hormonal,
immune and reproductive systems, and causes fathers to produce damaged sperm.
Nature has cleansed Vietnamese soils and vegetation of most of the dioxin, but the
chemical has lingered on in human blood, fat and breast milk. According to Le Cao
Dai, director of the Agent Orange Victim Fund set up by the Viet Nam Red Cross, the
breast milk of women in former South Vietnam who were exposed to Agent Orange in
childhood contains about ten times more dioxin than that of women in former North
Vietnam or industrialized nations such as the U.S.
Appalling birth defects among the children of veterans exposed during the war to
Agent Orange and other pesticides are well documented. According to Professor Hoang
Dinh Cau, the chairman of Viet Nam’s 10-80 Committee, which investigates the consequences
of the use of chemicals during the war, tens of thousands of children are affected.
Common symptoms are limbs twisted in a characteristic way or missing altogether,
and eyes without pupils. And now there is growing concern that a third generation
of children may be affected.
Although less well documented, Iraqi attacks on civilian populations of Iraqi Kurdistan
between April 1987 and August 1988 have had equally long-term effects. In the town
of Halabja, bombed over three days in March 1988 with chemical and biological agents,
about 5,000 to 7,000 people were immediately killed and tens of thousands injured.
The first medical study of the attack’s long-term effects was carried out by Dr Christine
Gosden, a professor of medical genetics at the University of Liverpool. In a report
to the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, she detailed serious medical problems,
including rare cancers, congenital malformations in children, infertility, miscarriages,
recurrent lung infections and severe neuropsychiatric disorders. She noted that delayed
effects such as the development of cancers following exposure may occur five to ten
years later.
All wars produce environmental damage. Some is deliberate and for direct military
objectives. Clearly that category includes the defoliation of Indochina–as well as
the accompanying physical clearance of some 300,000 hectares of forest using heavy
tractors. Other destruction is equally deliberate, but has a less clearly military
objective, such as Saddam Hussein’s sabotaging of Kuwaiti oil wells at the height
of the Gulf War in 1991. His forces attacked some 730 wells, setting some 630 alight.
Many continued to discharge oil into the desert and thick black smoke into the air
for many months. The total release of oil was finally estimated at 10 million cubic
metres. Some 300 oil lakes at one point covered 50 square kilometres of desert.
After Saddam threatened to set fire to the wells, some scientists warned that the
black smoke could rise high enough into the upper atmosphere to upset global climate
systems such as the Asian monsoon. These fears proved unfounded. But the local fallout
of soot, carcinogenic particles and acidic sulphur dioxide spread for hundreds of
kilometres around the Gulf. Kuwait City experienced “darkness at noon” comparable
to the worst London smogs of the early 20th century, causing a rush of respiratory
illnesses. It took six months and $10 billion to stop the fires and repair the damage
to the wells. Some of the thick black oil remains in hollows in the desert.
The war damaged the desert in other ways. Gravel beds that once held the desert sands
in check were fractured by thousands of bunkers, weapon pits and trenches. And the
tracks of tanks and trucks compacted fragile soils and killed vegetation. The Kuwaiti
Institute for Scientific Research concluded that more than 900 square kilometres
of desert were damaged by military vehicles and earth movement. The result has been
more erosion, sand storms, advancing sand dunes and diminution of plant life. The
war released one million cubic metres of oil (out of the total 10) into the Persian
Gulf, partly from Saddam’s sabotages but much of it from the bombing of strategic
installations by the U.S. and others. It severely contaminated some 400 kilometres
of Kuwaiti and Saudi coastline with tar, and destroyed shrimp fisheries. Studies
five years after the event revealed that Saudi coastal ecosystems had largely recovered,
though turtle populations nesting on islands in the Gulf had not returned to their
former levels.
But much environmental damage in war is unintended “collateral damage”. The detritus
of munitions such as cluster bombs and land mines are a major long-term threat to
environments. The U.S. dropped some 1.5 million cluster bombs during the Indochina
War, containing an estimated 750 million bomblets, according to Arthur Westing, a
leading historian on the environmental consequences of war. It dropped a further
60,000, containing some 30 million bomblets during the Gulf War. They were left scattered
across the desert along with some 1.7 million mines planted by the Iraqis. Most were
cleared up afterwards. But this caused further damage to desert ecosystems as bomb
disposal units ploughed up large areas of the desert.
Worldwide it is estimated that there are some 65 million functional land mines strewn
around the countryside posing a threat to inhabitants and wildlife in 56 countries
from Angola to Nicaragua, Eritrea to Laos. Anything bigger than a rabbit is likely
to set them off. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, they
kill around 800 people and maim thousands more each month. It estimates that Cambodia
has 36,000 amputees as a result, and Somalia 23,000. One of the more gruesome and
unexpected consequences of the massive flooding in southern Mozambique in February
this year was to float land mines left over after the country’s long civil war from
known minefields into villages and fields.
Refugees
and deforestation
A
new concern is the long-term consequences of the use of depleted uranium (DU)–a mildly
radioactive and very dense material that weapon makers now put on the tips of munitions
to penetrate tank armour. About 300 tonnes of DU was dispersed across the battlefield
during the Gulf War. The environmental and human health impacts of the radioactive
material left behind by these munitions remain unclear. There have been frequent
claims that DU has raised cancer rates in southern Iraq and caused Iraqi soldiers
exposed to it to father severely deformed babies. But so far no studies have confirmed
this link.
The social dislocation caused by war is a further cause of environmental damage.
Floods of refugees in particular can threaten natural resources such as water and
forests. The Rwandan conflict and the events that it triggered in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC, ex-Zaire)became a major cause of deforestation in central
Africa. One casualty was Africa’s first national park, the Virunga National Park,
on the border between the DRC and Rwanda. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) reported that
in six months, the Rwandan refugees and Hutu soldiers from camps around the town
of Goma in the DRC had deforested some 300 square kilometres of Virunga National
Park in their search for food and wood. At the height of the crisis, the Iucn estimated
that some 850,000 refugees were living within or close to the park and took between
410 and 770 tonnes of forest products out of the park daily. In the confusion, Zairian
soldiers were raiding the park for timber to sell to refugees and relief organizations.
Similar destruction became a feature of civil and cross-border conflicts across much
of Africa in the 1990s. In March this year, the UN Environment Programme reported
on the “transformation of natural land and forest areas” with “severe impacts on
biodiversity and water systems” in southern Guinea, following the influx of some
600,000 refugees from recent conflicts in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Most of the refugees had hacked out forest to grow crops for food.
Guerrilla armies do as much damage as refugees, particularly when they have to live
off the land or generate income to buy arms from the plundering of natural resources
in the region where they are fighting. Armies also have to eat, and for guerrilla
armies “bushmeat” is a frequent source of food. Guerrilla wars in Cambodia and west
and central Africa have been sustained during the past decade through the cutting
and sale of valuable hardwood timbers. Wildlife suffers too. In the Horn of Africa
in the 1980s, Somali war bands were frequently behind the rampant poaching of elephants
for their ivory. War in Uganda in 1979 killed off much of the country’s bush elephant
population, and conflicts in Angola and Mozambique have since caused the wholesale
slaughter of elephants in those countries too. The Rwanda conflict and succeeding
guerrilla activity in the surrounding regions through the 1990s saw the slaughter
of mountain gorillas in Virunga and elsewhere–a fact that understandably gained little
attention beside the massive slaughter of humans.
Silence
on Chechnya
War
and the environment have, of course, always been linked. Some of the earliest battles
between city states in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago involved the breaking of dykes
to flood farmland. But the Indochina War was the first time scientists seriously
probed the effect of a major conflict. The Gulf War was perhaps the first time those
consequences were seriously addressed before they happened, with experts (erroneously)
forecasting a global climate change if fire was set to the oil wells. During the
Kosovo conflict, the environmental consequences of the bombing of factories gained
precedence in much reporting over the intended economic
damage. There can be little doubt that the environmental impacts of Russian military
activity in Chechnya and Afghanistan has been as severe as that of the U.S. and its
allies in southeast Asia, the Gulf and elsewhere. But far less is known as independent
investigations have been notable only by their absence. In Chechnya, the severity
of the military battles and the physical destruction of Grozny has been so great
that likely environmental damage such as pollution of water supplies, though of undoubtedly
long-term importance for rebuilding, has to date barely been remarked upon. The continuing
conflicts in Afghanistan have made independent assessment of the impacts of 20 years
of war there hard to pursue.
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