history; The New York Times noted this was "nearly a ton for every person in Laos." Due to the particularly heavy impact of cluster bombs during this war, Laos was a strong advocate of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to ban the weapons, and was host to the First Meeting of States Parties to the convention in November 2010. Former U.S. Air Force official Earl Tilford has recounted "repeated bombing runs of a lake in central Cambodia. The B-52s literally dropped their payloads in the lake." The Air Force ran many missions of this kind to secure additional funding during budget negotiations, so the tonnage expended does not directly correlate with the resulting damage. Aftermath In Southeast Asia In Vietnam On 2 July 1976, North and South Vietnam were merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite speculation that the victorious North Vietnamese would, in President Nixon's words, "massacre the civilians there [South Vietnam] by the millions," there is a widespread consensus that no mass executions took place. However, in the years following the war, a vast number of South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while being forced to perform hard labor. According to Amnesty International Report 1979, this figure varied considerably depend on different observers: "...included such figures as "50,000 to 80,000" (Le Monde, 19 April 1978), "150,000" (Reuters from Bien Hoa, 2 November 1977), "150,000 to 200,000" (The Washington Post, 20 December 1978), and "300,000" (Agence France Presse from Hanoi, 12 February 1978)." Such variations may be because "Some estimates may include not only detainees but also people sent from the cities to the countryside." According to a native observer, 443,360 people had to register for a period in re-education camps in Saigon alone, and while some of them were released after a few days, others stayed there for more than a decade. Between 1975 and 1980, more than 1 million northerners migrated south to regions formerly in the Republic of Vietnam, while, as part of the New Economic Zones program, around 750,000 to over 1 million southerners were moved mostly to uninhabited mountainous forested areas. Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winning writer, described South Vietnam as a "False paradise" after the war, when he visited in 1980: The U.S. used its security council veto to block Vietnam's recognition by the United Nations three times, an obstacle to