Many deadly land mines destroyed in Cambodia, but much work remains
By Chris Kenning
courier-journal.com
July 28, 2008
PAILIN, Cambodia -- Sitting on weathered steps of his thatched-roof house, Sim Ry gazes at a bony cow grazing in a scrubby field and rubs the brown stump where his right hand used to be.
he former Khmer Rouge guerrilla lost his hand to a land mine in 2005 while clearing trees to plant corn outside his village near the Thai border -- an area so thick with mines that it has been called one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
"I worry each time my children leave the house that they will not come back," Ry, 53, said through an interpreter.
Nearly 63,000 Cambodians, mostly villagers, have been killed or maimed by mines since 1970, a lasting reminder of nearly three decades of violence fueled by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot that left Cambodia among the world's most heavily mined countries.
The scars from those mines have followed Cambodian immigrants who arrive in the United States, including Kentucky.
Sovanna Chhan, a 51-year-old metal worker working in Louisville, said he still feels the pain from land-mine wounds he suffered nearly three decades ago. "I was lucky to survive."
And while progress has been made to clear Cambodia and other nations of land mines by such international groups as the United Kingdom-based Mines Advisory Group and HALO International, experts say much more needs to be done.
Since the early 1990s those groups have helped destroy 433,000 mines and millions of pieces of unexploded ordnance.
Today there are an estimated 177 square miles of heavily mined land, down from 1,724 square miles in 2002, according to a report by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The casualty rate has also dropped dramatically since the 1990s, when 2,700 Cambodians were killed or injured each year by mines and unexploded ordnance, falling to 450 in 2006.
Better mine-danger education, an economic upswing that cut down on risky farming and a growing number of aging, inoperable mines may have helped cut those casualties, experts say.
The problem of leftover mines from war isn't confined to Cambodia.
Although more than 150 countries have signed a treaty banning anti-personnel mines, tens of millions of land mines remain buried in more than 70 nations from Mozambique to Afghanistan, killing thousands each year, taking limbs and stealing livelihoods.
Scars follow immigrants
It's a Sunday afternoon in Simpsonville, Ky., and inside a neat house in a subdivision, Chhan's six children play video games as he and his wife cook a meal of rice and fish he caught in Taylorsville Lake.
The gregarious metal-press operator said he still feels pain from the land mine that ripped into his thighs and legs in 1979.
"It hurts when I stand up all day at work," Chhan said, pulling up his pants to show the scars on his legs.
Chhan was a young man in Battambang when the Khmer Rouge began emptying cities to fill rural communes. He said his family was moved to the country to live in crude and starved conditions. Two of his sisters died from malnutrition and sickness. By the time Vietnam invaded in 1979, Chhan had fled to an unofficial refugee camp along the Thai border.
There he earned money for rice and cooking oil by removing land mines along trails. He was attempting to remove a tripwire mine with only a piece of straightened wire fencing as a tool when a second mine connected to the wire blew up a few feet away.
"I thought I would die," he recalled. "I shook for months."
Eventually he healed, and when the camp was closed in 1991, he immigrated to the United States, spending time in California before coming to Louisville in 1994 to join relatives.
He has two brothers who are still in Cambodia -- one runs a motorcycle taxi, and the other sells home-cooked food along the road.
"I worry about them because there are still a lot of mines," he said.
Tom Hess, a former Louisville Catholic Charities refugee-services official who worked closely with Cambodian immigrants, said most Cambodians in the Louisville area know a friend or relative harmed by a land mine.
Thearith Eng, who runs a nail salon in Crestwood, said that four years ago his extended family sent money to Sap Sung, a relative in Cambodia, to buy a tiller so he could plow fields. It wasn't long before Sung hit a land mine and was killed.
"It blew him into pieces," Eng said.
Pol Pot called mines 'perfect soldiers'
In the noon-day heat of Siem Reap, a Cambodian town near the ruins of Angkor Wat, 42-year-old Teng Dara uses hand pedals on a makeshift bicycle to creep past tourists.
His camouflage jacket hints at his past as a Khmer Rouge soldier, when he lost both legs to a land mine in 1990. Today he gets $30 a month in aid, and makes a living selling photocopied travel books to backpackers on their way to Angkor Wat.
"It is enough to eat one meal a day," he said of his income.
He's among the 43,000 Cambodians who survived a land mine only to face a new struggle in the impoverished nation. Prosthetic limbs are available to some, but social services are scarce.
"There is not much in terms of disability awareness and certainly not much in terms of equal opportunity or discrimination" protection, said Martha Hathaway, director of Vermont-based Clear Path International, which provides prosthetics and adapted houses for the disabled in Cambodia.
Many of Cambodia's mines were planted during the 1979-1989 Vietnamese occupation, although some date to the '60s. The Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese laid them haphazardly as they battled over the countryside.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Communist Khmer Rouge, once described land mines as "perfect soldiers." In the 1990s, Cambodian government troops and Khmer Rouge guerrillas were battling in a civil war, both using land mines to defend villages and roads or make land unusable by their enemies.
By 1999, much of the fighting subsided as Khmer Rouge were captured, gave up or sought amnesty. But the mines remained.
Enter agencies such as the Mines Advisory Group, which are engaged in a slow, dangerous battle to remove those mines.
The Mines Advisory Group, along with humanitarian partners, also helps beyond simply removing the mines -- partly by working with other aid groups in such places as Ta Krouk, a few hours' drive from Battambang.
Not long ago, the village was ringed by minefields. But after the Mines Advisory Group cleared the land in the 1990s, it worked with the global charity World Vision to pay for a school to be built.
A water pump also was built, so that villagers no longer had to go great distances for water. Poverty is still endemic, but life has returned to a modicum of normalcy.
"This has a big impact for the people," said Say Sameth, a Mines Advisory Group officer, standing among the children at the school.
Dangerous work to improve safety
The whistle blasts come first: Three long, three short.
Then a moment of quiet -- only the sound of buzzing insects over the orange earth of remote western Cambodia -- before the explosion bangs a mini-mushroom cloud into the sky.
One more land mine has been destroyed.
The work of removing land mines is difficult, slow and expensive, especially in remote areas such as Ban Hoy, outside the longtime Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin.
In a stand of brush and trees that runs between tilled fields are hundreds of mines -- most just a few centimeters below the dirt. Made of ceramic, metal or plastic, they may range from antipersonnel mines that pop up and explode, trip-wire mines, directional-spray mines set alongside trails and larger antitank mines. Unexploded mortars and grenades also are there.
On this day, a demining team from the Mines Advisory Group -- trained locals dress in Kevlar jackets and blast helmets -- work slowly and deliberately with metal detectors, picks and hand tools. Colored wooden stakes mark safe and dangerous areas and mines that will later be detonated with dynamite.
The Mines Advisory Group, which works in 35 countries, has 476 people working in seven Cambodian provinces. Along with groups such as HALO and the government army's efforts, about 4,000 people are working to remove mines.
After the day's work ends at Ban Hoy, mine clearer Pham Bunsont, 43, pulls off his boot to reveal a prosthesis where his leg was blown off by a mine while on patrol with government troops near Siem Reap in 1988.
He said he took the job because he couldn't find other work and to help avert injuries.
"It's a dangerous job," Bunsont said. "But I don't want mines to hurt others like they hurt me."
The Mine Advisory Group is in the area because Ouch Ouy, 40, a villager who was a Khmer Rouge medic, requested that it be cleared. Residents recounted how one villager died when his tractor ran over an antitank mine, while another was killed using a shovel to try to remove mines that were killing his pigs and cows.
Fourteen villagers have been killed by land mines, and 18 have been injured, often left with stumps after trying to till land to plant corn or other crops.
"We can't farm the land that we own," Ouy said.
Mine-removal hopes remain; aid needed
Earlier this year, an acting assistant secretary of state noted in a report that worldwide estimated casualties from land mines and explosive remains of war have dropped from the 26,000 four years ago to perhaps under 10,000.
Although estimates are difficult to verify, he said, it shows that mine-removal efforts "have made the land-mine problem surmountable in our lifetime." The United States banned the export of anti-personnel mines in 1992.
But much work remains in Cambodia.
Nearly half of Cambodia's 13,908 villages remain plagued by land mines, and reaching the national goal of removing them by 2015 isn't likely, said Chea Sarim, a regional Mines Advisory Group manager.
And since international donor countries and groups funded about $30 million worth of mine clearing in 2007, compared with the Cambodian investment of $1.5 million, there is a critical need for more funding to speed removal, he said.
Some experts say that public awareness of the problem spiked in the 1990s with the involvement of Princess Diana and the signing of the 1997 land-mine ban but has waned somewhat since.
"You get donor fatigues and loss of attention," said Suzanne Fiederleine, a researcher at the Mine Action Information Center at James Madison University in Virginia. She noted that the United States has given $1.2 billion to land-mine removal worldwide since 1993.
In 2006, Cambodian deputy prime minister Sok An said that removing mines was crucial to lifting affected residents out of poverty, including those such as Sim Ry, who said he hopes that the Mine Advisory Group's efforts will help his family's financial standing.
"I am happy they are clearing the land, because I want to plant more corn," he said.
Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at (502) 582-4697.
By Chris Kenning
courier-journal.com
July 28, 2008
PAILIN, Cambodia -- Sitting on weathered steps of his thatched-roof house, Sim Ry gazes at a bony cow grazing in a scrubby field and rubs the brown stump where his right hand used to be.
he former Khmer Rouge guerrilla lost his hand to a land mine in 2005 while clearing trees to plant corn outside his village near the Thai border -- an area so thick with mines that it has been called one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
"I worry each time my children leave the house that they will not come back," Ry, 53, said through an interpreter.
Nearly 63,000 Cambodians, mostly villagers, have been killed or maimed by mines since 1970, a lasting reminder of nearly three decades of violence fueled by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot that left Cambodia among the world's most heavily mined countries.
The scars from those mines have followed Cambodian immigrants who arrive in the United States, including Kentucky.
Sovanna Chhan, a 51-year-old metal worker working in Louisville, said he still feels the pain from land-mine wounds he suffered nearly three decades ago. "I was lucky to survive."
And while progress has been made to clear Cambodia and other nations of land mines by such international groups as the United Kingdom-based Mines Advisory Group and HALO International, experts say much more needs to be done.
Since the early 1990s those groups have helped destroy 433,000 mines and millions of pieces of unexploded ordnance.
Today there are an estimated 177 square miles of heavily mined land, down from 1,724 square miles in 2002, according to a report by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The casualty rate has also dropped dramatically since the 1990s, when 2,700 Cambodians were killed or injured each year by mines and unexploded ordnance, falling to 450 in 2006.
Better mine-danger education, an economic upswing that cut down on risky farming and a growing number of aging, inoperable mines may have helped cut those casualties, experts say.
The problem of leftover mines from war isn't confined to Cambodia.
Although more than 150 countries have signed a treaty banning anti-personnel mines, tens of millions of land mines remain buried in more than 70 nations from Mozambique to Afghanistan, killing thousands each year, taking limbs and stealing livelihoods.
Scars follow immigrants
It's a Sunday afternoon in Simpsonville, Ky., and inside a neat house in a subdivision, Chhan's six children play video games as he and his wife cook a meal of rice and fish he caught in Taylorsville Lake.
The gregarious metal-press operator said he still feels pain from the land mine that ripped into his thighs and legs in 1979.
"It hurts when I stand up all day at work," Chhan said, pulling up his pants to show the scars on his legs.
Chhan was a young man in Battambang when the Khmer Rouge began emptying cities to fill rural communes. He said his family was moved to the country to live in crude and starved conditions. Two of his sisters died from malnutrition and sickness. By the time Vietnam invaded in 1979, Chhan had fled to an unofficial refugee camp along the Thai border.
There he earned money for rice and cooking oil by removing land mines along trails. He was attempting to remove a tripwire mine with only a piece of straightened wire fencing as a tool when a second mine connected to the wire blew up a few feet away.
"I thought I would die," he recalled. "I shook for months."
Eventually he healed, and when the camp was closed in 1991, he immigrated to the United States, spending time in California before coming to Louisville in 1994 to join relatives.
He has two brothers who are still in Cambodia -- one runs a motorcycle taxi, and the other sells home-cooked food along the road.
"I worry about them because there are still a lot of mines," he said.
Tom Hess, a former Louisville Catholic Charities refugee-services official who worked closely with Cambodian immigrants, said most Cambodians in the Louisville area know a friend or relative harmed by a land mine.
Thearith Eng, who runs a nail salon in Crestwood, said that four years ago his extended family sent money to Sap Sung, a relative in Cambodia, to buy a tiller so he could plow fields. It wasn't long before Sung hit a land mine and was killed.
"It blew him into pieces," Eng said.
Pol Pot called mines 'perfect soldiers'
In the noon-day heat of Siem Reap, a Cambodian town near the ruins of Angkor Wat, 42-year-old Teng Dara uses hand pedals on a makeshift bicycle to creep past tourists.
His camouflage jacket hints at his past as a Khmer Rouge soldier, when he lost both legs to a land mine in 1990. Today he gets $30 a month in aid, and makes a living selling photocopied travel books to backpackers on their way to Angkor Wat.
"It is enough to eat one meal a day," he said of his income.
He's among the 43,000 Cambodians who survived a land mine only to face a new struggle in the impoverished nation. Prosthetic limbs are available to some, but social services are scarce.
"There is not much in terms of disability awareness and certainly not much in terms of equal opportunity or discrimination" protection, said Martha Hathaway, director of Vermont-based Clear Path International, which provides prosthetics and adapted houses for the disabled in Cambodia.
Many of Cambodia's mines were planted during the 1979-1989 Vietnamese occupation, although some date to the '60s. The Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese laid them haphazardly as they battled over the countryside.
Pol Pot, the leader of the Communist Khmer Rouge, once described land mines as "perfect soldiers." In the 1990s, Cambodian government troops and Khmer Rouge guerrillas were battling in a civil war, both using land mines to defend villages and roads or make land unusable by their enemies.
By 1999, much of the fighting subsided as Khmer Rouge were captured, gave up or sought amnesty. But the mines remained.
Enter agencies such as the Mines Advisory Group, which are engaged in a slow, dangerous battle to remove those mines.
The Mines Advisory Group, along with humanitarian partners, also helps beyond simply removing the mines -- partly by working with other aid groups in such places as Ta Krouk, a few hours' drive from Battambang.
Not long ago, the village was ringed by minefields. But after the Mines Advisory Group cleared the land in the 1990s, it worked with the global charity World Vision to pay for a school to be built.
A water pump also was built, so that villagers no longer had to go great distances for water. Poverty is still endemic, but life has returned to a modicum of normalcy.
"This has a big impact for the people," said Say Sameth, a Mines Advisory Group officer, standing among the children at the school.
Dangerous work to improve safety
The whistle blasts come first: Three long, three short.
Then a moment of quiet -- only the sound of buzzing insects over the orange earth of remote western Cambodia -- before the explosion bangs a mini-mushroom cloud into the sky.
One more land mine has been destroyed.
The work of removing land mines is difficult, slow and expensive, especially in remote areas such as Ban Hoy, outside the longtime Khmer Rouge stronghold of Pailin.
In a stand of brush and trees that runs between tilled fields are hundreds of mines -- most just a few centimeters below the dirt. Made of ceramic, metal or plastic, they may range from antipersonnel mines that pop up and explode, trip-wire mines, directional-spray mines set alongside trails and larger antitank mines. Unexploded mortars and grenades also are there.
On this day, a demining team from the Mines Advisory Group -- trained locals dress in Kevlar jackets and blast helmets -- work slowly and deliberately with metal detectors, picks and hand tools. Colored wooden stakes mark safe and dangerous areas and mines that will later be detonated with dynamite.
The Mines Advisory Group, which works in 35 countries, has 476 people working in seven Cambodian provinces. Along with groups such as HALO and the government army's efforts, about 4,000 people are working to remove mines.
After the day's work ends at Ban Hoy, mine clearer Pham Bunsont, 43, pulls off his boot to reveal a prosthesis where his leg was blown off by a mine while on patrol with government troops near Siem Reap in 1988.
He said he took the job because he couldn't find other work and to help avert injuries.
"It's a dangerous job," Bunsont said. "But I don't want mines to hurt others like they hurt me."
The Mine Advisory Group is in the area because Ouch Ouy, 40, a villager who was a Khmer Rouge medic, requested that it be cleared. Residents recounted how one villager died when his tractor ran over an antitank mine, while another was killed using a shovel to try to remove mines that were killing his pigs and cows.
Fourteen villagers have been killed by land mines, and 18 have been injured, often left with stumps after trying to till land to plant corn or other crops.
"We can't farm the land that we own," Ouy said.
Mine-removal hopes remain; aid needed
Earlier this year, an acting assistant secretary of state noted in a report that worldwide estimated casualties from land mines and explosive remains of war have dropped from the 26,000 four years ago to perhaps under 10,000.
Although estimates are difficult to verify, he said, it shows that mine-removal efforts "have made the land-mine problem surmountable in our lifetime." The United States banned the export of anti-personnel mines in 1992.
But much work remains in Cambodia.
Nearly half of Cambodia's 13,908 villages remain plagued by land mines, and reaching the national goal of removing them by 2015 isn't likely, said Chea Sarim, a regional Mines Advisory Group manager.
And since international donor countries and groups funded about $30 million worth of mine clearing in 2007, compared with the Cambodian investment of $1.5 million, there is a critical need for more funding to speed removal, he said.
Some experts say that public awareness of the problem spiked in the 1990s with the involvement of Princess Diana and the signing of the 1997 land-mine ban but has waned somewhat since.
"You get donor fatigues and loss of attention," said Suzanne Fiederleine, a researcher at the Mine Action Information Center at James Madison University in Virginia. She noted that the United States has given $1.2 billion to land-mine removal worldwide since 1993.
In 2006, Cambodian deputy prime minister Sok An said that removing mines was crucial to lifting affected residents out of poverty, including those such as Sim Ry, who said he hopes that the Mine Advisory Group's efforts will help his family's financial standing.
"I am happy they are clearing the land, because I want to plant more corn," he said.
Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at (502) 582-4697.
No comments:
Post a Comment