Ten years ago this month the OttawaTreaty Banning landmines came into effect but despite the ban, countries like Cambodia are still grappling with the landmine legacy left by decades of conflict.
Cambodia's history between the 1960s and the late 1990s was a bitter one of civil war, then genocide, followed by yet more civil war. The fighting stopped in the late 1990s. In the decade since, Cambodia has enjoyed a rising standard of living for many. But one of the legacies of thirty years of war is the scourge of landmines, which has posed significant hardships in this predominantly- agricultural society.
Presenter: Robert Carmichael
Speakers: Touch Bunthoeun, former soldier injured by a landmine; Rupert Leighton is the country director of Mines Advisory Group, http://www.maginternational.org/cambodia/
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CARMICHAEL: Ten years ago the Ottawa Treaty came into effect. You might not have heard of it unless you live in a country as afflicted by landmines as Cambodia. In the mid-1990s Touch Bunthoeun was a soldier in the government army fighting the Khmer Rouge in north-west Cambodia. He lost his right arm below the elbow to a landmine, an event that marked the end of his soldiering.
As a result Bunthoeun went back to farming for three years, and although his disability didn't change how his friends and family dealt with him, strangers were always curious.
BUNTHOEUN: A lot of people would ask me how I was injured and lost my arm. I explained to them that I was a soldier fighting the Khmer Rouge and I was injured by a landmine and they amputated my arm.
(sound of machinary and welding)
CARMICHAEL: Then in 1999 Bunthoeun got a job at DTW - an organization on the outskirts of Phnom Penh that makes a three-ton remote-controlled demining machine called the Tempest. There he welds, cuts and drills the metal panels on the Tempest machines, which DTW supplies to demining NGOs in Cambodia and in countries around the world such as Congo, Afghanistan, Mozambique and Angola. The irony is not lost on him - that the scourge of landmines both cost him his livelihood and gained him another.
Bunthoeun's story is common in Cambodia, a country with one of the highest disability rates in the world. The Ottawa Treaty bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines. Cambodia ratified the Treaty in 1999 and is one of 156 countries that have signed up. Countries such as China, Russia and the US are among those that refuse to. But for Cambodia the treaty came long after the mines were laid.
LEIGHTON: The problem in Cambodia is extensive - Cambodia still remains one of the most highly contaminated countries in the world. There is a lot to do and the extension request on the Ottawa Treaty really is going to be the last push that we have to clear as much as possible.
CARMICHAEL: Rupert Leighton is the country director of Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, one of three demining organizations in the country. He says the Ottawa Treaty helped to raise the profile of demining. But the problem here is so comprehensive that the government of Cambodia is preparing to request that its ten-year deadline to demine the land is extended by another decade. Leighton says the government has been proactive in destroying stockpiles of mines and in clearing affected land. But no matter how good the work, the situation is complicated by the fact that funding for demining is getting harder to come by.
The Nobel Prize-winning coalition called the International Campaign to Ban Landmines says international funding for mine clearance programs dropped 10 per cent in 2007. Leighton says MAG's funding in Cambodia will decline by around one-third this year, which means the demining NGO will cut one-third of its teams. That inevitably slows the pace of clearing. But there is some good news: The number of casualties from landmines and unexploded ordinance continues to decline year on year. In 1994 almost 3,000 Cambodians were killed or injured while last year that figure was down to 266, around a third of them children.
Demining and mine awareness education have played a role in cutting the number of deaths and injuries but so have higher prices earned by farmers for their crops, meaning they don't need to forage in dangerous areas for other products such as bamboo and firewood. Last year the 'hungry season' - the four month period before the new season's rice crop is sown - accounted for half the year's dead and injured.
And while nobody knows how many landmines lie buried in Cambodia's soil - it is almost certainly in the low millions - some will always remain no matter what efforts are made to eradicate them. Clearing every landmine, says Leighton, is an impossible task. Better to do what the Ottawa Treaty proposes and outlaw them in the first place.
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