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Sek Sak, Cambodia — Special to The Globe and Mail --- Towering sugar palms sway in the breeze as lean dogs scamper through
overgrown fields, and voices can be heard coming from the thatched-roof
houses. Located in the lush green countryside of western Cambodia an
hour’s drive from the Thai border, the village of Sek Sak has spent the
past 15 years trying to get back to normal.Forced to leave during their
country’s bitter civil war, its people began to return after most of Pol
Pot’s Khmer Rouge surrendered in 1998. They carried little with them.
If they were to eat, they had to farm.
Marking off fields was a simple, if brutal, process: Work back from
the road until someone steps on a mine. Anything beyond that was
declared too dangerous, leaving Sek Sak with just enough to get by. It
wasn’t until last June that professionals working with the British-based
Mines Advisory Group (MAG) finally arrived to finish the job.
One
of the “deminers” knows all too well how dangerous a land mine can be.
Now 47, Yi Am was a soldier in the 1980s, and planted hundreds of them.
Then he stepped on one.
“It
is very difficult for amputees to find work,” says Mr. Am, who lost his
left leg below the knee. For years, he struggled as a farmer, but he
decided in 1995 that he could better support his family by risking his
life in minefields again.
His wife wants him to stop, but he says
that, as well as the money, he does it to keep others from winding up
like him. “I want to do this job forever.”
The way things are going, Mr. Am may get his wish.
In
December, 1997 – mere months after the death of Diana, the Princess of
Wales, who had championed the issue, and just before American activist
Jody Williams shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) – delegates from 122 nations gathered
in Ottawa to sign a remarkable agreement designed to rid the world of
such weapons.
Fifteen years later, Ms. Williams announced at
December’s annual meeting of Ottawa Treaty signatories that “we are
closing in on a mine-free world.” And yet more than 200 million mines
are still being stockpiled, with more still in the ground, rendering at
least 3,000 square kilometres of territory potentially deadly.
Almost
one-third of that land, an estimated 945 square kilometres, is in
Cambodia, where mines and other “explosive remnants of war” (munitions
that failed to detonate or were simply left behind) have killed at least
19,660 people since 1979. As many as 40,000 more have lost limbs,
giving their country what is believed to be the world’s largest
population of amputees per capita.
When it signed the Ottawa
Treaty, Cambodia had as many as 10 million anti-personnel mines, but
declared it would be mine-free by 2009. The deadline has been shifted to
2020. At the current rate of demining, however, the task will require
25 more years.
“We cannot clear and destroy them as quickly as we
want,” says H.E. Chum Bun Rong, secretary-general of the government-run
Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority. “We need a lot of
resources.”
Alistair Moir, MAG’s director in Cambodia, agrees.
His agency has destroyed more than 249,000 explosives in Cambodia since
1992 (when, frustrated with United Nations inertia on the issue, a
coalition of non-governmental organizations launched the ICBL), but
budget constraints and “donor fatigue” have forced it to scale back.
“We’re
spending a lot of time simply trying to maintain our current capacity,”
Mr. Moir says. For example, the team in Sek Sak returned to work last
month after being forced to sit idle for more than two weeks.
Land
mines are no longer seen as the humanitarian scourge they once were,
and in no other country is the growing apathy toward removing them as
readily apparent as it is in one of the movement’s former leaders:
Canada.
Canadians contributed $17-million toward global mine
action in 2011, a 56-per-cent decrease from 2010 and the country’s
lowest contribution since 2002.
According to the NGO coalition Mines Action Canada (MAC), funding
last year will probably end up being even lower, and now that the
Canadian International Development Agency plans to end all bilateral aid
to mine-affected states such as Zimbabwe and Niger, as well as
Cambodia, programs in these countries are expected to be particularly
hard-hit.
“We are victims of our own success,” says Paul Hannon,
MAC’s executive director. “The farther we get away from the excitement
of December, 1997, when the treaty was signed here in Ottawa, the harder
it is to convince people to continue to support this.”
The treaty
was signed a year after Canada’s Lloyd Axworthy had challenged the
world to act. “The treaty was a demonstration that you could introduce a
different set of norms or standards internationally, predicated on the
idea that there is a thing called human security,” the former foreign
affairs minister now says.
Working in tandem with non-governmental
agencies, small and medium-sized states agreed to ban the use,
stockpiling and trade of anti-personnel mines.
“A lot of the
larger powers were not really content with the idea that we would take
the kind of initiative that we had,” Mr. Axworthy recalls.
By the
end of last year, 80 per cent of the world’s countries had signed the
treaty, about $5-billion spent on clearance, more than 46 million
stockpiled mines destroyed and the overall use of anti-personnel mines
drastically reduced.
Now even nations that refuse to sign the ban
rarely use mines, says Steve Goose, the Human Rights Watch official who
serves as the ICBL’s chief spokesman. “When the treaty came about …
mines were going into the ground much faster than they were coming out,
and we’ve totally reversed that.”
But momentum is waning even
though much work remains to be done. Not only do mines still kill and
maim thousands every year, they can freeze a society in its tracks,
MAG’s Mr. Moir says.
“People need to be fundamentally aware of the
warped nature of land-mine contamination,” he explains. “It costs
around a dollar to make a land mine, and then that mine can sit in the
ground for, in Cambodia’s case, up to 30 years. It can stifle
development from the village level right up to the national level.”
The
members of MAT 7, the demining team in Sek Sak, are former farmers,
market vendors and soldiers, both government and Khmer Rouge. “We have
good co-operation,” the team’s supervisor says, even though many once
exchanged fire along the Cambodian-Thai border.
One of Cambodia’s
few female deminers, Man Malis, 41, sold T-shirts in a market before
joining MAG in 1996. “Traditions in Cambodia are changing,” she says.
“My colleagues treat me as an equal.”
The work is painstaking and
slow. Since arriving in June, the team has focused on one 14-hectare
plot. So far, it has found 43 mines plus several unexploded mortars and
grenades. At least eight other minefields in Sek Sak also need to be
cleared.
Sweating in their helmets and armour, the deminers
methodically sweep the earth with their Swedish metal detectors. Every
beep is marked with a plastic chip. In Cambodia, demining is primarily a
manual affair – a process virtually unchanged since the Second World
War.
When their rows are finished, the deminers dig. They work gently with hand-forged tools: rakes, shovels, and knives.
“Excavation,” says Keo Yong, 48, an ex-soldier and 18-year MAG veteran, “is the most challenging part of the job.”
Some
models, like the Soviet-made PMN, are incredibly sensitive.
Occasionally, mines are found planted on their sides, waiting to be
triggered by a deminer’s shovel. If the area is a former battlefield,
clearing a few square metres can take hours, the soil littered with
relics of war: spent casings and fragments of mortars, rockets and
bombs. At night, children raid the team’s camp for scrap metal.
At
first glance, the risks hardly seem worth the $240 they take home each
month. The deminers have seen colleagues blinded, maimed and killed, but
none dwell on the danger. Their salaries, after all, are three times
the country’s per capita gross domestic product – but perhaps the real
rewards are less tangible.
“My mother had a land-mine accident,” Mr. Yong says. “That’s why I want to clear mines. … We make communities safer.”
Ms. Malis feels the same way: “I don’t want people I know to be injured.”
Cambodia
had about 165 casualties from anti-personnel mines and other
battlefield leftovers last year, which is just one-fifth the annual toll
a decade ago. But greater mechanization of agriculture is causing a
steady rise in incidents involving anti-vehicle mines, which are not
banned by the Ottawa Treaty and since 2009 have killed more Cambodians
than anti-personnel mines.
Recently, a tractor ran over such a
mine not far from Sek Sak, killing six people. “Dismembered body parts
were left scattered on the ground and in the branches of surrounding
trees,” a local news report stated.
A hole the size of a plate has
been dug into the earth, revealing the edge of an innocuous-looking
plastic disc: a Soviet PMN-2 – deadly and one of the more common mines
found in Cambodia.
Delicately, team supervisor Prum Sarin places a
small charge below the mine. He fixes it to a cable, then retreats.
Yellow pegs in the surrounding ground mark the locations of mines
previously destroyed. One peg stands within centimetres of the road, and
a deminer explains that, if buried deeply enough, mines can evade
detection but still be lethal.
At 15, Mr. Sarin was forcefully
conscripted into the Khmer Rouge’s army. He eventually deserted, but not
before planting more than 1,000 anti-personnel mines. Now 46, he has
cleared twice that many in his 18 years with MAG.
“In Buddhist
theory, a mistake is a mistake,” he says, speaking softly in a way that
suggests he has weighed these words carefully. Sighing, he adds: “I
cannot make up for what I have done.”
A siren warns everyone to
take cover. Mr. Sarin presses the detonator, but nothing happens. He
turns it in his hands, calls for fresh batteries and presses it again.
There is a crack and a plume of smoke. The concussion reverberates off a
nearby cluster of low mountains.
“It’s possible to make this country mine-free,” Mr. Sarin says. “I’ll be unemployed, but at least I’ll be happy.”
Will
Canada help Cambodia finish the job? “Most of the world looks at this
as a great thing that Canada does, and they still look for Canadian
leadership,” MAC’s Mr. Hannon says.
But he is skeptical, as is
Lloyd Axworthy, even though Canada has a robust economy and Article 6 of
the Ottawa Treaty states that every signatory “in a position to do so
shall provide assistance.”
“It’s clearly not a priority in [the
government’s] idea of what Canada should be doing,” Mr. Axworthy says.
And yet, 15 years after seeing the treaty’s birth, he remains active in
the campaign – and optimistic.
“Back in the parliaments in the
1990s, it was a bipartisan effort – it wasn’t a Liberal initiative,” he
insists, adding: “Wouldn’t it be nice for Canada at some point to say
that what we started in 1997 has now been done?”
By the numbers
Syria
was the only country to use anti-personnel mines last year, although
Israel, Myanmar and Libya did so so in 2011, with accusations against
Yemen and Sudan unverified.
Rebels planted land mines last year in six countries: Afghanistan, Colombia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Yemen and Thailand.
160 states are now party to the Ottawa Treaty, with Poland declaring last month it plans to be No. 161.
35 nations have yet to sign or ratify the treaty, including the United States, China and Russia.
57 countries are heavily contaminated with mines, led by Cambodia, Afghanistan and Angola.
4,286 deaths and injuries due to mines and munitions were reported around the world in 2011.
$30-million was spent on aid for the world’s 500,000 land-mine survivors in 2011, down 30 per cent from 2010.
225
million anti-personnel mines (minimum estimate) are being stored in
more than 100 countries, led by China and Russia. Only 19, including
Canada, have destroyed their stockpiles.
$662-million was spent on global demining in 2011. Internationals donations dropped by 3 per cent.
Sources: ICBL, the World Bank, Mines Action Canada, Handicap International
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