Conflict Cambodia

I’ve just spent six weeks working and living in the city of Battambang, in western Cambodia. The area surrounding Battambang is predominantly rural, and one of the heaviest mined areas in the country, and quite possibly the world.

Landmines and other unexploded ordinance come from the Second World War, the French-Indochina war in the 1950s. After a brief respite in the early1960s, Vietnam placed UXOs to protect its supply routes in Cambodia from 1967, and then the USA responded with aerial drops of cluster bombs and covert operations deploying landmines in the Vietnam war well into 1975. Cambodia then suffered under the Khmer Rouge regime, and brought UXOs to the rest of Cambodia and around its borders to create a wall-less prison. Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989 and sparked another major UXO deployment as a result of a power vacuum and the Khmer Rouge continued laying mines after the 1993 elections with new tatics of placing UXOs in towns.

The Cambodia Mines Action Comittee (CMAC) reports that mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland.

With the regular occurrence of the wet season, UXOs get moved and become buried. Maps were rarely drawn when mines were deployed as it was carried out on an ad-hoc basis with varying tatics by different countries from the Second World War right to the late 1990s.

However, a mine removed is a life saved and CMAC spent the last 15 years clearing away mines and other unexploded ordinance, but there are still a rough estimate of at least 6 million mines, and discounting urban population, that’s nearly one mine for every rural person.

People in rural Cambodia live right next to a road – or rather, access route as it is generally safer, though people can still be dangerously ignorant of the consequences of handling an UXO device. A police station stored a large collection of UXOs, who alerted our crew of the collection. They wait until an organisation come along and take them away for controlled detonation.

The leader of our de-mining team, a Cambodian, was captured and tortured by the Khemer Rogue three times – each time he was thrown into a deep pit naked, was excreted upon, buried, put under water, and other stuff that is unspeakable. You would have not known it if you met him, he is a bright man dedicated to the dangerous job of removing UXOs in Cambodia.

A boy of four years old was playing with an unexploded hand grenade, completely unaware that it is a lethal device that could kill him without warning. He came running towards us, proudly showing off his new “toy”. As we got him to put it on the ground and walk away from it, our de-mining team removed it and found it to be harmless. The explosive materials has leaked out through a rust long ago. The kid was lucky, children and adults are maimed and killed on a regular basis in Cambodia.

Three days before I arrived, three people died when they stepped upon a landmine by a roadside near Battambang. It was an anti-tank mine. The police said there was absolutely nothing left of them.

It is mostly the very poor, as always, who suffer. They are uneducated and need to live off the land to feed themselves, and cannot afford to move to a town. In Cambodia, if you earn more than $40 a month, you are doing very well. Builders working on a building Battambang’s highest building, a 4-storey hotel, earn just under $2 a day. That’s less than a quid a day. Human labour is so cheap, that the builders have no machines or power tools to build the hotel. It is like going back 150 years and watch how they tackle tricky construction methods without any machinery such as lifting, pouring concrete, and ‘drilling’. Waiters earn between $1 and $1.50 a day and they are well dressed and many have taken upon themselves learning English.

The average income is $350 a year, skewed by the very rich few, and those who can be counted. The rural people have no income, live in houses they built from sticks and planks of wood, and often a temporary structure. The clothes they wear look modern, but what they wear is what they have.

Yet, the Cambodian people are a cheerful lot, and they have every reason to be – its the first time a generation has not experienced war and conflict, the first time people can plan the next day, to embark on long term projects and a reason to make money. It has a long way to go, and it won’t be easy, but the people sure are trying!