Cambodia Is Teaching the World How to Clear Land Mines

This past summer, I traveled to Cambodia and hung out with deminers to learn how the art of landmine clearance happens. Cambodia’s history of bombardment has led it to develop expertise in the dangerous, delicate business of removing these hidden threats, and now the much of the world comes to Cambodia to learn this necessary skill. This issue is even more pressing today, as the United States is now supplying Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions. The article was published in The Nation, and the print edition has the title “Walking Through Landmines.”

Before I signed the waiver, Sophie Schillings went over the rules. “Please don’t run in the minefield,” she said. “And don’t pick anything up.”

This was my first time in a minefield. I was listening carefully.

It was a misty morning in Cambodia, and although it was barely 10 am, the heat was already baking the air. I was about to enter a known minefield near the Trei Nhoar commune, less than an hour’s drive from Siem Reap, Cambodia’s second-largest city and the gateway to its legendary temples. The HALO Trust, a UK-based NGO and the world’s largest demining nonprofit, was working to clear the mines from the area, and Schillings, HALO’s deputy program manager for Cambodia, was judiciously advising me on what not to do in a minefield.

I had come to Cambodia to observe the dangerous ballet of land-mine removal. More important, I had also come to learn how Cambodia has become a leading location for non-Cambodians to study the art and procedures of demining. Foreigners once flew over Cambodia to drop bombs; now foreigners fly to Cambodia to learn how to get rid of bombs. Practices and methods for mine clearance have been developed and refined here and exported to countries as far away as Ukraine, Angola, and Iraq.

Why Cambodia, you might ask? The answer lies largely with history. The nation is afflicted with some of the highest concentrations of land mines on earth, owing to the protracted wars in Southeast Asia, multiple foreign invasions, the madness of its homegrown genocide under Pol Pot, and the country’s long, slow climb out of civil strife. The northwestern region along the border with Thailand hosts what’s known as the K5 mine belt, a 750-kilometer stretch of death-in-waiting, planted in the 1980s during the fighting between the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea and the Chinese- (and US-) supported Khmer Rouge.

The east of the country is also riddled with unexploded ordnance (“UXO” in the professional lingo), mostly cluster munitions left over from the US carpet-bombing campaign under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It is estimated that from 1969 to 1973, the United States dropped at least 26 million cluster submunitions, also known as “bomblets,” on this country of just 6.7 million people—a third of which fell within one kilometer of villages. Experts believe that between 1.3 million and 7.8 million of these submunitions failed to explode (so-called “duds”). These unexploded bomblets became de facto land mines that continue to haunt this nation and hold its territory hostage.

According to the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority, a government agency, there were 65,028 casualties—including 19,821 deaths—from explosions of ordnance between January 1979 and July 2023.

But what I learned was that demining doesn’t just protect you from the weapons of past wars; it can also lead you to take positions on present conflicts. The day after I was out walking with deminers near Trei Nhoar, the US announced that it would be sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s recently replaced defense minister, has said that Ukraine now holds the dubious distinction of being the most heavily mined nation on the planet, and the war came up often in my talks with the Cambodian demining community. Every Cambodian I spoke with thought the American decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine was a big mistake.

“Military leaders will demand one thing, but after the fighting it’s a completely different story,” Heng Ratana, the director general of the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC), the government’s demining agency, told me as I sat in his office in Phnom Penh. “We have more than 200 cluster experts working in the field,” he said, “and we continue to discover cluster submunitions every day on the ground.”

Ratana explained that dud rates are always higher than the manufacturers promise, with a 25 to 30 percent failure rate in Cambodia, and buried cluster submunitions continue to maim or kill people routinely there. Since they fall through the air, bomblets often end up embedded deeper in the earth than a soldier would lay a land mine. In soft ground, cluster bomblets can be found a meter deep, Ratana said, making them harder and more dangerous to discover.

“From our own experience and the lessons learned here,” Ratana said, “we believe that to use cluster bombs in Ukraine hurts the Ukrainian people themselves.”

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Land mines are the unacknowledged legislators of the earth. They determine who can walk the ground or work the soil. And they do so silently, lying in wait with inhuman patience for months or years or even decades. When, one day, a land mine does explode, it can burst with all the fury and vengeance of a long-ago conflict. Yet we continue to design them, produce them, and deploy them, convincing ourselves of their imminent need while reassuring ourselves of our dominion over objects. But every time we bury them in the ground, fire them from rockets, or drop them from the sky, we enslave ourselves for the foreseeable future to a tyranny of our own creation.

Like the hand grenade, the machine gun, and the armored warship, land mines were an invention of the US Civil War. Initially, the Confederacy improvised land mines out of a variety of artillery shells, but by 1863, a new science had been born. The Confederate States Congress allotted $100,000 to the Army Torpedo Bureau, “the world’s first institution devoted to landmine warfare,” according to Kenneth Rutherford, a historian of land mines. The bureau was headed by Brig. Gen. Gabriel Rains, the inventor of the Rains fuse, a sensor that would activate an artillery shell if someone stepped on it with a mere seven pounds of pressure. Confronted with this new reality, Union commanders would sometimes force Confederate prisoners of war to march in front of them as a rudimentary form of mine clearance.

German engineers refined the Rains fuse just in time for World War I. During World War II, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy laid as many as 19 million land mines in North Africa alone. World War II also saw the extensive deployment of bounding fragmentation mines, the most infamous being the German S-mine, also known as the “Bouncing Betty.” When tripped, these mines shoot up about three feet into the air and then explode, spraying shrapnel in a 360-degree radius and killing or mutilating anything nearby. As for cluster munitions, the United States deployed them extensively during the Vietnam War. A 1972 US Air Force review of BLU-63 bomblets, over 1 million of which were dropped in Cambodia, showed that the Hoffman Electronics Corporation received a contract to provide almost 24 million units to the Air Force. The cost per bomblet? Thirty-five cents.

Adjusted for inflation, 35 cents in 1972 equals $2.55 today. It’s often said in the demining community that a land mine costs as little as $1 to produce but $1,000 to remove.

In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissipation—or so it seemed at the time—of the threat of global nuclear annihilation, the international human rights community turned to the problem of land mines. In 1991, Asia Watch (part of Human Rights Watch) and Physicians for Human Rights jointly published a report titled “Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward’s War,” which detailed the terrible toll that land mines had taken on civilians there. A movement was building, and Cambodia and Afghanistan were repeatedly mentioned as the countries that were suffering the greatest devastation by this indiscriminate weapon. Globally, the most recognized activist fighting the scourge of land mines was Princess Diana, who in 1997 famously walked through a minefield in Angola that was being cleared by HALO.

Later that year, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention was signed in Ottawa, Canada, taking effect on March 1, 1999. To date, 164 countries (including Ukraine) have joined the treaty. However, 32 countries—including the United States, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North and South Korea—have not. The US position is complicated: In June 2022, the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, pledged to forgo the use of antipersonnel land mines and destroy US stockpiles, except for those that it considers necessary to defend South Korea against an invasion by its neighbor—often called the “Korea exception.” At the same time, the US also provides significantly more funding for global demining efforts than any other nation.

But the land-mine treaty does not ban the use, stockpiling, or production of every kind of land mine—only the victim-activated antipersonnel mine. Mines that are operated by remote control, for example, are not banned; neither are anti-vehicle and anti-tank mines. And cluster munitions are regulated by a different international treaty. The Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted in 2008 and went into effect in 2010. That treaty has been signed by 124 countries, but 73 countries—including Ukraine, the US, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, and both North and South Korea—have not signed on.

In Cambodia, the destructive force of land mines, cluster munitions, and other explosive remnants of war remains a terrifying reality in people’s daily lives. In Phnom Penh, I met Borin Bun, a 38-year-old mother of two who lost her right leg below the knee when she was a 10-year-old kid searching for mangoes; she didn’t receive a prosthetic limb until she was 18. That same year, she joined the Cambodian Handicraft Association, a small NGO that helps women who have been disabled by land mines or polio. I met Bun, who started as a weaver and is now a tailor, at the association’s workshop, a dimly lit sewing factory near the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum that raises funds by selling handmade silk scarves and souvenirs.

Land-mine discoveries and detonations continue to occur. The day before I visited the minefield near Trei Nhoar, a HALO deminer found an unexploded 60-millimeter mortar round nearby. The previous day, a 42-year-old farmer lost his right foot after stepping on a land mine as he was foraging for mushrooms near the Thai border. Though the first six months of 2023 saw a significant decline in explosive ordnance casualties compared with 2022, late June and early July saw five accidents (including two deaths) in 10 days, according to Miles Hawthorn, HALO’s program manager for Cambodia.

When land mines don’t kill their victims, they often destroy a person’s ability to make a living. Before I suited up with the deminers in a Kevlar vest and a white helmet with a thick visor, Ran Tith, a field officer and 14-year HALO veteran, told me that the minefield I’d be visiting, laid by the Khmer Rouge, is considered low-density. Even so, Chinese-made 72-Alpha antipersonnel and Type 69 bounding fragmentation mines had been found there. And after someone was killed by a mine explosion in 1998, the land was deemed too dangerous to farm—an expensive loss for the three families on whose land the minefield sat and the village of 724 people nearby. In an agrarian society like Cambodia’s, so much really does depend on wheelbarrows…

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