I don't know what I expected when I went on my three-day excursion with CMAC, the Cambodian Mine Action Center, but somehow I didn't expect the mined areas to look so normal. Which is of course pretty stupid since the whole purpose of a minefield is that you are not supposed to know that there are mines. And still, I found the normalcy quite weird.

All in all I visited six minefields in the three days I was there. At every field there was one platoon, 29 men, working and clearing mines. The work itself is quite unexciting and mundane: One of the deminers cuts the vegetation and a second one goes over the cleared ground with his metal detector. If he finds something then the first guy digs into the ground and find out what the signal is. If it's a mine then he need a minute or two to defuses it and then their work continues. Most of the time though the deminers do not find mines. Most of the times the signal emanates from a bullet, a piece of shrapnel, a spoon, a can of sardines, a nail or something else. Unfortunately the metal detector cannot know which is which, so the work is very slow and exhausting. Just imagine digging in your garden at 40 degrees Celsius in more then four kilos of kevlar armor, with a helmet and a visor on your head while the sun is burning down on you. It's really hard work. And apparently one of the largest problems is that the protective equipment is so uncomfortable that the deminers hate to wear it. I saw this in one of the platoons I visited where one of the deminers had not closed his visor. A few weeks ago a deminer in another unit had made the same mistake and lost his eyes when a mine blew up into his face.

Fortunately, in the German-funded unit I visited, there had not been a single accident since 1993. During the same time though, the unit had lost 14 deminers to Aids, according to the director of the unit twelve percent of the deminers are HIV positive. According to a doctor I spoke to, Cambodia is the country with the fastest growing number of HIV infections worldwide. How the deminers got infected was easy enough to see: Close to one of their camps are at least a dozen of brothels. And I don't think you get condom for the 5,000 riel (= 1,25 USD) they pay for the girls. That is, if the girls know about the risk at all. After all, many people here have never gone to school and in the rural areas most people can't read or write. Good luck educating them about AIDS when their prime concern is food, water and roof to sleep under.

All in all I have to say that the living conditions and the poverty of the people who live in the areas we visited touched me much more then everything regarding the landmines. Though one is very often related to the other. We passed through villages that were not more then small collections of ten or twenty stilted bamboo-huts, often without walls, where families of four, five or six would live. And you couldn't help to ask yourself: What are they gonna live of? There is no sizeable source of water nearby, there are no fields ... there is nothing. Col. Billaut explained to me that most of them make a living by burning the surrounding forest and selling the wood as charcoal. But that cannot last for more then a year or maybe two. And then? How many more people can plant and harvest rice?

We visited one area near Osmeach on the Thai border where people had actually been forced to resettle into mined areas. They used to live right at the Thai border in an area that was largely demined but when a local military commander decided to use the area to build a casino for Thai gamblers, around 2,000 people had to move a few kilometres south. And the area they moved to was and still is covered with mines. They "found" the minefield we visited when people from the village burned the forest and thereby set off a number of explosions. So of course they did not settle there. But I saw how people started to cultivate land while fifty or a hundred meters away the deminers were still pulling mines out of the ground!

That was another thing that surprised me: I had expected there to be some sort of signal and everybody stopping there work and moving 100 meters away when a mine is being found. Just like at home, where they clear whole blocks whenever an unexploded bomb from WWII is found. But no - the deminers here are working in small, 1.50 meters wide corridors that are 20 meters apart form each other. This way they can work quietly and without disturbing any of their colleagues, who will not even know about their friends having found a mine until they look in the storage pit.

Another thing that really surprised me was that the families of the deminers live with them in the camp. It felt dangerous to me, but of course the storage and the house with the explosives are well secured and it seems pretty impossible that a nosy child would manage to get into these buildings. And apparently it's good for the deminers to have their families close by. According to Col. Billaut it gives them some form of normal surroundings and also works as a form of social control. He claims that he has less problems with drinking, drugs, whoring and discipline in general if the women and the kids are around.

As you can see I had an interesting three days with CMAC. It was a very fascinating insight into a work that is of vital importance for this country. It has also helped me to overcome some of my own anxieties about the danger of landmines in Cambodia. I'm now confident that your risk of entering a minefield by accident in Cambodia is de facto nil. When coming to Cambodia you should worry more about the traffic than about landmines.

But even though CMAC is doing some very important work I am reluctant to suggest to donate money to the organization since from what I heard CMAC, like most organizations in Cambodia, is full of corruption. People who are working for humanitarian organizations told me that new recruits have to pay between 500 and 800 USD to get a job and that to advance in the organization you have to pay again. Of course it must be emphasized that this is perfectly normal in Cambodia. And I have reasons to believe that the DU 6 is very "clean" for Cambodian standards. But I would still worry that donations to CMAC would find their way into the pockets of some of the bosses and would not go towards their mine clearing efforts.

On the web:
Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC)