sung commune, Samlot district, Battambang province – Because the professional deminers were too busy to clear her jungle plantation before the growing season, Som Thoeun took a hoe in hand and knelt to the earth behind her new house.
Somewhere nearby, she knew, there were mines laid by soldiers from three armies. Three-legged wild pigs that fell into her husband’s traps were evidence of the minefields the soldiers left behind.
Her Sung 1 village neighbors’ stories were more bad news, about explosions at nearby farms that took lives or, if the victims were lucky, just a limb.
Methodically, with the blade of her hoe pushing through the dirt just below the surface, she began a search for something metallic. Four mines and a good-sized plot of land later, she stopped.
“They never exploded because I went step by step,” the mother of two said.
Her story is not so unusual in the remote Samlot district, where farmers trade tips on the ways of peanut and cashew plants, buy and sell in Thai baht and sometimes force their bodies to work despite a burning malarial fever.
Land mines are a part of everyday life here, and they exact a staggering toll. In the past 18 months, 22 people in Sung commune have been injured or killed by mines and unexploded ordnance.
In neighboring Kompong Lepec commune, three people died in May, including a girl who tampered with an artillery shell to extract the valuable detonator and explosive inside.
Som Thoeun said she knows it was dangerous to clear her own land, but she and her husband needed the plot to grow their crops when they returned from a Thai border camp in 1999.
“I was very scared, but I did not have any choice but to try and do that,” she said.
Som Thoeun and her neighbors live in one of the most dangerous regions in Cambodia. Battambang province has more landmine and unexploded ordnance incidents every year than anywhere else in Cambodia, with 361 incidents recorded from January of 2000 through this past June, according to authorities.
Her neighbor, Pheng Pheap, 37, also a father of two, said he collected 10 anti-personnel mines from around his new house when he returned from a border camp last year. He piled the mines in a corner of his land for Cambodian Mine Action Center officials to take away.
“It is safe now all around my house, but if we go to the rice field to farm it is dangerous,” he said.
Efforts by professional demining groups to pull the mines out of the land are progressing, though too slowly to stop villagers from attempting to clear their own land.
Khlork Saroeun, the deputy chief of site 12 for the CMAC’s clearance teams, said his demining crews in Samlot destroy 15 to 20 mines every day. The crews work to clear the main roads and communal water pumps first, then move on to less traveled areas.
Farmers who move into the area to clear a section of jungle often rush in before the deminers have come.
“People here they live very dangerously. They try to clear the land themselves, because if they do not clear it, no one will clear it for them and they need the land for farming,” Khlork Saroeun said.
His demining crews have not had an accident in the two years since they arrived, hoping to beat a rush of returning refugees from Thai border camps who had fled the area during the 1997 factional fighting.
Malaria has taken its toll on the crews, many of whose members come from other areas of Cambodia, Khlork Saroeun said. Five men have died so far from malaria. When the crews first arrived, half of them caught the fever. Even with the illness, the crews have cleared 238,812 square meters of land so far this year, he said.
As peace comes to these former battlefields, villagers are often the first to find the landmines left behind by the soldiers. A new effort to prevent mine accidents, unveiled Monday at CMAC headquarters, will help villagers find ways to feed their families without putting themselves at risk.
“People are settling down in villages and need to learn how to deal with the presence of these devices as a community,” CMAC spokesman Tang Sun Hao said.
The project will send 16 CMAC employees into six districts in Battambang and Pailin over the next eight months to give lectures and hand out information. It will be conducted with the technical assistance of Handicap International and $100,000 of funding from the UN Development Program and Unicef.
The project begins as the number of mine accidents continue to fall, from 1,984 in 1998 to 554 so far this year. Still, it’s difficult to know what the advisers will recommend for the farmers of Sung 1 village.
Nei Sorn, 39, said he has no other place he can move. He has twice stepped on landmines without triggering them, but even those close calls were not enough to convince him to live somewhere else.
“We tell the kids not to go into the jungle,” the father of two said. “If they want to play, we tell them just to play on the clean land.”
