Beauty
and terror. Smiles and mines. The kingdom of the Khmer that took its name
from Kambou, the Brahman prince who arrived from India (Kamboudja; kingdom
of Kambou's children), is a country full of contrasts. We wonder what the
karma of a people who developed Angkor's wonderful culture as well as the
terrible Angkar, the Khmer Rouge's supreme organisation, might be like.
Cheant
Por is smiling too. Sitting on the ground near his crutches, the former
twenty-five-year old fighter is upset because he is about to receive an
artificial leg. He will finally throw away his old two crutches he had
been leaning on since his right leg was destroyed by an antipersonnel mine
in the Preah Vihear's region and amputated. “Come in” - says a collaborator
of Handicap International, the humanitarian organisation that has been
working in Cambodia for several years now.
Cheant
Por laboriously stands up and enters a room full of prostheses. He sits
on a bed and the artificial limb is attached to his body. A few moments
later he starts walking without crutches. Before returning to his native
village he will learn to improve the use of his artificial leg in a rehabilitation
centre. Statistics report that 905 tibial amputations and 156 femoral amputations
were performed in the five orthopaedic centres run by the organisation
Handicap International in 1997. The operations carried out to help the
injured were 1,113. 1,041 prostheses and 203 wheelchairs were supplied.
Handicap
International is just one of the several organisations that help the victims
of the mines and it is not difficult to imagine the overall number of amputations
due to these deadly weapons in the country as a whole. Cambodia is one
of the countries with the highest number of land mines and unexploded devices
in the world. When the Americans bombed Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam they
dropped hundreds of thousands of devices which had intentionally been built
in order not to explode as they hit the ground but with a delayed action
when they were hit by human beings or moving objects.
Other
hundreds of thousands of bombs were unscrupulously dropped by aircraft
which had failed to bring its destructive devices to Vietnam. When the
country was under the United Nations' temporary control, over 2,000 minefields
later delimited by the Control Department of the Antimine Cambodian Centre
were reported. Other 2,632 minefields were detected in the following period
up until the end of 1996. Presently, the priority is the location of the
areas where land mines probably were dropped but not their removal so that
most of them do not explode under circumstances controlled by experts but
under people's feet or hands. Thus, it is up to the people to clean up
their country from the deadly weapons manufactured and sold by Americans,
Russians, Chinese, Italians, French, Turkish and Serbs. It has been estimated
that it will take 175 years to neutralise the mines currently present in
Cambodia. The central province of Kompong Thom was a battlefield for over
twenty-five years.
During
the conflict the placing of the mines played a key role in the tactics
of the various belligerent factions. Wide areas of the country became uncultivable.
The
unexploded devices are everywhere and their number is so high that people
use the grenades' metal to build working tools and the bombs, after removing
their explosive content, as the pillars of the houses' foundations. Although
they are aware of the risks they may run, the farmers, pushed by hunger
and the need to find food, also go to those fields known to be mined. Forty-year-old
Toy Aon was maimed by a mine while he was working in his rice field: “I
survived the Americans' bombing, the Khmer Rouge's genocide and the Vietnamese
invasion. I lost an arm in peaceful times. My son too lost his leg in the
explosion”.
With
a protective gesture he puts what is left of his arm around his son's shoulder.
Antipersonnel
landmines are devices created with a diabolic cleverness: they were not
developed to kill but to physically harm people as much as possible, with
the logic of forcing the enemy to undergo material sacrifices because taking
care of a handicapped is more expensive than burying a dead. I met Phan
Phy, a nineteen-year-old former fighter of Cambodia's armed forces in the
dormitory of a veterans' hospital. He was laying in his bed and listening
to music.
He
lost both legs while patrolling areas controlled by the Khmer Rouge. When
he wants to move he has to use a tricycle pushed by another former fighter
that the explosion of a mine made blind. Even Chan Malay, aged 35, was
injured by a mine: “I was standing guard near Angkor Wat.
I
knew where the mined areas were and I was walking only on paths considered
to be safe. But during the night other mines were dropped and so it happened
to me, too”.
He
lost an arm, was seriously injured in his genitals, abdomen and eyes in
the explosion.
In
another care centre I saw a child watching his friends playing with a ball.
He was leaning what was left of his leg on a crutch and was following the
game with dreamy eyes.
He
said he did not remember how it all happened, except that he was playing
with his friends in a field he would usually go to. He got to the hospital
with his left leg all crushed and wounds due to splinters all over his
body.
Some
are in worse conditions, however.
Norodom
Aon, a ten-year-old boy, has a terrible wound in his leg that was caused
by an antipersonnel mine.
The
physicians tried to suture everything as best as they could hoping to save
his limb but the wound has difficulty in healing. It is continually enflamed,
probably because of foreign bodies inside of it or fragments of the bomb
that the physicians failed to remove.
The
pain is so strong that it makes him cry and he knows that if the wound
does not get better he will lose his leg. Phnom Voar is in Kampot's southern
province. It is one of the regions most heavily hit during last decade's
battles.
After
the Khmer Rouge's recent defeat, it was possible for some antimine teams,
often financed by the same mine-producing countries, to begin to “mine-clear”
the lands to be used for agriculture.
Here,
as well as in other areas, the biggest problem to clear the mined fields
is the lack of maps indicating were the devices were located. 466,791 square
metres of land were controlled in Kampot. 1,176,624 fragments of explosive
devices were found, the overall number of mines that were destroyed is
218 while the unexploded devices which were later exploded were 1,055.
The
lands to be mine-cleared, however, are still many.
Nevertheless,
something was done at an international level in order to ban antipersonnel
landmines. Ninety-six countries - mostly allied, friends and periphery
of the USA empire - approved a text in Oslo last September, later signed
at Ottawa, to ban antipersonnel mines.
Italy's
House of Deputies approved the regulations to ban antipersonnel mines last
October 22, 1997, and made them become laws of the state.
Ottawa's
signatories, furthermore, believe it is necessary to co-operate to carry
out the operations to clear the lands of mines, provide assistance for
the treatment, the rehabilitation, and the social and economic reintegration
of the victims.
Unfortunately
some countries like China and the United States oppose clear and rigorous
regulations with incomprehensible pretexts and refuse the outright ban
of the mines.
Thus,
in Cambodia as in other 67 countries, stories as those we have told will
be repeated for the decades to come. Until 110 million of invisible snipers
will continue to remain lined up and hit children, women, old people, men
in their everyday life's actions.
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Italian
Mensile di scienza medica e attualita`
