…Wait ‘til it Blows

From Battanbang we headed northeast by boat to Seam Reap. The journey was a tedious and very shallow one. The guidebook makes a passing mention of the fact that local villagers are not all that fond of the tourist ferry boats and having ridden some way on the roof and watched the wake sink longtail boats left and right and snag and rip fishing lines and nets, I can see why.

Eventually the river opened up into Tonle Sap and stopped disrupting the locals, but anyone thinking of taking the journey by boat, I discourage you from doing so. This is first thing I’ve seen in S.E. Asia that I think should be taken out of the guidebooks and avoided until it disappears. The journey isn’t particularly nice or scenic and the fact that you piss off everyone along the way just makes it worse. Take the bus.

We disembarked about 30 km south of Seam Reap and were met by a cartel tuk-tuk. There is a sort of cartel among guesthouses in Cambodia where you are more or less handed off to the next town. Typically you book a ticket through wherever you’re staying and then they call a cousin in the town you’re heading for and often they will meet you at the bus station or boat dock or wherever you happen to be arriving. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with such practices, they’re generally fine since all the guesthouses we’ve seen here are more or less the same thing with only minor fluctuation in price (the real secret in selecting a guesthouse is to take careful notice of any construction that might be nearby). The funny part about our waiting tuk-tuk driver at the dock was that he actually had a placard with our names on it, or rather the names Matt had given out when he bought the boat tickets. Fake names of course, and misspelled at that.

The next morning we decided not to head straight for Angkor Wat. We slept in quite late and it was around two (heat of the day of course) when we decided to head out to the landmine museum.

One the things I may have failed to mention thus far in my Cambodia reportage is that this was/is one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. The Thais, the French, the U.S. and others have all laid mines in the area, but no one laid as many nor with such sick preference for killing and maiming innocent targets as the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge mined the borders to keep everyone else out and the Cambodians in, they mined roads, they mined circular arcs around villages to prevent villagers from leaving. They mined rice paddies, they mined cities, they mined the jungle. They were the Johnny Appleseeds of land mines, except that it isn’t funny. And there are still a lot of mines in Cambodia.

The museum is on the edge of town (though give it a couple years and the town will have far over taken it) and consists of a large shed full of information on various landmines, their manufacturers and techniques for removal as well an educational video and, most fascinating, a faux minefield for you to stare at and try to determine how many you can see. Even when they aren’t hidden, as they would be in the actual jungle, landmines are very very difficult to spot. I was feeling pretty good about spotting what I thought was most of the obvious ones when I happened to look up and notice that I was standing under a mortar shell with a bit of fishing line wrapped around a tree. If I were to have stepped to my left I would have tripped the wire. Or course none of them were real mines, but it was a bit unsettling nonetheless.

Mr. Aki Ra who set up the landmine museum is dedicated to educating the public in landmines (he’s also exhibited art as far away as Salt Lake City and participated in several documentaries on the subject). Judging by the photos around the museum area Mr. Ra has been in no less than five armies, which gives you some idea of the turmoil of Cambodian history, including the Khmer Rouge. But at some point, realizing that he had laid one to many land mines, Aki decided it was time to undo what he had done and he has dedicated the rest of his life to both the removal of mines and helping the victims of landmines. In addition to the museum the small compound also provides food and shelter for a number of landmine victims, most missing arms or legs, some both.

You might think that removing landmines involves sophisticated technology of the sort you see in BBC documentaries on Bosnia, but here in Cambodia landmine removal is most often handled by the technological marvel of southeast Asia—the bamboo stick. (While that last sentence may sound sarcastic it’s really not meant that way, In my five months here I have seen people do things with bamboo that had to have taken thousands of years to perfect. Given a choice between a power saw and a good piece of bamboo I would go with the bamboo). The museum has a number of posters showing the techniques used to find and remove the mines. Sadly the removal of mines generally begins with a local villager finding a mine. Provided the mine does kill the person who stumbles across it, Aki is called and comes out with a long piece of bamboo which he used to feel around the mine, determine what type of mine it is and very carefully extract it. Landmine removal has a zero percentage error factor, so the fact that Mr. Ra has been doing this for ten years obviously means he’s good at it. Fortunately for the Cambodians most of the mines on their soil are generally older and not quite so deadly as the new and improved mines (like the “bouncing betty” made in the US and designed not simply to blow your legs off, but to actually bounce out of the ground and explode at chest height maximizing the “kill radius” as jargon would have it).

Landmines aren’t glamorous. They lack the universal terror of nuclear bombs or long-range missiles. They aren’t the sort of thing anyone but the BBC is going to report on, but landmines kill more people than any other weapon deployed in the world. The problem with landmines is they last forever. Long after both sides have faded into history, the mines still exist. The mines lie dormant in the ground until someone steps on one, drives a car over it, ploughs it up in a field, or trips a wire in the bamboo thicket. Landmines are forever and then some. And because they aren’t as obviously destructive as say a nuclear warhead, it’s tougher to find support for their ban. Everyone is afraid of nuclear weapons, but only people who have actually dealt with landmines seem to understand how much more destructive and immediate their threat is.

The real problem with landmines is that they exist. In late 1999 a treaty passed through the UN calling for a worldwide ban on landmines. Lots of people signed it. The U.K, Spain, Ukraine, Germany, 151 in all, but not, you guessed it, the United States. Ever wonder why? I wonder about these things. Why did China, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia and the U.S. not sign a treaty banning land mines? Are these really the countries we want to side with? Landmines aren’t actually very effective in today’s battlefield where increasingly robots and kids with laptops are the first ones to enter a potentially mined area. It turns out that the five biggest suppliers of arms to the world, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China and France are also all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. These countries have a necessary economic interest in wars; they manufacture the majority of the weapons used, regardless of whether their own troops are involved. And yet, as member of the U.N. Security Council they are ones who often have the power to decide whether or not the wars happen.

So long as the military industrial complex is pressed between the sheets with the Federal government the landmines will keep getting made. And that’s not an indictment against Bush, it’s an indictment against the entire US government, Democrats, Republicans and any oddball third parties for good measure. Take away the military industrial complex and see how many candidates can afford television commercials.

Do I sound angry? Good. I am. I’ve seen too many things over here to ever be able trust American government. I’ve seen the effects on innocent people. Regrettably I’m too much of a realist to believe anything can be done. Just remember when you head down to the polling booth to vote for whoever you think is right, that somewhere in the world someone is strapping on their prosthetic leg, or pulling themselves onto their wheeled cart. Someone who very likely has had little or no education, no food and no idea why someone s/he’s never even met would want to take away their leg, their arm, or the lives of the ones they love.

If you’d like to help I encourage you to do so. If you would like to donate some money to The Landmine Museum in Seam Reap, every bit helps. You can have a look at the international ban on landmines which seems like a step in the right direction (and co-recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize). Write to your senator/representative and encourage them to pressure Bush. Ask them why the U.S won’t sign the treaty. But more than anything I encourage you to try to broaden your understanding of current international events. So much of what happens in the world is ignored by the U.S. media. I for one will never be able to read an American newspaper again. Nor will I suffer through the local news bullshit ever again. The whole global village thing that lots of pundits in America like to talk about already exists. America just isn’t part of it. We remain with our heads in the sand. Someday the landmines will be on our soil and then we won’t be able to bury our heads in the sand any more. We have a choice I suppose, do something about now while we have a choice or wait until we have to do something about it. Choose wisely.