PHNOM PENH, Cambodia
The first six months of this year saw a dramatic increase in the number of Cambodians killed or injured by landmines and other unexploded ordnance, with 101 casualties compared to 110 in the whole of 2013, according to the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC).
Heng Ratana, director general of CMAC, told the Anadolu Agency Wednesday that while the figures have not been finalized, it looks like July and August were equally dangerous - with several cases of young girls needing to have limbs amputated after stepping on UXO.
Ratana blamed the increase of casualties on the fact that more and more farmers are switching from traditional farming techniques to the use of heavy machinery - which dig deeper into the ground and therefore are more likely to trigger buried UXO.
"Most of the incidents are related to agriculture-farmers using heavy tractors where they used to use manual techniques," he said. "Also, people trying to pick bamboo shoots [have triggered buried mines]."
"The main provinces affected are Battambang and Banteay Meanchey" in the northwest of the country, Ratana said, adding however that his organization had seen increased casualties in the south, along the Vietnamese border.
The UXO in those areas are a legacy of Cambodia's long civil war with the Khmer Rouge and America's war with Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s.
"As you may be aware, the U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia's Vietnamese border...cluster munitions. These do not cause a high number of killing but are a long-term problem," Ratana said.
The CMAC will now re-introduce methods to try and stop the increasing number of casualties, such as educational radio and TV shows and more rapid response teams, he added.
While Cambodia has painstakingly demined millions of square meters of land to date, and - as one of the nations most affected by the scourge of landmines - was once the darling of international donors, funding has decreased in recent years as focus has shifted to new hot spots like Afghanistan and the Middle East.
"In my organization it was quite difficult to maintain the same impact as before," Ratana said.
Although demining in Cambodia has seen huge successes, there still remains a lot of work to be done with about 2,000 square kilometers that remain heavily mined.
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