Episode #267: Navigating A Mine Field
“Compassion is such a key value in the meditative practice, and it's a benefit that comes from the practice,” says Yèshua Moser-Puangsuwan. “The development of compassion by seeing deeply into your own experience, which is the human experience, leads to very deep compassion for the suffering of others. For any real social change to occur, it has to come out of that space of acknowledging our shared human predicament, and that's what gives me the strength to continue doing what I do; just the compassion that's developed. If I didn't do the meditation practice, I probably would have burned out as an activist a long time ago! Also, I don't use anger as my motivation. Anger burns up its own supports. A lot of activists run on anger, and they can only run for so long. Most of the people who were activists when I first became an activist, are no longer activists. They burned out long time ago. Compassion is what keeps me doing my activism.”
Yèshua began his meditation practice at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. He participated in a three-month meditation retreat there, where he learned from teachers in the Mahasi tradition. This experience led him to visit the Mahasi Center in Burma in the early 1980s. Since then, he has maintained a regular meditation practice, spending about a month or more in intensive meditation practice each year. Aside from his role as a yogi, Yèshua is also an ardent champion of human rights and peace. Since 1995, he has worked for the International Campaign to Ban Landmine; in 1997, this campaign won the Nobel Peace Prize. With some 30 years as an committed activist, Yèshua brings much-needed insight to the question of how to stay engaged without burning out. His secret? Bury anger, and feed compassion.
Indeed, there are few issues more challenging to maintaining a clear mind and balanced emotions than landmines, and Yèshua is one the world’s foremost experts. He notes that despite the increased awareness of landmine harm, and the important 1997 Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines—credited largely to the passionate advocacy of Lady Diana—landmines are far from a relic of the past. And it is a trauma that has long haunted Myanmar. “I applied to be a researcher on Myanmar because I could see that landmines were causing an enormous amount of suffering around the country. A soldier or a combatant uses a mine for a certain military purpose on a certain day, and then it gets left behind,” he explains. “By and large, it's going to be stepped on by a civilian later on. So this is something that is essentially a suicidal policy!”
Yèshua highlights the tragic irony that many landmine victims suffer grievous injuries from mines laid by forces that are ostensibly fighting for their cause. “From a humanitarian point of view, that's a violation of international humanitarian law to use these things, because they're indiscriminate; they cannot distinguish between a civilian and a combatant,” he says. “It's a clear form of senseless violence, and it can stop today, if anyone wants to do it! They don't need landmines today, and that would be an act of peace if they [banned them outright]. It couldn't be seen as supporting one side and being against another side to do this, because it affects all sides equally. It is a way to reengage with the conflict and say, ‘Hey, think about this. This is not something you have to do. You're creating suffering for your own people.’ If I was talking to a group like the Karen National Liberation Army, I'd say ‘Who's your enemy? Burmans? Are you laying landmines on Burman land? No! You're laying them in Karen state. Who are the victims of this going to be of this suicidal policy?’”
Yèshua and his team released a 2023 report on Myanmar that is deeply troubling. To provide some background context, he notes that in areas that have seen consistent “hot conflict,” such as Rakhine and Shan, mines have been an issue for at least over a decade. But now with the coup, new conflict zones have heated up all over the nation, leading to a sudden rise in mine deployment and mine-related casualties; notably, this is happening even in Bamar-dominated regions that had little to no history of mine-related casualties. Yèshua points to a 2023 UNICEF report indicating a tripling of mine-related casualties! However, the war has made accurate data collection difficult. “Interestingly, what we're seeing in 2024 is less reports of mine victims,” he says. “But we don't believe that less [reporting] is an accurate reflection of reality. We think that the internet shutdowns, the lack of electricity, and less reporters in the field are the reason why we're getting less reports. For March [2024], in our own casualty counting, we had a three times reduction [from last year]. I don't think that's at all accurate! If anything, I think there are more casualties now. But for some reason—and we haven't been able to determine what it is—we're getting less reports. And it's not just about mines. Everybody I know in the Human Rights field says we're getting less reports! So it's universal that less information is coming out.”
There are other issues that complicate the accurate gathering of mine-related injuries and fatalities. For example, Yèshua notes that throughout much of South-East Asia, victims of mines are often viewed as receiving karmic justice for cultural and religious reasons, and accordingly, many people avoid any association with mine victims. Also, he explains that while medical assistance agencies provide basic support (as well as data to international documentation groups), “[T]he dead get no assistance. A lot of the people who died just simply go unrecorded by anyone, so we can come up with no meaningful idea of the percentages. No armed group gives any figures on how many of their combatants are killed or injured by mines. It's a military secret. They won't tell you. We know that it's very high; anecdotal evidence and occasional slips of the tongue tell us how high it is. What's the ratio between combatants and civilians? Again, we've got no idea. And even for our counting, it's only the number we could catch.” He concludes, “Do we believe it's higher? Absolutely. Is it double? Sure. Triple? Could be.”
And for those who survive stepping on a mine, what assistance can they expect? Yèshua adds to the already grim picture. “The majority are seen within the medical system of Myanmar. Very few can actually cross the border; it's not safe, or they don't have the money, to get it in the surrounding countries. So they're seen within the country. The Burmese medical system is rated by the World Health Organization near the bottom of the barrel… In many cases, the medical help is competent, but they don't have the materials they need to work with. The family usually has to buy things on the market for the hospital to use, especially in the way of medicines.” And Yèshua points out yet another grisly reality: civilians are disproportionately affected by landmine injuries compared to military personnel. Even worse, mine victims often bleed out while desperately waiting for help. Unlike soldiers, who travel in groups and usually have someone with basic medical skills, civilians are often alone when they encounter these deadly devices. This stark difference in circumstances means that a soldier's chance of survival after a landmine injury is significantly higher than a civilian’s.
Trying to comprehend the psychological trauma of a non-combatant living in such a reality— a seemingly impossible world where any moment could bring death— Yèshua simply asks: “Have you ever lived in a war zone?”, and shares his own experience: “It's amazing how much we get used to it. It's part of the coping mechanism that human beings have. You can't live with the idea that you might cease to exist in the next hour, so there are a variety of mental coping mechanisms that you create, to continue to function in those environments … I remember being in a village [in Cambodia during the war] that was shelled, and some of the people I saw had ghosts in their eyes; they'd mentally checked out. They just weren't there. That's not the case for most people, who are at least functional. I think it depends on the individual, how they do it. I mean, for me, the future was just darkness, and I've never experienced that in my life before. Future being darkness … The other one is the people around you. That's the big one. You depend on the people around you. If they still look like they're animate, you’re animate. They're running and screaming, you're running and screaming.”
The deadly impact of hidden mines contaminating a village can quickly overwhelm even the amazing capacity of human beings to keep going even in the face of the most extreme and dire circumstances. Yèshua mentions the case of a woman who stepped on a mine, laid for some reason in an area that had not seen any conflict. “Nobody knows where the mine came from. But everybody in the village now uses another path to go to the market, which takes them an hour longer. There was an orchard next to where she stepped on the mine, and all the workers decided not to go work in the orchard any longer. It was one mine, on one path, but you can see the circles getting larger and larger, the impact [just ripples out]. You have a farmer who steps on a mine in one field, [and] all the farmers who have fields around him are going to think twice about going to their fields. So the land that gets taken out of usage, whether it's land that you traverse or land that you use to grow food or land where you forage, less and less of that is available within the country. Even if the armed conflict somehow stopped tomorrow, that impact is still there.”
A common question Yèshua is asked is who places the landmines, but his response is it is not that important. “What matters is how much land is being contaminated, and how many people are being killed or injured. This is our primary question,” he says. Moreover, Yèshua notes that in his extensive career, he has never encountered a soldier who admitted planting a mine. So the question of attribution is nearly impossible to answer anyway, as they mostly rely mostly on villagers’ reports about the last armed groups in the area. Yèshua explains that sometimes responsibility lies with the military, and at other times, the resistance. However, he says that in the vast majority of cases, it cannot be conclusively tied to any specific group.
There is also a difference between military mines and those used by resistance groups: the former are produced in factories, often modeled on US and Chinese designs, the latter typically more ad-hoc and improvised, often powered by batteries. However, Yèshua says that resistance groups also frequently seize and use stockpiles of military grade mines, making it impossible to determine who actually laid a mine from the type alone. Resistance groups claim that because their improvised mines are battery operated, they naturally go dormant after a few months, but that is “utter rubbish” according to Yèshua. “We know of mines that they've made in that way that have lasted eight years! It depends on a lot of factors: Is there moisture in the soil? Is there not? Was it well sealed by the engineer or not? Did they use cheap batteries or not? All of these things would affect the life of a battery operated, improvised, antipersonnel mines.”
Yéshua next discusses the rationale behind laying mines. “An antipersonnel mine is an ‘area-denial’ weapon for any combatant,” he says. “They're trying to keep one combatant out of an area. So they will be laid [by the resistance] around military camps; and for the Myanmar armed forces, they will lay them around infrastructure that they feel may be attacked, like power pylons [and dams and bridges].” When the objective is area-denial, the mine fields are signposted and fenced off, acting more as a deterrent than an actual weapon; this decreases the danger because the area can simply be avoided, and mine removal teams can move in to clear the area later on. Much more challenging with regards to mitigation are mines are laid haphazardly on paths that the military believes may be used by enemy combatants, or to slow down pursuit. “[T]hose are just out there!” Yèshua exclaims, addressing the difficulty of locating mines, and the extremely dangerous job of disarming them. “In the future, they're [eventually] going to be removed an arm and a leg at a time!” At least the military usually maintains maps of the mines they’ve laid, but to his knowledge, resistance forces do not, leaving mines lying unknown and undetected until accidentally triggered by a passing civilian.
Despite their military applications, the question still remains: What motivates any armed group to use landmines, considering their devastating and random aftereffects on civilians? To Yèshua, there is no real justification, and he says that even those responsible for their deployment often acknowledge privately that the long-term harm far outweighs any short-term advantage. “I asked [a local commander], ‘How many of your landmines kill your own people?’ He was not very happy with me asking the question; a little pissed off, and he was quiet for a while, then he looked at me and said, ‘Half of them kill the enemy.’ He was quiet for a little while longer. And he says, ‘The other half, they kill our soldiers, they kill our people, and they kill the animals. Landmine warfare for us really doesn't make any sense. But we keep doing it. It's kind of like an addiction.’ I mean, it's a good lens to look at this through. Every junkie kind of knows somewhere in their mind that what they're doing is not good for them. But they keep doing it! And to a certain extent, that's what's happening in Myanmar today. They know what they're doing is not good for them, but they keep doing it.”
Yèshua also relates one particularly shocking incident, when an (unnamed) armed organization used landmines not for an actual military purpose, but to secure control of a profitable natural resource located near their territory. “They laid the mines around a logging concession so that another armed group couldn't claim that area and come in and use those resources, which they wanted the money from!” They also didn't want the logger to cut outside of the concession. So they employed the tactic of ‘landmine militarization.’ Yéshua continues, “This is where a weapon of war has become so ingrained within their behavior that they're using it for non-warfare purposes, in this case, monetary ones. I asked him, ‘Have you ever thought about the consequences of laying these mines?’ And he said, ‘When it leaves my hands, I don't consider myself with it any further.’ This is where a democratic government that has control over its armed forces is really important, because the military has a hard time seeing outside of the box due to its conditioning.”
It is evident that military and paramilitary forces will not relent in their use of landmines even when they themselves recognize they are not using mines for military purposes. For this reason, Yèshua believes that strong government control over military groups is essential to force a prohibition on landmines from the top down. “When the military is in the preeminent position, as is the case with Myanmar, or I would argue with almost any ethnic group in the country, you can't speak at this level. To a great degree, the civil authorities and medical authorities and most ethnic areas are with us on the landmine ban, but they're not calling the shots.”
Clearly the military regime would never agree to a landmine ban, but in any case, some interactions with the NUG have left Yèshua equally skeptical of their intentions. “The International Campaign to Ban Landmines wrote a very clear message from its headquarters in Geneva to the NUG asking for a policy statement around landmines. ‘Just what is your policy?’ Never received a response, not even ‘We received your letter we'll discuss ...’ Nothing,” he says. “Consistently, I have found that Burma is a land of missed opportunities, and so it's no surprise that those go around at every level, in every place. I wish [the NUG] well, but my own personal experiences with them has been less than positive. Burma is such a dichotomy! It's a country that I first visited with a meditation visa, and I think it was the only country in the world that was offering meditation visas in those days. And you would think with that level of understanding of Buddhism, they would have been able to avoid the violence they're in now. But I will continue doing what I can to help bring a positive change if I have the capacity to do so and invite invited in.”
Yèshua Moser-Puangsuwan would like to invite readers to delve deeper into his work by checking out his website, following along Burmese translations on their Facebook page, or joining their Burmese Telegram channel.