Episode #409: Mined and Forgotten
RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 7, 2O25
His military experience enabled a rapport with Myanmar’s armed actors, says Rory McCann, who recently served almost two years as the country Weapons Contamination Specialist for the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC). A challenge at the beginning of the job was to build trust with different conflict parties, in part to convince them that the ICRC was teaching weapons safety regarding landmines and other explosive ordnance, not weapons handling that would enable combatants to create or repurpose more deadly devices.
As an international humanitarian actor, the ICRC engages all parties in a conflict based on principles of confidentiality and neutrality. As a 25-year veteran of the Irish Army, McCann was deployed in conflict-affected countries including Chad, Syria and Uganda, with his training in the ordnance corps preparing him for his transition to humanitarian mine action. He would not confirm specifics of engagements, but his ICRC role included interaction with the Myanmar Armed Forces and other armed groups.
“My previous roles in relation to to mine action would have been military clearance, which is a very rough and ready clearance, where you're just clearing a path for your forces to be able to advance,” McCann tells Insight Myanmar, in the most recent episode of the Navigating a Minefield series. “When you're talking about humanitarian mine action, it has to be much more systematic and you're looking at the international mine action standards.”
National mine standards do not exist in Myanmar, although McCann says they are necessary to address the country’s specific risks and context. International standards set guidelines across“five pillars" of humanitarian mine action: clearance, risk education, victim assistance, stockpile destruction, and advocacy.
McCann says his role, in part, was educating armed actors about their obligations to protect civilians and landmine use under customary international humanitarian law (IHL). Myanmar is not a signatory to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, with its protocols to regulate the use of landmines, or the Mine Ban Treaty, which bans anti-personnel landmines entirely. Conflict actors are still legally bound by customary IHL that prohibits indiscriminate use of landmines and requires protection of civilians.
“Landmine fields are designed to be an obstacle, to either deprive territory or deprive access routes to another group or to the other party,” McCann says. “What we were seeing in Myanmar and in other conflict areas, they’re simply being used in a kind of a sporadic and I’d say maybe even punitive manner, in that they’re just designed to catch people who may be moving through a shortcut or through a known route.
Known as “nuisance mining” in humanitarian mine action terminology, this pattern of landmine use fails to meet military objectives, McCann argues, as an unmarked minefield might kill or injure a combatant, but it does not deny access because it is unclear where the mines are planted. The dangers for civilians also increase given unmarked, haphazard mining, posing an indiscriminate threat pervading everyday life.
At present, the conflict prevents regularized demining and destruction of weapons stockpiles in Myanmar. Of the five pillars of humanitarian mine action, only explosive ordnance risk education, victim assistance, and advocacy are formally underway, in a country that recorded the worst landmine and explosive ordnance casualties in the world in 2023.
Since 2015, the ICRC and Myanmar Red Cross Society (MRCS) have conducted Risk Education and Safer Behavior (RASB) sessions, with over 1,800 training delivered to more than 69,000 people in 2024 alone. More than 4,800 people with disabilities, including 1,818 people affected by explosive hazards, were supported through physical rehabilitation services.
The public education initiatives rely on community leadership and local volunteers. The ICRC conducts three-day training-of-trainer sessions, with participants then leading 45-minute to one-hour meetings tailored to community context and risk environment. Communities also are the principal source of information on hazard mapping in their areas.
“We’re looking for someone who has influence over the village or over the local population,” McCann says. “We'll look at engaging with them and finding out what activities they think are putting the population or the community at risk, and then looking at adapting the messaging or giving them key bits of information so that they can spread that information among the village.”
National ownership of landmine issues is an ICRC goal, with conflict actors adopting national mine standards and assuming responsibility for landmines in areas under their control. McCann admits the conflict situation makes full realization of that goal unlikely, working on a strategy focused on risk mitigation and incremental improvements to armed actors’ conduct, rather than addressing the underlying problem of continued landmine use and widespread contamination.
“It’s advocacy and understanding of the obligations on the parties to the conflict in relation to the use of landmines. If you’re in the control of an area, whether you use landmines, fire the explosive remnants of war, or not, the obligation is on you to protect the civilian population,” McCann says. “The more we can keep spreading that message, I'm hoping that it is getting through and that sides are more conscious.”