Devastation: Landmines in Burma
Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, in his discussion on landmines in Burma, highlights that landmines have become a widespread issue due to the military and various ethnic armed groups. He mentions that retreating soldiers from Myanmar's ruling Military Council have planted landmines indiscriminately in both military and civilian areas. He further explains that this problem extends beyond ethnic minority regions and affects the entire country. Yeshua emphasizes that the use of landmines causes significant suffering, as civilians are often the ones who end up stepping on these devices long after they have been laid. He describes this practice as a violation of international humanitarian law, noting that landmines are indiscriminate weapons that harm civilians and combatants alike.
“If you see a victim and there are remains of a factory-made mine there, you don’t really know who laid it. It could have been the Myanmar military or it could have been one that the ethnic armed groups got their hands on.”
“What matters is how much land is being contaminated. And how many people are being killed or injured. This is our primary question. In the answering of that question, we find, in many cases, we can attribute use. Nowhere on the planet where the Landmine [and Cluster Munitions] Monitor has made reports and we attribute use in those situations, has a soldier come up and said, ‘Yeah, I laid that land mine.’ Never happened, never happened. Attribution is a difficult thing to do. And it's not the primary focus of our report.
But when we can attribute use, we do so. We have no percentage, because the attributions we [do] have are a drop in the bucket. We might have more attributions toward the military one year and more attributions towards ethnic armed groups in another year. Can we draw a conclusion from that? No. We can't. The ethnic armed groups have had a capacity to manufacture loads of improvised antipersonnel mines, and are doing so today. The Myanmar military has its own manufacturing capacity for factory-made mines. They've copied Chinese and US mine designs for the mines that they manufacture. They certainly have a capacity to manufacture massive numbers. We have no idea how many. Their mines are a little bit more robust than the improvised mines that ethnic armed groups in Myanmar deploy.
The ethnic groups use a variety of battery-made mines. And they tend to like to say in public, ‘Well, they last for a few months and they go dead,’ which is utter rubbish. 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 mine. But the ethnic armed groups will capture or lift as many of the Myanmar Army-made mines as they can get their hands on. And they reuse them.
So, if you see a victim and there are remains of a factory-made mine there, you don't really know who laid it. It could have been the Myanmar military or it could have been one that the ethnic armed groups got their hands on. And within the past few months, the past many months now, they have gotten their hands on many, through overrunning a number of military outposts of the Myanmar military. We have the pictures of the mines that they've seized. None have been reported destroyed.
So, that's not something you can attribute. Most ways in which we attribute something is, for example: The young man was killed by a landmine on his way home from his pasture. He walked to the pasture every day. We know that it was a recently laid mine. The people in the village said, ‘Well, there were two ethnic armed groups who clashed there the other day; one of them must have laid it.’ So, we don't know which one it was. But we attribute it to those two ethnic armed groups who were clashing in that area.
In another case, people said, ‘Well, we always went to this mountain to look for mushrooms. This time we went up, we stepped on mines. The Myanmar Army camped there a month ago; they must have laid it.’ We report it just as the villagers said it. That's as close as we can get to attribution.”