Contested Ground
RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 8, 2025
In a recent submission to Mine Free Myanmar’s art contest, a soldier wrote a love story in which the protagonist steps on landmine while deployed in Shan State. While the account is fictional, it demonstrates the author’s reflections on his experiences in the villages and communities of the region, and consideration about the harms inflicted.
“This is very important for us,” says Webster, the nationwide campaign coordinator. “Maybe a long time ago, they were a soldier and they laid landmines, and now it’s obvious that they feel guilty about that.”
The nationwide art contest, now in its third year, features categories for adults and children under 17. It is one element of the advocacy and public information provided by Mine Free Myanmar, a country-focused initiative of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, alongside personal impact stories, online quizzes, educational videos, and outreach via local media. Webster, who recently spoke to Insight Myanmar as part of the “Navigating a Minefield” series, using a pseudonym for his protection, runs the campaign in partnership with his wife, who is also the organization’s data manager.
The artworks that are submitted offer a window into the lives of survivors. One woman who was injured while fetching water was later abandoned by her husband because she was disabled. Last year’s prize winner from Rakhine State shows a boy playing football who runs into a mine in front of the village signboard. Common themes for many of the survivors include the difficulty just in survival as a disabled person, amid the already difficult conditions facing so many people, and the depression and mental anguish that often accompany the physical injuries.
Neutrality is a defining feature of Mine Free Myanmar’s campaign. Long-term solutions to reduce the use of landmines, or ban them altogether, depend on the actions of all conflict actors. The soldier’s submission shows that the advocacy is reaching even people on the side of the military’s State Administration Council (SAC), which was recently rebranded as the State Security and Peace Commission (SSPC) ahead of planned elections. While the military has a long history of deploying anti-personnel mines, the conflict that has enveloped the country since the 2021 coup has seen increased landmine use from some ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and pro-democracy resistance forces as well.
From anecdotal evidence, including survivor stories collected by Mine Free Myanmar volunteers, there was a surge in landmine incidents following Operation 1027 launched by several EAOs in October 2023. The most recent Landmine Monitor report published in November 2024 concluded that Myanmar suffered the most recorded casualties from landmine and explosive remnants of war of any country in the world in 2023.
The campaign collected 50 impact stories from Northern Shan State, but the project was cut short by a lack of funding and dangers posed by SAC airstrikes. The safety of the staff is another reason that neutrality is essential. “It is very dangerous to talk about banning landmines, because both the SAC side and the armed groups side can hate us for talking about it,” Webster says. “We have to hide our name, our profile, to work on this issue.”
The challenges posed by the conflict also require innovative communications strategies. The social media pages, including explosive ordnance risk education and advocacy to ban landmines, adhere to the strict policy of neutrality, without responding to the many partisan and provocative messages posted by visitors. The campaign spans the digital divide by working with local broadcast media and contacting community focal points, who save contest posters and education materials to share offline with their networks.
While local news outlets cover landmine incidents almost on a daily basis, the steady toll is often missed by international outlets. Webster believes the actual number of landmine incidents is undercounted. “What we have seen is very few of them,” he says. “We just collect the impact stories of those who survived. There are many people who are being killed by the landmines in the community.”
Another aspect of the challenge for communities is illustrated by the submission of girl from Tanintharyi, who won second prize. Her series of artworks shows villagers receiving mine awareness education, yet some are still casualties of this hidden danger because of the daily necessities of their lives, gathering food, collecting water, and traveling for work. While there are local mechanisms to provide education and respond to landmine incidents, many people are regularly exposed to dangers in the normal course of their lives.
In the absence of coordinated national action on landmines, Webster believes the most effective form of community action is advocacy. “According to my experience, those communities are trying to inform the ethnic armed groups they know in the places where they live to tell them to remove those landmines,” he says. “The best way to avoid this, in my opinion, is that they must advocate with the ethnic armed groups and the SAC, both sides. They have to advocate not to lay landmines so that they can survive freely after there is no conflict.”
The role of the international community, he says, is to support multilateral engagement and advocacy to make that ban a reality, although he admits that amid the active conflict, reductions in landmine use and more awareness by armed actors might be the best that can be hoped. In the meantime, Webster urges international partners providing victim assistance to focus not just on the immediate injuries and provision of prostheses, to encompass the reality of a person’s life after an injury and the need for vocational training and sustainable livelihoods.
“If we don’t talk about banning landmines, we have to support the survivor every decade, every generation,” Webster says. “It will never end.”