Two Cambodian deminers killed by anti-tank mine

According to demining officials, two Cambodian deminers were killed while attempting to remove a decades-old anti-tank mine from a rice field that had previously been the scene of combat between government troops and Khmer Rouge soldiers.

The government’s Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) claimed in a statement that “an old brutal hidden killer” killed the two deminers on Thursday when they were digging mines in the northwest Oddar Meanchey province.

“This is the loss of professional experts who have contributed to the cause of peace, security and the developing of Cambodian people and the country,” CMAC said, identifying those killed as CMAC deminers Pov Nepin and Ouen Channara.

The country in Southeast Asia is still covered in abandoned weapons and ammunition from the 1960s and other war-related conflicts.

During the Vietnam War, the United States bombarded large areas of Cambodia, a campaign that contributed to the establishment of the murderous Khmer Rouge government.

Tens of thousands of people were killed or maimed during the course of the almost three decades of conflict that followed, during which millions of landmines were planted throughout Cambodia.

Since 1979, there have been about 20,000 mine and unexploded ordnance-related deaths and twice as many injuries.

During a demining training operation in southern Cambodia in 2018, war-era munitions detonated, killing an Australian and a Cambodian.

Thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance from a previous fight were discovered inside a school in the northeastern part of the nation in August 2023.

The relatives of fatalities who “actively participated in mine clearing operations… in order to ensure that people live with safety after the war era” received PM Hun Manet’s condolences on Thursday.

Hun Manet stated at a November anti-mine conference in Siem Riep that since 1992, Cambodia has destroyed over a million anti-personnel mines and three million explosive remnants of war, clearing more than 3,000 square kilometers (741,000 acres) of landmines.

According to him, there are still about 1,600 square kilometers of polluted land that need to be cleansed, leaving almost a million Cambodians living with the effects of the conflict.