Japan’s foreign minister announced a joint project with Cambodia to share knowledge and technology on landmine removal with countries around the world, including Ukraine.
Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said this during a visit to the Cambodian Mine Action Center, which was formed in the 1990s at the end of the nation’s decades of civil war.
It seeks to deal with an estimated four million to six million landmines and other unexploded munitions left strewn around the countryside.
“Cambodia, which has steadily advanced mine removal within its own country, is now a leader in mine action around the world,” Kamikawa noted, adding that Japan has consistently cooperated in Cambodia’s mine removal since the civil war.
Cambodian deminers are among the world’s most experienced, and several thousand have been sent in the past decade under UN auspices to work in Africa and the Middle East.
Cambodia in 2022 began training deminers from Ukraine, which also suffers from a high density of landmines and other unexploded munitions as the two-year Russian invasion drags on.
“As a concrete cooperation under the Japan Cambodia Landmine Initiative, Japan will provide full-scale assistance to humanitarian mine action in Ukraine,” Kamikawa said.
“Next week, we will provide Ukraine with a large demining machine, and next month, here in Cambodia, we will train Ukrainian personnel on how to operate the machine.”
The NGO Landmine Monitor in its 2022 report listed both Cambodia and Ukraine among nine countries with “massive” mine contamination, meaning they had more than 100sq km of uncleared fields.
Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and about 45,000 have been injured by leftover war explosives, although the average annual death toll has dropped from several thousand to less than 100. Despite a very active demining programme, many dangerous munitions remain in place, posing a hazard to villagers.
Cambodia’s training of Ukrainian deminers, in Poland as well as Cambodia, came after former prime minister Hun Sen – in an unusual move for a nation that usually aligns itself with Russia and China – condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “Cambodia is always against any country that invades another country”. — AP
