While visiting many of the temples it is delightful to hear small groups of musicians playing traditional Khmer music in the background. When you get up close to the traditional musicians you realize that they are the continued victims of wars that ended as long as 30 years ago. The musicians at the temples are mostly land mine victims. Cambodia was the most heavily land mined nation in the world. For a country of 11.5 million people there were over ten million mines laid.
While the Khmer Rouge were the worst offenders, deliberately targeting the civilian population with mines and booby traps, all sides have shown blatant disregard for the long-term consequences of the use of mines on human and animal populations.
The scope of the inhumanity of this type of warfare boggles my mind and I am at a loss describe just how wrong it is..... I don't know how to write about it except to say that before her death lady Di worked hard to stop the use of land mines and I am proud that in 1999 Canada took the lead with the ‘Ottawa Treaty’ banning the production and use of anti-personnel mines. But let it be know that the United States, Russia and China, have thus far still refused to sign.
The following is a list of countries that have manufactured and sold mines to be used in Cambodia. The United States, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland.
The world not just Cambodian society must address the issue of those disabled by mines. This is hard in Cambodia for the blame is still not placed on the nations and groups that laid the mines. In this traditional Buddhist society the person themselves is viewed as unlucky, their own bad karma having sentenced them to a life of misery.
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