CAMBODIA’S FEMALE DEMINERS
Stuart Hughes, Battambang Province, NW Cambodia

In a ramshackle market in a remote corner of northwestern Cambodia, Leath Chumbory sits on a wooden bench and hurriedly eats her breakfast of soup and noodles.

The first light of the day is beginning to seep between the gaps in the bamboo roof and Chumbory is keen to begin work before the sun rises too high in the sky and makes conditions stiflingly uncomfortable.

For eight hours a day, Leath Chumbory searches for landmines in one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. 

Almost three decades of conflict have left Cambodia with a chronic landmine problem. Years of aerial bombing and the widespread use of mines by all sides in Cambodia’s recent bloody history have had a devastating impact on the country. 

Almost half of Cambodia’s 11 million people live alongside, or even in the middle of, minefields. More than 800 people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed or injured by landmines in Cambodia last year. More than a quarter of the victims were children.

The landmine problem is particularly acute in the northwestern province of Battambang. The area was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting between Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and Vietnamese and Cambodian government soldiers. During the battles of the 1970s and 1980s, landmines were an everyday weapon of war. Pol Pot called mines his “perfect soldiers,” so effective were they at causing death and injury to his enemies.        

Leath Chumbory experienced at first hand the terrifying excesses of the Khmer Rouge regime. She had just entered her teens when, in 1975, Cambodia’s then leader Lon Nol fled the country and the capital Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot’s rebels. 

After taking Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began implementing its murderous experiment of trying to transform Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian society. The Khmer Rouge forced the population of Phnom Penh and the other major towns into the countryside to undertake slave labour in the fields. 

Leath Chumbory was among them.

She was forced to walk 400km from the capital to Battambang Province with her family. Three of her five sisters went missing on the road to Battambang and were never seen again. Later, Leath Chumbory learnt the horrific fate of many of her other relatives.

Her father and two of her brothers were killed at Phnom Penh’s infamous Security Prison 21, a former school where more than 17,000 people were detained and tortured before being transported to the killing fields on the outskirts of the city and murdered. Her brother in law, an army general under Lon Nol, was slowly cooked to death in an oven. 

When she reached Battambang, Leath Chumbory was forced, like thousands of other Cambodians, to build dams for up to 15 hours a day. She knew that even the most minor act of disobedience would result in summary execution. The work nearly killed her.

On Christmas Day in 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. A fortnight later, Pol Pot’s government was toppled. As the Khmer Rouge soldiers fled into the jungle and the mountains on either side of the Thai border, Leath Chumbory was able to escape and begin the search for her missing family members. She was eventually reunited with her sister – the only relative to have survived the Pol Pot years.

She returned to Phnom Penh, married and gave birth to a baby daughter. The couple scratched out a meagre existence running a street stall in the capital but when Leath Chumbory’s husband died in 1990, she struggled to survive.

By 1996, Leath Chumbory was poverty-stricken and desperate. But her life was about to change. She replied to a newspaper advert placed by the British-based mine clearance charity, MAG, inviting women in difficult circumstances to train as deminers. She was selected and, after undergoing training in demining techniques, began working with a 15-strong Mine Action Team. 

Leath Chumbory’s motivations for working in such a dangerous environment are a mixture of the humanitarian and the financial. She’s proud to be able to clear fields, villages and wells so that those living there are able to live their lives free from the threat of landmines. But with a salary almost ten times Cambodia’s national average, Leath Chumbory and her fellow deminers are able to support not only themselves but large extended families as well. In Chumbory’s case, her income enables her to raise the five children she adopted from her sister after her brother-in-law was killed by a mine.

Chumbory is now part of a unique project – Cambodia’s only all-female demining team. The team is currently working in the village of Svay Sor, 60km from the provincial capital of Battambang Town. The 50 families living in Svay Sor, which means tall mango tree in the Khmer language, abandoned the village in 1979 because of the heavy fighting in the area. It was 17 years before they were able to begin returning. 

More than 100 families, most of them farmers, have now settled in Svay Sor -- even though the village is heavily contamined with mines ranging from small anti-personnel devices to powerful anti-tank weapons. Accidents are common and a number of villagers limp along on crude prosthetic limbs, a poor substitute for the legs they lost to landmines. Recently, an ox cart travelling through a field on the outskirts of Svay Sor detonated an anti-tank mine the size of a dinner plate. The explosion killed three people. Despite the risks, the villagers of Svay Sor say they have no choice but to work the land. They know the risks – but this is the only land they have. Some villagers have taken extraordinary risks by trying to clear the mines themselves. Others have simply tried to plant crops around the areas they know to be mined. 

The women deminers search the land methodically, first with a metal detector and then on hands and knees. Inserting a metal spike into the ground at an angle of 30 degrees so as not to disturb the sensitive lids of the mines, they clear the village inch by inch. Many of the mines commonly found in Cambodia are too dangerous to be physically removed from the ground. Instead, they are surrounded by explosives and blown up wherever they’re found. Each safely destroyed mine leaves a deep crater, into which a yellow wooden stake is placed, marking the spot like a tombstone. 

On a hand-drawn map, the team’s supervisor, Seng Somala marks out the cleared areas in green pencil. The villagers of Svay Sor are eager to know how long it will take for the minefield to be made safe so they can begin building houses and planting crops. 

Seng Somala admits her team has come under closer scrutiny because it is made up entirely of women. She has no doubts, however, that her deminers can match their male counterparts. 

“Men are stronger and sometimes quicker than women deminers but women are more patient and they try harder so they easily make up,” she says.

Seng Somala believes the pilot all-female team has been a model for the whole of Cambodian society, empowering the women and encouraging strong bonds between them.

“They take care of each other and are more confident and vocal,” she says.

“This is a real example of what women in Cambodia can achieve. It will improve the profile of women and promote our position in society.”

As the sun begins to cool on the dusty fields of Svay Sor, the women begin packing up their metal detectors, flak jackets and safety helmets and prepare to return to the barracks they share during the week. In front of a mirror nailed to a bamboo post, Som Chany combs the grit and sweat from her hair and applies a veneer of make up. 

Although the women range in age from 22 to 45, Som Chany regards her fellow team members as equals – united in their determination to rid their country of landmines. 

“Some women are strong, some women are less strong, but working together makes us all strong,” she says.                                   

               



    



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