OK so now that's out of the way...how is all that related to the cover picture of this post displaying a map of Cambodia showing landmine removal progress throughout the country? Well...read on.
If there was one thing that my choice of travel destinations last year did for me, it was to make me appreciate how valuable safety and security is in the place where you call home. Or maybe not so much home as the places we travel (since I don't feel unsafe at home really ever, thank God). Last year we visited two countries (Rwanda and Croatia) where 30 or so years ago there was a good chance that you would not be safe walking down the streets of a town or city. Not as a tourist. Not as a resident. Not as anything.
In 1991, Croatia was locked in a struggle for independence from Yugoslavia and its cities and citizens faced assaults in the form of munitions shelling from the Yugoslav army. Want to stroll the walls of Dubrovnik in the fall of 1991 like we did last year? Couldn't do it. Not unless you wanted to risk getting hit by a very large projectile that would likely kill you on the spot. The cost of Croatian independence? About 20,000 lives.
A little less than three years after the Croatian War of Independence, Rwanda had it way worse. Genocide. Tutsi and Hutu neighbors and countrymen killing each other hand to hand with weapons as crude and as brutal as machetes because they apparently were different enough to someone with a voice loud enough to call for the extermination of the other group. No 20,000 lives here. 500,000 to 1,000,000 killed. And in the most brutal way. Over nothing really.
Think about all that for a moment. Just a bit more than 30 years ago these places would not have been safe. But we were fine last year. We walked around Kigali and Split and Dubrovnik without a problem. No more killing. No more danger. Not in the way that it was in the early 1990s.
15 or so years before violence in Rwanda and Croatia was raging out of control, something similar was happening in Cambodia, which we recently visited as part of our major trip of 2024.
Cambodia had it bad in the 1970s. Really bad. Mostly it was due to the Khmer Rouge, a communist guerilla group which took power in the country in 1975 and which was insistent on abandoning anything resembling 20th century advances in industry, medicine, technology and relations with foreign countries and restoring Cambodia to a self-reliant agrarian society. Their methods of getting there? Executions. Torture. Genocide. How about wiping out one quarter of the entire population of Cambodia. One quarter of the entire country's population!!!! For what? Being educated. Practicing western medicine. Being a civil servant in the overthrown government. Being labeled a subversive. Something else like one of those reasons.
The rise and reign of the Khmer Rouge was bookmarked on either side by the civil war in neighboring Vietnam before the Khmer Rough seized power and a civil war in Cambodia once the Khmer Rouge established power. All of that is long over today but it's not forgotten. It can't be. Because while the effects of civil war and ethnic violence in Rwanda and Croatia are not felt with continued violence and destruction today, that's not the case in Cambodia.
In 2024, Cambodia looks as peaceful and welcoming as Rwanda or Croatia were in 2023. But the conflict in Cambodia is still felt. Not by men with weapons shooting each other but through detonated landmines. From the Vietnam War through the coup by the Khmer Rouge to the Cambodian Civil War there were a ton of landmines placed everywhere in Cambodia. No markings. No labels. No responsibility for future casualties. But plenty of danger. Everywhere. And a lot of them are still there. Waiting to explode.
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| Mines removed from Cambodia. Amazing how small these things are. Cupcake sized killers. |
Between 1979 and 2002, 20,000 people in Cambodia were killed by landmines. 20,000 people. That's a bit more than 800 per year. How many in somewhere like the United States? I'm guessing (and this truly is an unresearched guess) about zero. 800 in a place as small as Cambodia is a lot. Like a ton. Cambodia also has one of the highest per capita number of amputees of any country in the world and the number one culprit is landmines According to a 2023 article in Time Magazine, there are 40,000 amputees in the country of 16.6 million. That's one in every 415 people with amputated something. That sounds high also, doesn't it? It does to me.
How does this happen? Well, by someone walking through an area of the country which is loaded up with mines. Nothing complicated. Just hidden danger everywhere. Maybe it's a tripwire, maybe it's body weight, but something sets these things off in places where nobody has any idea that there's any real danger. It could be a farmer. It could be someone taking a shortcut through the woods. It could be a tourist like you and me. It could be a kid playing near a village. Wrong place. Simple as that. The worst part is most mines aren't designed to kill; they are designed to maim, with some throwing shrapnel 200 meters or so (that's about two football fields with end zones). So you live with limbs removed. And likely pain every day. Got the picture yet? Well, let's keep going anyway.
Maybe you step on a tank mine and get lucky because those types of mines aren't set off by something as light as the weight of a person. You will never know. But a tractor works on a tank mine. Maybe a farmer driving a tractor gets really unlucky and sets off a stacked mine which is a series of mines laid on top of each other that detonate simultaneously. A tank mine is designed to stop a tank. What do you think it does to a tractor? These things can be anywhere. They were laid a long, long time ago by people indiscriminately looking to stop someone else getting near them. No records. No maps. No responsibility. Just danger.
So I know what you are probably thinking: why don't the Cambodians just remove these things. Sure! Great idea! How are you going to propose doing that? Metal detectors? Some of these things are made of plastic. Do you want to volunteer to enter a mined zone with a metal detector when there might be plastic mines out there? Yeah...me either.
This is where the rats come in.
In the mid-1990s, a Belgian and pet owner named Bart Weetjens was thinking in his spare time (I'm speculating a bit here...) about the global landmine problem that faced this world of ours and he wondered if rodents, with their heightened sense of smell, might be a solution to that problem. It appears based on a little internet searching that he started with gerbils but eventually settled on rats. Plentiful and reasonably intelligent and trainable seemed to be the logic here.
The problem? It would likely take up to a year to train a rat to reliably identify the explosive ingredient in landmines (TNT, if you must know) and European rats lived around 3 years. Not a good return on investment in terms of time or money. Lots of training. Relatively short career doing what they were trained to do.
Fortunately for this story, Bart didn't abandon the rats idea. Instead, he starting searching for different kinds of rats. And he found some. African giant pouched rats in Tanzania apparently live for up to nine years. Now nine years vs. three years may not seem like a lot of difference but if you are going to invest a year training a rat to detect TNT, well then two years of regular rat life vs. eight years of African giant pouch rat life is huge.
At the risk of selling a complex and involved story very, very short, from there the Belgian government got on board and the APOPO organization was formed. APOPO, which stands for Anti-Persoonsmijen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling (it's in Flemish) is now involved in mine and unexploded ordnance removal (and admittedly Cambodia also still has a good amount of mostly American unexploded cluster bombs along with their mines) in a number of locations around the globe. They started working on mine removal in Mozambique with great success and in 2010 turned their attention to southeast Asia. In 2016, they moved operations into Cambodia and in 2018 they opened center in Siem Reap.
And that's where we come in. Well, six years after that date anyway.
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| The map at APOPO detailing their global reach. Not all spots are landmine clearances. |
APOPO's center in Siem Reap is used as their base of operations in Cambodia and is also open for visitors. It's apparently very popular. The place was packed when we got there in the middle of the afternoon and we delayed our arrival an hour or 90 minutes or so based on calling earlier in the day and finding them unable to accommodate any more visitors at our originally planned arrival time.
A visit to APOPO involves some static displays detailing their global footprint and the details behind the work that they do followed by a quick tour which includes some videos about the importance of their work and a demonstration of how their rats find mines. The last piece there is clearly the star attraction.
While the most visible and publicized aspect of APOPO's work involves deploying rats in minefields to detect TNT, the organization uses both rats and dogs in their mine clearing operations and also uses the rats as a means of early tuberculosis detection. I guess it's like a side gig that uses similar principles (sense of smell) to achieve similar results as detecting the presence of explosives. The dogs are trained in Europe and the rats are trained in Tanzania.
So how do you clear an area of mines with dogs and rats? Well based on what our guide, Mankay (guessing at the spelling a bit...), told us the initial identification occurs through intel from local populations followed by an area sweep from a team with dogs. This verifies that there are mines in the area but doesn't pinpoint the location or facilitate their removal.
Based on that initial identification, the area is prepared for detection by the rats. Pathways are cleared in the area about eight feet or so apart by a dude driving what was described to us as basically a heavily armored lawnmower that then allows installation of a setup for the rats to get to work. And no, they don't just unleash a whole bunch of rats in the area. There are currently only 43 trained rats in Cambodia and eight of those work at the APOPO visitor center showing off for tourists. The rats are leashed and walked deliberately back and forth between two handlers until they find a mine. The humans take over from there, carefully excavating and removing the explosive.
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| Mine detection demonstration. Without live mines. |
The outdoor demonstration portion of the tour gave us a great overview of how invisible these things are from the surface of the Earth and how deliberate and careful the rats are in their work. But it's the removed mines in the display cases in the visitor center and the stories on the walls of the place that are truly chilling. I don't think I'd even seen a mine in real life in a museum before (although I could be wrong) but the quantity and variety of below grade explosives on display at APOPO was truly chilling. Particularly because they were all removed from forests or rice paddies or villages in Cambodia that I'm sure don't look much different than the land around Siem Reap that we traveled through to get there. It's pretty creepy and disgusting actually.
I do believe it's important we visit places like this when we travel. We could hide behind the walls of a hotel or all-inclusive resort but what's the point? Isn't part of the reason we travel to understand what life is like in other parts of the world. It's not all rainbows and unicorns out there as much as we might like it to be. There are wonderful amazing sights to see in the places we visit but there are also very real problems that are different than what we might experience at home. It's important to understand all of that when we travel someplace new, I think. Learning about the devastating affects of landmines left and forgotten decades ago is part of life in Cambodia. Visiting APOPO was important and not just so they could take the money we paid and put it to good use.
It costs about 6,000 Euros to train one rat. Just saying...
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| Mankay pointing out telltale signs of hidden landmines. Again, not live mines. |
I can't imagine how stressful it is to clear minefields for a living. And here I'm talking about the humans for a moment, not the rats. I don't want any job where there's a legitimate risk of getting blown to pieces on any workday. I think my job is taxing sometimes. All I do is sit in meetings and try to convince people to see things my way. I have no real context for clearing minefields with an African giant pouch rat or two as my guides.
Apparently, the rats aren't super enthusiastic about it either. They only work from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then they quit for the day. I guess a tired rat isn't very motivated from what we were told on our tour. But who can blame them? They are nocturnal, can't see in the daytime and are prone to sunburn on certain parts of their body that lack hair to protect them (ears and tails). Would you want to work beyond 9 a.m. with those limitations in a hot and generally pretty sunny place?
But regardless of the satisfaction of APOPO's workers (both humans and rats...and dogs), the real measure of success here is are they making a difference. The answer is yes. Both on the landmine removal side of the equation and the survivability of their workers side of things. Both the dogs and the rats that are trained and deployed by APOPO go through rigorous zero-tolerance-for-mistakes training and redundant teams of rats are deployed during mine detection operations to verify findings and eliminate mistakes. Someone on our tour asked if anyone had been killed de-mining places in Cambodia and Mankay's answer was basically "would people continue to work here if people had died?" Good question. And answer.
I can't imagine how much work is ahead of APOPO. The map in the cover photo of this post has a lot of red indicating remaining minefields. That represents a lot more work and a lot more dogs and rats and I'm sure it's all going to go extremely slowly. We contributed to APOPO through our visit but also through a donation before we set out on our trip to Cambodia. A little goes a long way here. A donation of $30 clears 30 square meters of minefield. That seems like it's money well spent to me.
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| More unearthed mines. Chilling every time I see these. |
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