The Kingdom of Cambodia is a fascinating country despite its tiny size. It is rich in natural resources and traditional culture, and its Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world.
However, Cambodia is also one of the world's most-heavily mined countries due to the nearly three decades of civil conflicts.
So far, landmines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) are still a daily threat to the lives of thousands of families and remain a major obstacle to socio-economic development in former conflict
areas.
In a country with about 13 million population, more than 61,000 people were killed or maimed by mines and UXO from 1979 to 2004,
according to the figures from UNICEF.
In order to reduce the victims of mines and UXO and clearing landmines to return them to the community, the royal government has done it's utmost on it and made some progress.
Under the assistance of international community, a wide range of activities against landmine/UXO have been waged, such as surveying mine-affected areas, awareness raising on the danger of mines, and marking mines and mine clearance.
The Cambodian Mine Centre (CMAC) was established in 1992 with the priority to provide land for resettlement, for agriculture use
and for community and infrastructure development.
With support of UNICEF, the Mines Advisory Group started to implement a comprehensive three-year child Mine Risk Education (MRE) project in the heavily affected areas of Battambang, Banteay Meanchey and Siem Reap.
In 2000, the royal government of Cambodia established the Cambodia Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority (CMAA) to regulate and coordinate all agencies involved in mine action,
including NGOs, commercial companies and the Army.
Moreover, the capacity building of people with disabilities programme was officially launched in January 1999 by Handicap International Belgium and has been partially funded by UNICEF since 2000.
Sustained mine removal and mine awareness program have resulted in a significant decrease in the number of deaths and injuries, which fell from 4,318 in 1996 to 891 in 2004.
Since the huge clean-up, started in 1992, nearly 1.6 million landmines and UXO have been located and destroyed, and surface area cleared from 1992 to 2004 reached to 28,409 hectares.
But there are still an estimated 4-6 million landmines buried in Cambodia soil, and the number of people killed or injured by landmine and UXO is still alarmingly high - between 2000-2004 there were 4,194 casualties reported. Among those were 1,297 children under the age of 18, most of whom were tampering with UXO.
Areas along the Cambodian and Thai border were the highly contaminated areas and have not been cleared up. According to the Cambodian Mine/UXO Victim Information System (CMVIS), almost 30
percent of all casualties occur along the Cambodian and Thai border.
According to a national survey in 2000, in 13,908 villages surveyed, there were 3,000 suspected contaminated areas, and a total of 446,600 hectares suspected of being contaminated.
Pailin, located about 15 km from the Thai border and some 375 km northwest of Cambodia's capital, is the post conflict area.
Among 78 villages here, about 88 percent of the land are still littered with mines and UXO, and the people here are suffering with them.
Cambodia has set itself the goal of achieving zero landmine/UXO victims by 2015. To realizing the target, the government still has a lot of work to do and a long way to go.