Japan, Cambodia to train Ukraine on removing land mines

The Associated Press

Cambodia and Japan will share knowledge and technology on land mine removal with Ukraine and other countries.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa made the announcement during a July 2024 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 up to 6 million land mines 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 said, adding Japan has 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 United Nation 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 land mines and other unexploded munitions as Russia’s illegal invasion drags past two years.

“As a concrete cooperation under the Japan Cambodia Landmine Initiative, Japan will provide full-scale assistance to humanitarian mine action in Ukraine,” she said. “ 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 Geneva-based Landmine Monitor in its 2022 report listed both Cambodia and Ukraine among nine countries with “massive” mine contamination, meaning they had more than 100 square kilometers of uncleared fields.

Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have been killed and about 45,000 injured by leftover war explosives, although the average annual death toll has dropped from several thousand to less than 100.

Cambodia’s training of Ukrainian deminers, in Poland as well as Cambodia, came after former Prime Minister Hun Sen condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, saying “Cambodia is always against any country that invades another country.”

Cambodia was one of nearly 100 U.N. member countries that co-sponsored a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion.

Several other countries, including Germany and the United States, have also provided Ukraine with demining assistance.