Survey Work Drives Priorities

It’s as simple as this: You have to know where the mines are to make good decisions on clearing them. That is why the surveys of minefields has recently received increasing attention and resources. Many sites have been addressed, either by demining agencies or by the villagers themselves. Now it’s time to survey, calculate and plan, say the agencies involved.

Survey teams fan out across the rural areas of Cambodia. Some follow up reports filed in the early 1990s during the Untac period, and some respond to local complaints to try to pin down where exactly the minefields are. They are often not easy to find.

When Cambodian Mine Action Center surveyors went out to look at 700 sites, they found 300 had either been cleared or had been incorrectly suspected, but found an additional 250, said John Dingley, CMAC technical advisor for survey teams. The surveying was done over 18 months in 1996 and ‘97.

Now, CMAC is tackling a new national survey. Beginning in 1999, teams will spend two years going to every village in Cambodia to assess how seriously each one is infected by mines.

They will chart the minefields, as with earlier CMAC reports, and also gather information on how many casualties they cause and how seriously the villagers’ lives are affected. "The idea is to make the survey as exhaustive as possible," said Dingley.

This will allow CMAC to assign priorities for demining according to the benefits they would bring to the people in villages. These priorities will more closely resemble the operations of Cambodia’s two other demining organizations, Mines Advisory Group and Halo Trust. In recent years, CMAC has followed a somewhat different path than other demining agencies. CMAC for the most part uses large numbers of men on each demining site and plans the work for its deminers a year in advance. The other agencies work in smaller units, are more community-based, and target areas with high casualties. They give a higher priority to alleviating problems within villages as they are found.

UXO HERE: A villager reports the details to CMAC

"We are positioned to do the jobs that CMAC does not do. We get teams out quickly," said Archie Law, country director of MAG. "It’s casualty-based, what we do." MAG has data-gathering teams which evaluate how badly the mines affect the lives of people nearby.

"It’s several teams of people learning about a village and talking things through. As the priority in the village changes we’ll reflect that," said Law.

At the same time CMAC is compiling the national survey, it is concentrating on techniques aimed at making it more flexible and responsive to community needs.

Ten CMAC deminers are working in a small village in Battambang province named Ras Smey Sanghar. Eight people were injured inside the village, and more along the four-kilometer access road. The school is deserted because the Khmer Rouge used it as a hospital, and people are afraid it is mined.

The CMAC deminers are now clearing the school. Most of the village is heavily mined but they will clear only the school, the access road and the water point, all communal areas where people are most at risk.

These deminers are part of a Community Mine Marking Team. The teams’ priority is to reduce casualties, and they move quickly to do limited clearance of high-priority communal land such as village water points or pagodas. They find the worst-hit villages by responding to local requests for help and by doing their own survey inside the two northwestern provinces where they work.

CMAC is expanding this concept. There are 65 men in the marking units, making 13 teams, but that will be expanded to 20 by the end of the year, said Michael McDonnell, the adviser concerned. CMAC is also bringing in several 29-man mobile platoons which will help the teams respond to larger tasks inside villages.

Demining groups can respond quickly in other ways too. CMAC, like MAG and Halo Trust, can send special teams to destroy unexploded ordnance when it is reported. And, like MAG, CMAC fields mine-awareness teams, to educate people and help them cope with mines in their area. Mine awareness teams serve double duty as an extra source of information about the villages, and often channel specific complaints onward.          

High Risk: Marking a minefield

CMAC is also devising how to cooperate better with development NGOs. Halo and MAG routinely work with other NGOs in many of the places they demine. "We go in first so the other organizations will go in and improve medicine and agricultural infrastructure," said Simon Conway, an official with Halo, which often begins demining an area soon after the fighting ends. One factor pushing CMAC to make these changes is improvements in the techniques for demining. For instance, many minefields surveyed to date have been marked far beyond where the mines actually lie, sometimes 200 percent bigger than necessary, said Dingley. But that is set to change. Dog teams and extra survey teams will help shrink the surplus "mined" area. The upshot is that smaller units of deminers will be able to cover more ground and be more flexible. "It will make a huge difference in term of deploying small platoons ... as opposed to larger platoons," Dingley said. "Most of the villages we visit have some problems," said Per Robstad, the technical adviser at CMAC for mines awareness. At one recent mine awareness session at a village in Kampot, villagers showed mine awareness team members three UXOs lying near fields and paths, the residue of fighting in recent years.

The national survey will create an accurate picture of the situation in the villages, and enable an efficient demining plan to be created, CMAC officials say. Since it started operations in 1992, CMAC has not possessed such a comprehensive plan of its own. The other demining organizations will also use the information to set priorities. "It will form our minefields and UXO sites rather than casualties," said Archie Law of MAG.

The survey will have one limitation: It is a snapshot of one moment in time. As new mined areas are found or old ones are cleared by villagers, updates will need to be made. Ideally, said McDonnell, there needs to be a national reporting system similar to that in Belgium, which still has problems with UXOs left over from World War I.

That will require teaching villagers how to report mines, and setting up a more reliable system so villagers can be sure of receiving a timely response to their problems.

"If we’re going to create a national survey we’ve got to create confidence in the national reporting system," said McDonnell. Better information is the first essential step that drives everything else, he stressed.

Story & Photos by Douglas Grindle