http://www.nwf.org/intlwild/2000/abtma00.html
International Wildlife
March/April 2000
About This Issue
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Land Mines: Grim Legacy For Wildlife Worldwide
COVERING WILDLIFE in remote and rugged areas of the world is a
matter of great personal interest to our reporters, and it´s
usually a task they relish. But sometimes the duty is downright
unpleasant, even hazardous.
[INLINE] Take our story on land mines ([14]page 24), those
explosive devises intended to maim and kill people who happen to
step on them. Worldwide there are more than 100 million mines, many
left from conflicts long ended. Although the grief they cause
humans is a high-profile news issue (in Cambodia alone, 40,000
people have been disabled by mines and unexploded ordnance), the
impact of mines on wild animals is only beginning to be understood
and is still largely unreported.
Enter our team. Floyd Whaley is a veteran reporter whose credits
include pieces for Reader´s Digest. Kevin Hamdorf is a
Phillipines-based photojournalist whose pictures have appeared
widely in Asia. We sent them to Cambodia, where they traveled
directly into one of the world´s most heavily mined areas.
What has happened in Cambodia mirrors problems elsewhere in the
world. Elephants have been blown up in Sri Lanka, gazelles
eradicated in parts of Libya and snow leopards killed in
Afghanistan. But Cambodia with its long history of conflict is an
especially sad case. Mines around agricultural areas have forced
people into the forests to kill wild animals for food. And the
devices have even been unearthed and redeployed as tools to kill
tigers.
For Whaley and Hamdorf, the assignment was not always a happy task,
as Whaley´s first-person story recounts. Although teams of
UN-sponsored de-miners are slowly clearing the landscape, even
these experts concede that wildlife will continue to detonate the
instruments of past wars.
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http://www.nwf.org/intlwild/2000/landmine.html
International Wildlife
March/April 2000
SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN KILLERS
By Floyd Whaley
In Cambodia and elsewhere, land mines are taking a huge toll on wild animals
LAST YEAR in Manila I met with a friend to ask about the wildlife
situation in Cambodia. My friend had worked in the small Southeast
Asian country for years as a journalist, and he quickly rattled off
the usual problems: rampant logging and indiscriminate hunting. But
his next comment surprised me. "And then, of course, there are the
land mines," he said. "Who knows how many animals are killed by them?"
[INLINE] The cruel legacy of land mines for innocent people is
well-known: Hundreds of thousands of people have been maimed or killed
in recent decades by some of the more than 100 million land mines
buried worldwide, according to the International Campaign to Ban
Landmines (ICBL). But my friend´s rhetorical question intrigued me.
How many tigers and other wild animals were being killed by these
explosive devices?
To help answer that question, International Wildlife last summer sent
me and photographer Kevin Hamdorf on a fact-finding mission to
Cambodia, one of the world´s most heavily mined countries. Our plan
was to spend time with de-mining crews, interview people who are
starting to compile data on the wildlife carnage, visit markets where
we might find both wildlife products and mines on sale, and see the
infamous "killing fields" that still brim with mines. Our hope was
that in Cambodia, just recently emerging from three decades of war, we
would get a clearer sense of the largely unexplored global issue of
how land mines affect wildlife.
Land mines come in a frightening array of shapes, sizes and uses:
There are huge antitank mines, tiny plastic antipersonnel mines that
can float down rivers, fragmentation mines that spray shrapnel and
bouncing mines that can jump 3 feet and take off a child´s head. The
devices are buried in 87 countries, making vast stretches of places
such as Afghanistan, Angola, Iran and Iraq uninhabitable.
ICBL, a nonprofit group that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, tracks
the human costs of land mines around the world. Lately, researchers
associated with the organization have begun looking into the
environmental impacts of the devices.
"Mines have killed many animals, including elephants in Africa and Sri
Lanka, eradicated gazelles from parts of Libya, pushed snow leopards
to the brink of extinction in Afghanistan, and killed one of the few
remaining male silver-backed mountain gorillas in Rwanda," said Bruce
Gray, an Australian land mine expert who wrote a 1997 report on the
issue for ICBL.
Reliable data on the extent of land mines´ toll on wildlife are
difficult to come by. But Kevin Stewart, an environmental activist
based in Canada, has made an attempt to quantify the problem. Stewart
says he has compiled anecdotal reports of more than 1.6 million
animals dying from land mines in 39 countries. In his collection are
stories of as many as 20 elephants a year being killed by mines in Sri
Lanka, of animals being "blown to pieces" in the Falkland Islands, and
bears, deer and foxes triggering the devices in Croatia.
From an environmental standpoint, the most troubling use of land mines
is in the countries with the richest variety of plants and animals,
says Claudio Torres Nachon, director of the Center for Environmental
Law and Economic Integration of the South, a nongovernmental
organization in Mexico that is affiliated with ICBL. The most heavily
mined among these "hotspots" of wildlife are countries such as
Colombia, Mozambique, Angola, Burma and Cambodia, Nachon adds.
Cambodia was once home to herds of elephants, possibly thousands of
tigers, wild cattle, leopards, bears, barking deer and an array of
other animals. But decades of war have taken their toll on both this
rich panoply of wildlifeand on people. Strife began in the 1960s, when
the Vietnam War spilled into eastern Cambodia. It continued through
the 1970s, when civil war raged and Pol Pot´s brutal Khmer Rouge
forces triumphed. And it lasted through the 1980s and early 1990s,
when Cambodians fought against occupying Vietnamese forces. As a
result, Cambodia today is littered with as many as 6 million mines. An
estimated 40,000 Cambodians have been disabled by mines, and uncounted
numbers have died.
[INLINE] With peace and order slowly returning to Cambodia, and
reports coming out of the country of land-mine-triggered wildlife
casualties, Hamdorf and I packed our bags and left for Phnom Penh to
begin our investigation. Our first meeting was with Hunter Weiler, a
retired U.S. bureaucrat who has been working as an independent
wildlife advocate in Cambodia for two years. Weiler recently helped
organize a survey of hunters and local leaders on the status of the
country´s wildlife. The survey, sponsored in part by the
California-based nonprofit group Cat Action Treasury, found that
Cambodian hunters are using land mines to kill tigers and other
animals. The villagers place small mines under dead monkeys or other
bait in the forest, and return a few days later, often to find the
carcass of a hapless tiger that set off the device while examining the
meat. Such booby traps, although crude, are easy to set up, and they
leave enough of the tiger´s skin and bones to sell on the black
market.
"The war is over but they picked up some very bad habits in the
countryside," said Weiler. "The hunters are taking mines out of the
populated areas and putting them back down in the wildlife habitats."
Weiler´s survey found that the use of land mines to kill tigers, deer,
wild cattle and other animals was widespread. For some hunters,
though, the booby traps didn´t work. In one remote village, a tiger
that stepped on a mine lived to bite one of his attackers on the rear
and escape.
Weiler cautioned that land mines are not the only reason for the
decline of Cambodia´s wildlife. "It´s not just the mines and artillery
shells," he said. "It´s thirty years of everybody having a gun and
mowing down everything they see in the countryside." Deforestation has
also contributed to the disappearance of wild creatures, Weiler added.
To learn more about the fate of some of the country´s wild animals,
Weiler suggested a visit to Street 166 in one of the city´s central
markets. Land mines and heavy weaponry were once openly available in
this and other markets, but a 1998 crackdown sent the weapons
underground. The illegal trade in animals is still thriving, however.
On the muddy road, I found rows of shops selling a grisly collection
of animal parts: antlers, skulls, Asian black bear skins and paws.
At one shop, two giggling teenagers sat reading a magazine in front of
an 8-foot-long tiger skin. The girls said matter-of-factly that the
tiger skin sold for $700. When we pulled out a camera, both girls
jumped up and rushed over to us, waving their arms angrily. "No
photos! No photos!" the girls screamed. An older woman emerged from
the back of the shop, yelled in Cambodian and pushed us out. As I was
shoved away, I asked how the tiger had been killed. She responded by
stomping her feet, shooing me away like a cockroach.
Hoping to get more definitive data on the extent of the land mine
problem, I went to the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC), located on
the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The United Nations, with the help of a
$2.4 million grant from the United States and Sweden, set up CMAC in
1993 to coordinate the country´s de-mining efforts. More than 3,000
Cambodians and expatriates work for CMAC. The agency uses a variety of
methods to clear land, including mine detectors, mine-sniffing dogs,
high-tech sonar devices, a truck that whips chains onto mine fields
and a 59-ton German vehicle that runs over mines.
In its utilitarian offices, I met Mao Vanna. Mao is a wiry, seasoned
de-mining expert, and his eyes lit up when the subject of wildlife was
mentioned. He has worked for years in some of the country´s most
dangerous areas and could remember seeing animal carcasses in mine
fields. He immediately confirmed Weiler´s reports of land mine
hunting.
"The tribal people still use traditional traps, but the soldiers are
lazy," he said. "They use machine guns or booby traps with a 60mm- or
80mm-rocket shell hooked to a trip wire. That kills a herd."
Other experts at the center told me that most of Cambodia´s land mines
are spread out across the central and northwestern sections of the
country, where much of the fighting with the Khmer Rouge took place.
But millions of bombs were dropped by the American military on a
section of the Ho Chi Minh trail running through the northeastern part
of the country. As many as a third of those weapons are still lodged
in the ground, unexploded.
"Animals are as much at risk from this unexploded ordnance as people,
in fact more so," said Bob Keeley, a former British military officer
who is now an advisor for CMAC. "Animals can´t go to mine awareness
training or read the warning signs."
Cambodia´s de-mining center has been focusing on the human toll of the
deadly devices, but it does have a brief report on the environmental
impacts of land mines. The report states that land mines threaten wild
animals both directly and indirectly. Mines not only kill or maim
animals that step on them, but the devices force people off mined
farmland and into the forestwhere the displaced people clear new land
for planting and kill animals for food.
[INLINE] After two days of reading and hearing about the land mine
issue from others, I was anxious to get into the countryside and see
the problem with my own eyes. Hamdorf and I rented an ancient car and
found ourselves bouncing along a rutted road heading north from Phnom
Penh to the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Battambang province. In
1998, the grueling eight-hour journey would have been impossible.
Unmarked land mines, renegade bands of guerillas and violent bandits
kept most non-Cambodians off the road.
The countryside was dotted with flimsy wooden shacks and muddy rice
paddies. Huge trucks driven by uniformed soldiers hauled logs,
flouting a nationwide ban on logging. At a ramshackle town along the
way, we saw villagers turning over their weapons to a local official
part of a national program to disarm civilians. On the pile sat an
M-16, a half dozen AK-47s and more pistols than I could count.
We stopped for lunch at a roadside food stall, where I shared a meal
of chicken bones and rice with a passing team of de-miners. They told
me my aching back would get no relief on the rugged road ahead.
"Are there still bandits and land mines?" I asked.
"No bandits or land mines on the road," said one of the team with a
smile, as he stood up to leave. Putting his hand on my shoulder, his
face became serious. "But stay on the road."
In Battambang town, land mines were not a concern but the menu at the
Teo Hotel restaurant was something of a shock. "Fried Hot Spice with
Wild Pig, Turtle, Deer or Jungle Dragon" sold for $2.50 a bowl. For
the same price, diners could enjoy "Sour Spice Soup with Wild Animal."
The waiter explained flatly that "Wild Animal" was the diner´s choice
of tiger, elephant or deer, but he had no idea if the animals had been
killed by land mines.
At the mining center´s provincial headquarters the next day, six-year
veteran de-miner Mam Neang described the challenge of his job. No maps
were made by the armies that laid Cambodia´s mine fields. Most of
those who set out the devices were untrained, and many have since
died. As a result, mines were just randomly scattered and never
recorded.
When asked about the impact on wildlife, Mam paused for a moment and
then said no journalist had asked him that question before. "Wild
animals are hitting trip wires out there all the time," said Mam, a
de-mining unit manager. "But we are focusing on the people. We´re not
keeping records of the wildlife casualties."
We then left in a convoy of off-road vehicles down a pockmarked road
toward the village of Treng. As we arrived at the village, a cluster
of houses at a road junction, a Canadian member of the de-mining team
described it as "sort of the Poland of Cambodia. Both sides rolled
back and forth through here, killing people and leaving mines."
The whole village had been declared a mine field and the painstakingly
slow process of clearing the area had just begun. The villagers,
dressed in ragssome missing legsjust did their best until the
de-miners made it to their homes. Bright red land mine warning signs
lined the road and dozens of de-miners carefully probed the ground
with rods, while children played in the fields beside them.
Assisting in the de-mining operation was Sith Tang, a 41-year-old who
fought in the Cambodian military for 14 years before joining the
de-mining group. "My men placed some of these mines," he said. "We had
to defend ourselves."
Sith, who served as a second lieutenant, ordered his men to lay mines
around their position every night when they slept in the jungle.
Patrols on both sides routinely did the same thing and then just left
the devices there the next day. In the morning, they often found deer,
wild pigs and other animals that had stepped on mines the previous
night.
On one occasion, when his men had rigged a trip wire to a 60-mm shell
to defend their flank, they found a tiger the next morning dying a
slow, painful death. Its front paws blown off and head nearly severed,
it still squirmed when they approached.
Although I had been unable to get statistics on land-mine-related
wildlife deaths in Cambodia, I had at least succeeded in getting a
firsthand account. But the search left me troubled. In this war-torn
country, where human life meant so little for so many years, the fate
of animals was barely an afterthought. With the dawn of peace in
Cambodia, I thought, perhaps the country´s wildlife would get more
attention.
I asked Sith when he thought Cambodia´s forests and jungles would once
again be safe for wildlife. He remained silent for a moment. "We´ll
never be able to get rid of all the mines," he said. "I think the
animals are going to have to find some of them for us."
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Floyd Whaley is a Philippines-based contributing editor for Reader´s
Digest and has written for USA Today and The Los Angeles Times.
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