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we, we don't know how many land mines are left in Cambodia
we suspect it's between 3 million and 6 million
I generally use the term - five million
thats as good as any other number
there's maybe a hundred million landmines left around the world
and if you want to grab a number we really don't know how many are left around the world
the country with the most in it could very well be Iraq
with maybe 25 million land mines left along the Iraq-Iran border
from the Iraq-Iran war.
The objective here is to make the country safe by 2020.
Now the government's working really hard to get that done
there is 4 demining groups that are working here,
maybe 3500 deminers around the country working.
Some people think it will take between 50 and 100 years though
to make the country safe.
Some of it is moving a land mine
when you ask them where are they moving it from?
"we're moving it out of my farm".
some people are traveling down a road, some people are just
observers, when somebody is trying to move something
when he goes off their injured also.
But we have people injured every month in Cambodia from land mines.
It's such a common occurrence around the world now
that the outside world doesn't hear about it.
In September we had three boys who found
a Vietnamese B40
shoulder rocket-propelled grenade and they were trying to break the egg open
with a rock to try to get the metal out to sell it
and it blew up and killed all three of them, they were eight years old.
That didn't make the news anywhere out of Cambodia.
we'd clear all the land mines in a couple years
but they're blowing people up in little countries you can't find on a map.
now there's a lot of countries that are giving a lot of money to help clear land mines.
Princess Diana didn't put the body armor
on and walk into the minefield to talk to British government
into clearing land mines,
she put it on to talk us (USA) in clearing landmines
and we have decided it's not a priority anymore.
Now the governments are still putting a lot of money into clearing landmines
but we're not getting the donations from private individuals
that we need in order to clear land mines from the world.
This isn't rocket science.
We clear landmines with the same method we used a hundred years ago.
you put a mine detector on the ground and when you find something
you get on the ground with a bayonet, then you dig it up and blow it up with TNT.
so...It's easy work.
What we need is Technology.
Richard Branson came out one time and he was gonna provide
blimps for everybody to fly over and map the mine fields.
Well thats wonderful - where are the mine fields?
so. well they're in Cambodia. Well I know that but I'm flying over a village,
what land down there is the mine field? Well, we don't know.
It's always found out the hard way.
We know there is a mine field somewhere because
some poor bloke has had his arms blown off.
inside it, thats how we know the mind field is there.
what we need is a commitment on the part of the people of
the world to see this problem ended.
we don't have any governments putting them in the ground anymore for all practical purposes.
We have four.
We have a lot of non-state parties putting them in.
We got the Taliban putting them in, we got the Farc Guerrillas putting them in,
the Karin Guerrillas in Thailand and Burma putting them in,
you got the Taoists in southern India putting them in and I could go on and on and on.
but... we can find the stuff that's in the ground now.
in Cambodia we're not putting them in the ground anymore.
We can find this stuff if we wanna, if we wanna to do it.
So...