As Myanmar government troops clashed with armed, pro-democracy resistance forces in the country’s northwestern Sagaing region in June, concern rose over the dangers lurking beneath the ground, particularly around a Chinese-run copper mine in the area, reported Nikkei Asia.
The military regime seized power in February 2021 and after multiple failed attempts, it was trying to root out rebels so that resource extraction could proceed unhindered. Although, experts mentioned that the government’s strategies for protecting the Letpadaung copper mine and other Chinese interests include ringing them with antipersonnel land mines.
The rapid increase of these weapons, which kill and maim indiscriminately, is exacting a growing toll on civilians and threatens to tear the country apart, according to Nikkei Asia.
Jason Tower, Myanmar country director for the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington-based think tank said, “Land mines are being used by the military as a strategy to protect Chinese assets. This was the fourth time since the coup that troops were used near the Letpadaung mine, which also has land mines around it to restart work,” he said of the operation in June.
Letpadaung has been inoperative since the military ousted the elected government over two years ago. It was a consequence of growing anti-regime resistance by an estimated 16 pro-democracy groups, which collectively make up the People’s Defense Force, active in Sagaing. The Chinese company that has a stake in the mine is a subsidiary of Wanbao Mining, which is affiliated with China’s state-owned defence corporation China North Industries Group (Norinco).
However, Wanbao Mining refused to comment about its mine allegedly being ringed with hidden explosives, reported Nikkei Asia.
According to the Landmine Monitor Myanmar/Burma Country Report for December 2022, evidence of land mines being used to fence Letpadaung was revealed by one of the pro-democracy armed groups in August last year.
The copper mine has been dogged by controversy for years. Moreover, local communities have staged protests against toxic outflows, including mine tailings, or waste byproducts that pollute the groundwater. In late 2012, violence erupted after villagers raged against the project as another symbol of Chinese economic dominance in their midst. But the mine also turned the heat on democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi, long before her government was ousted in the February 2021 power grab. Later, in 2013, when Myanmar was under military moderates as a quasi-democracy, Suu Kyi — as leader of the opposition and chairperson of a commission of inquiry over the anti-mine protests — defended the mine’s plans to operate, Nikkei Asia reported.
Now, other assets backed by China are also drawing attention in connection with the military regime’s use of buried explosives, such as the homegrown MM6 antipersonnel mine. The list includes a power station along the China-Myanmar oil and gas pipeline in the northern Shan state, as well as, some stretches of the pipeline that cuts across the country, according to the Landmine Monitor. “Mines [have] been laid to protect infrastructure projects under China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” the report added.
The generals’ strategy for pacifying China and guarding the assets — Myanmar’s powerful neighbour to the northeast and a key diplomatic and economic ally propping up the regime — has not been lost on campaigners against land mines, such as Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan.
Lead author of the Myanmar land mine report Moser-Puangsuwan said, “This is the only place in the world that we know where land mines have been placed around Chinese infrastructure projects.” He further added, “It is certainly the doings of the junta … who warned villages nearby not to go to places where the land mines had been placed,” as per Nikkei Asia.
Myanmar’s domestic weapons industry produces five types of antipersonnel land mines and has benefited from USD 1 billion worth of arms trade with foreign suppliers under the military regime.
A report released in May by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, titled “The Billion Dollar Death Trade: The International Arms Networks That Enable Human Rights Violations in Myanmar,” revealed that the Myanmar military’s Directorate of Defense Industries arms factories, also known as “KaPaSa,” has tapped foreign equipment supplies to manufacture “small arms ammunition, grenades, artillery shells and anti-personnel and anti-vehicle land mines,” according to Nikkei Asia.
The regime’s adversaries, including ethnic armed groups and the People’s Defense Force, have reportedly buried their land mines — an affordable and convenient choice of weapon, to worsen the danger.
The proliferation is also highlighted in reports by the United Nations Children’s Fund, which found land mine contamination in Sagaing, Shan State and 10 other regions of Myanmar in an assessment in the first quarter of this year.
That grim picture mirrored Landmine Monitor’s findings which say, in 2021, around 97 of Myanmar’s 325 townships, across 12 states and regions, had “some degree of contamination, primarily from antipersonnel mines.” But this figure spiked in 2022 to 147 townships, including new areas affected by land mines “because of ongoing conflict since the coup.”
Furthermore, the growing clusters of land mines along the shifting front lines of Myanmar’s bloody conflict have contributed to speculation about the country fragmenting, Nikkei Asia reported.
David Scott Mathieson, Seasoned Analyst of Myanmar’s political issues and author of reports on the country’s ethnic armed forces said, “Myanmar had already been Balkanized before the coup, but it has been turbocharged since the military grabbed power.”
He further said, “The space the military controls has shrunk since the coup … and that is a challenge for the Chinese, who want stability as a precondition for projects.”
Then there is the human cost.
According to United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), there were 388 casualties reported countrywide during the first four months of 2023, which was less than 390 reported for 2022. Humanitarian groups worry that the worst is yet to come and their fear is based on observing decades of deaths and injuries from land mine explosions. The Landmine Monitor counted 5,629 casualties including 1,008 killed and 4,500 injured between 2000 and 2021, according to Nikkei Asia.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) stated in response to an email query about Myanmar’s worsening land mine warfare, “Year upon year civilian accidents involving land mines, unexploded ordinance, and other explosive devices reach into the hundreds. Land mines and other explosive devices make no distinction on who steps on them, and many communities are strongly impacted.”
Beyond the death toll, the ICRC stated that the proliferation of land mines leads to “families losing their breadwinners due to injuries or (the impossibility) of the farmers to use their land.”