Cambodia

In Cambodia, the Digger Foundation is using a D-250 demining machine which has been financed by two Swiss benefactors, Mrs. Miyuki and Mr. Victor Villiger, a unique event in the history of the Foundation.

This machine has been made available to the British NGO, Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which has been present in Cambodia for 25 years and shall be used under the supervision of the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority (CMAA).

It will typically be used for technical surveys. This procedure, which forms part of the humanitarian demining standards, consists of determining through technical methods of decontamination and verification, the presence, type and exact location of anti-personnel mines or explosives left from war in a zone often previously identified as dangerous during a non-technical survey, which consists primarily of collecting information without any intervention in the field. This is an important step for the effectiveness of the entire demining process as it quickly and safely enables large areas of land, where other demining methods do not need to be deployed, to be returned to the population.

The purpose for using this machine is to substantially increase the effectiveness of this type of mine clearance and to return land to the communities more quickly than is possible with manual demining methods alone.

MAG estimates that the decontamination of an area of about forty hectares, which can take a manual clearance team up to two or three years to complete, will only take six months with the help of the machine, depending on the type of contamination. Moreover, this estimate agrees with what was established by HI, the operator of the DIGGER D-3 that has been used in Casamance (Senegal) since 2012.

The beneficiaries of this project are rural communities who are largely dependent on subsistence agriculture and on gathering products from the forest. Most of them live in remote areas with difficult access and poor infrastructures. In the eastern provinces of the country where MAG is focusing its action, the increasing demand for land which goes hand-in-hand with recent economic development, is forcing poor rural communities, despite the risks, to farm marginal land where the presence of mines is suspected, or has even been proven.