Japan partners with Cambodia to share demining knowledge with Ukraine, other countries

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Japan’s foreign minister on Saturday announced a joint project with Cambodia to share knowledge and technology on land mine removal with countries around the world, including Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa made comments during a visit to the Cambodian Mine Action Center, which was formed in the 1990s at the end of the Southeast Asian nation’s decades of civil war. It seeks to deal with an estimated 4 million to 6 million land mines and other unexploded munitions left strewn around the countryside.

“Cambodia, which has steadily advanced mine removal within its own country, is now a leader in mine action around the world,” she noted, adding that Japan has consistently cooperated in Cambodia’s mine removal since the civil war.

Cambodian deminers are among the world’s most experienced, and several thousand have been sent in the past decade under U.N. auspices to work in Africa and the Middle East. Cambodia in 2022 began training deminers from Ukraine, which also suffers from a high density of land mines and other unexploded munitions as the two-year Russian invasion drags on.

“As a concrete cooperation under the Japan Cambodia Landmine Initiative, Japan will provide full-scale assistance to humanitarian mine action in Ukraine,” she said. “Next week, we will provide Ukraine with a large demining machine, and next month, here in Cambodia, we will train Ukrainian personnel on how to operate the machine.”

The NGO Landmine Monitor in its 2022 report listed both Cambodia and Ukraine among nine countries with “massive” mine contamination, meaning they had more than 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles) of uncleared fields.

Since the end of the fighting in Cambodia, nearly 20,000 people have