A Country In Trauma

Editor's Note: This is the fourth installment in a series about the work of Clear Path International, which is based on Bainbridge Island and aids survivors of landmine accidents in Asia. Imbert Matthee is one of its cofounders. I f you ever saw the movie "The Killing

Fields," you'll remember the devastation and horror brought upon Cambodia during the four-year Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.

An estimated 2 million people died in the small Southeast Asian nation sandwiched between Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and the Gulf of Thailand.

The Pol Pot government did away with modern economic infrastructure, city dwelling and medicine among other aspects of civilized society. It took collectivism to unprecedented extremes that made slaves out of Khmer citizens.

Almost every Cambodian you meet lost loved ones or relatives during that time. Everyone who survived the Cambodian holocaust has stories that reflect a deep personal trauma.

But the short-lived dictatorship was only part of a debilitating three-decades civil war that began in the mid 1960s and lasted until the late 1990s. Only in the past decade has the country been politically stable and had a degree of normalcy.

One consequence of such prolonged strife is the vast array of unexploded ordnance ( UXO or landmines and other munitions) that remains scattered everywhere and is the reason why one in every 240 Cambodians is a survivor of a peacetime accident with this deadly debris.

I first traveled to Phnom Penh, the country's capital, in 2001 and was introduced to a friend of a Cambodian refugee who went to school with James Hathaway, Clear Path International's co-founder in Vermont.

This was not long after the four of us had started our first mine-clearance project in central Vietnam. We were looking for ways to help victims of accidents there and find other mine-affected communities in the region that we could support with aid.I t turned out the needs among landmine accident survivors in Cambodia were enormous, but the gaps in service were mostly in the field of socio-economic rehabilitation, so that's where we began our first project in partnership with Cambodian Volunteers For Community Development.

We chose the province of Kampong Cham, named for the ethnic Cham Muslim minority indigenous to the communities along the Mekong River, because the area was ignored by other aid organizations and because of a shared U.S. history in the early 1970s.

In five years, we graduated more than 150 landmine accident survivors from our vocational training center on the Mekong where we trained them in small-engine repair, consumer electronics repair and sewing.

Together with equipment and materials grants, and business start-up advice, many of the graduates were able to start homegrown businesses. They went from survivors who were dependent on their own families and communities to much more independent contributors to their local economy, offering services that weren't available before in their rural towns.

After serving most of the landmine accident survivors in the region who had expressed an interest in receiving our trades training, we shifted our focus to another part of the country: the former K5 mine belt along the border with Thailand where fighting between Khmer Rouge guerillas and government forces continued until the late 1990s.

In the province of Battambang, which has the second highest population of landmine accident survivors, we polled many war-disabled farmers and learned they were interested in getting support to become better and more diverse rice growers.

Battambang produces some of the highest-quality rice in Cambodia, but its lands are heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance; many farmers are in a debt cycle with money lenders that prevents them from getting ahead of their highinterest payments to become financially stable.

So in the west part of Cambodia, Clear Path International formed a ricefarmers cooperative and built a rice mill with generous funding from the U.S. Department of State, the nowdefunct Adopt-A-Minefield program of the United Nations Association USA, the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis and the Dutch charity Mensenkinderen.

The rice cooperative provided agricultural extension services, organized households into collaborative groups, offered micro loans and bought their raw husk rice for processing and sale to disadvantaged urban poor who had no access to high-quality, affordable food staples.

The British organization Mines Advisory Group cleared the land for the mill and for a nearby demonstration farm for the development of fish farming and other agricultural projects to train farmers in crop diversification.

Hundreds of landmine accident survivors and disadvantaged members of their communities benefitted from the rice mill cooperative while urban household gained access to a steady supply of rice at bulk rates.

To learn more about the work of Clear Path International, please visit www.cpi.org.