Landmines and unexploded munitions claimed more victims in Myanmar than in any other country last year, with over 1,000 people killed or wounded amid the continuing intensification of the country’s civil war.
In its latest Landmine Monitor report, published yesterday, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) said that anti-personnel mines and explosive remnants of war killed or wounded 1,003 people in Myanmar in 2023, almost three times the number in the previous year. Of these, at least 228 people were killed.
By comparison, last year saw 933 reported landmine casualties in Syria, which had topped the ICBL’s list for the previous three years, followed by 651 in Afghanistan, and 580 in Ukraine. In total, ICBL said that at least 5,757 people had been casualties of landmines and explosive remnants of war across the world last year, up from an estimated 4,710 in 2022.
Myanmar’s military has used anti-personnel mines for decades – the ICBL has documented their use every year since the Landmine Monitor was first published in 1999 – but this is the first time that Myanmar has topped the Monitor’s grisly ranking.
The obvious reason for this is the increasingly intense conflict that has engulfed most parts of the country since the coup of February 2021. The ICBL reported that there had been a “significant increase” in the use of anti-personnel mines by the Myanmar military in 2023 and 2024, including around infrastructure “such as mobile phone towers, extractive enterprises, and energy pipelines.”
As fighting has expanded to parts of previously peaceful parts of the country, the use of landmines has followed. Citing photographic evidence, the Monitor said that antipersonnel mines manufactured by Myanmar’s Directorate of Defense Industries were captured from the Myanmar Armed Forces by armed resistance groups every month between January 2022 and September 2024, “in virtually every part of the country.”
In a supplementary statement released yesterday, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that landmine casualties and contamination “have been documented for the first time in all 14 Myanmar states and regions, affecting about 60 percent of the country’s townships.” The casualty rate has continued to rise in 2024, with 692 reported civilian casualties recorded in the first six months. Around a third of them were children.
In its statement, HRW quoted one opposition fighter as saying that the military had increased the use of antipersonnel mines in response to Operation 1027, a resistance offensive launched in October 2023, which has seen striking gains for resistance groups, particularly in Shan and Rakhine states.
“The military’s putting more mines in residential areas to keep the resistance out,” the fighter said. “They’re mining the walls of houses, inside compounds, throughout villages. They’re booby-trapping people’s gates with wires.” The Landmine Monitor added that mine casualties were also often recorded around the outskirts of military camps, suggesting that mines were being laid in a vain attempt to ward off resistance attacks.
The Monitor noted that antipersonnel mines had also been placed by armed resistance groups, although it said that “attributing the new use of antipersonnel mines is made difficult by the complex conflict situation and the partisan nature of some media sources.” The United Nations Children’s Fund said in April that all sides in the civil war were using landmines “indiscriminately.” However, the Myanmar armed forces are clearly the major culprit, given its ability to manufacture numerous types of antipersonnel mines. Resistance groups have been forced to rely on improvised explosive devices and stockpiles captured from the Myanmar army.
The Monitor also found evidence that the Myanmar army has continued its longstanding practice of using civilians as landmine sweepers. It documented numerous instances in which people were press-ganged into walking in front of military units in mine-affected areas in order to detonate landmines.
The findings of the report are an unsurprising but melancholy reminder of the damage wrought by the 2021 coup, and the human costs of the military’s continuing campaign to subjugate the resistance by force. Sadly, there is little end in sight. The military will likely continue to rely ever more heavily on indiscriminate weapons like antipersonnel mines as its military fortunes dwindle.