Loung Ung, a national spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, speaks to an Anabel Taylor Hall audience Dec. 4. Robert Barker/University Photography
At 27, Loung Ung may appear to be an unlikely spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won this year's Nobel Peace Prize. But Ung is a survivor of the war that ripped apart her native Cambodia in the 1970s, and land mines, which were wantonly employed in that conflict, continue to kill or injure 26,000 people worldwide every year.
Ung's work lecturing about these cheap and deadly devices has become a personal crusade, one she brought to the Cornell campus in a talk titled "Wars End, Landmines Don't" Dec. 4 in Anabel Taylor Hall. She traveled to Ithaca directly from Ottawa, where representatives of more than 120 nations met to sign a treaty prohibiting the production and use of anti-personnel mines.
Although it supports the concept of the ban, the United States did not sign the agreement because military officials believe it is necessary to use land mines on the Korean peninsula to protect U.S. troops stationed there. Ung appealed to her Cornell audience to help her build up public pressure on the government to alter its stance by asking the Student Assembly to proclaim Cornell a "mine-free campus."
Ung's presentation began with a half-hour video called "Small Targets," which she then expounded upon and made palpable with elements of her own experience. When Pol Pot seized power in Cambodia in 1975 and led his Khmer Rouge guerrilla army on a campaign of systematic elimination of the country's educated classes, Ung was only 6. Because her father was a prominent politician opposed to the Khmer Rouge and thus marked for assassination, her family desperately fled from town to town in an attempt to elude a grim fate.
They managed to get tantalizingly close to the Thailand border but dared not cross it, since Pol Pot's men had laid mines along the entire boundary between the two countries in order to prevent any Cambodians from escaping. The "silent sentinels of death" had served their purpose; Ung soon lost her family to the regime's death squads, and she wound up starving in an orphanage.
Eventually Ung, who speaks Khmer, Chinese, French and English fluently, escaped her wrecked country and now calls Essex Junction, Vt., home, when she isn't on the road lecturing. She said her decision to take up the anti-land mines cause full time came in 1995 during her first visit to Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, since fleeing. She was approached outside her hotel by a young girl carrying a 7-month-old malnourished baby and begging for money. Their father had been killed by a land mine, leaving them to fend for themselves. "That girl looked like me. She could have been me. The only difference was that I was lucky enough to get out," Ung said.
Cambodia's war is formally ended, and Pol Pot, 69 and ailing, who some had even presumed dead, is apparently imprisoned by his own former Khmer Rouge fighters. But the land mines they planted continue to lie in wait -- perhaps as many as one mine for each of the 10 million people who live in Cambodia. Half of the country's land is contaminated with mines, many of which are located in rice paddies, alongside roads and on school grounds, Ung said. She also noted that as a result of leftover mines, Cambodia has 40,000 people with one or more limbs amputated, and at the current rate mines are being removed, it will take 100 years before the nation is free of them.
Dozens of other countries are struggling with the daily hazards posed by some 110 million land mines around the world. For every mine that is removed, 20 new ones are planted, Ung said. That means there will be more post-conflict casualties that could be prevented.
"How can we have peace when the war is still in the ground?" she asked.
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