KATHMANDU, NEPAL -- It was 8:30 a.m. on May 14, 2007 when Sunita Ghale, 21, and five friends went into the forest near their village to collect mushrooms for their families’ dinners.
The search for mushrooms led the group into the middle of the forest. When they decided to return home, they realized they had lost their way. Ghale says she remembers wandering through the forest for more than three hours in search of the path back to her village in the Lamjung district of western Nepal. Finally, they saw a telephone tower in the distance. As they approached the tower, they realized they had stumbled across a military base.
Ghale says they were elated to see the camp after having been lost for so many hours. As they approached the base to ask for directions, Ghale’s friends say they heard a loud blast and watched as Ghale flew into the air and landed a distance away.
She stepped on a landmine.
”When I gained back my consciousness after sometime, I saw a leg separated from a body,” she recalls. “I had never thought that it could be my own leg. There was a pool of blood around me and I fainted seeing it.”
While she was unconscious, security forces brought her to Birendra Army Hospital, by helicopter, in Kathmandu for treatment.
Ghale is one of the thousands of Nepalis who have been hurt or killed by landmines and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were planted by the Nepali Army and Maoist insurgents during the decade long conflict between 1996–2006. Statistics collected by the Ban Landmines Campaign in Nepal, an NGO working to remove all hidden explosives, revealed in 2007 that 1,370 people were killed by landmines in Nepal between 1998 and 2006, when the conflict formally ended. The report estimates that as many as 3,248 people were handicapped or injured by landmines during the same period. And more than 200 people have been injured or killed by landmines and IEDs since the conflict ended.
A Treaty Ignored
The Unified Party of Nepal, also known as the Maoists, launched an armed conflict against the royal government of Nepal in February of 1996. Their stated aim was to end monarchical rule and establish Nepal as a republican state. After nearly 10 years of armed conflict between the Maoists and the Royal Army, the government of Nepal and Maoist leadership signed a peace treaty and formally declared the end of the war in November 2006. Per the treaty, both parties agreed they would not lay any new landmines and would inform each other, within 30 days of signing the agreement, of the location of any remaining landmines that were set up during the conflict. The terms of treaty mandated that both parties would help to destroy all remaining explosives within 60 days or by January of 2007.
Ghale stepped on a landmine more than four months after all explosives were supposed to be removed and destroyed. And today, some three and a half years after the terms of the treaty are overdue, less than half of the minefields in Nepal have been cleared.
According to a report of UN Mine Action Team (UNMAT) in 2009, 23 of 53 known minefields in Nepal had been cleared. Some 52,000 explosives and other hazardous devices have been removed.
Landmines and IEDs continue to take the lives and limbs of Nepali people. According to data from United Nations' Children Fund (UNICEF), more than 200 people have been killed or injured by landmines and other explosive devices since the ceasefire took place in 2006. Of the total casualties, 60 percent of those who have died as a result of the landmines have been children. To date, Nepal has one of the largest casualty rates from victim-activated explosions in the world.
Purna Sobha Chitrakar, coordinator of the Ban Landmines Campaign in Nepal, says landmines were laid in 71 out of 75 districts of the country. The Nepal Army is said to have planted over 10,000 mines in 53 different locations and 20,000 IEDs in 285 places. Maoist officials say they did not keep statistics or records of how many landmines and explosives their troops planted during the war. The Ban Landmines Campaign estimates that Maoist militants used as many as 10,000 mines and explosives for just one military encounter with the Army.
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