They Returned Home, Landmines Were Waiting: FBR's Program to Remove Landmines in Karenni State
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- 8 min read
Documentary photography by Sean Sutton (@seansuttonphoto). Operational photos by Free Burma Rangers.
To reach the church, we walked single file. The path was narrow. On either side of us were landmines.
The Burma military had bombed the church in 2023. The roof was mostly gone. The walls were cracked and scorched. But the building was still standing, and so the people of this village in Karenni State still used the church. Not because it was safe but because it was theirs, and because there was nowhere else to go. On this day, myself and the Karenni demining team were going there to meet some survivors of landmines - the Karenni leadership had arranged this, to give us context for the work we were preparing to do.
The survivors had left their IDP camps to meet with us. Landmines had taken something from each of them. Some had lost limbs trying to go home. One had lost her husband. The injuries didn’t happen in battle. They happened on the walk back to get food.
More than 200,000 people are displaced across Karenni State. The IDP camps don’t have enough food. They haven’t had enough for a long time. At some point, hunger becomes a stronger force than fear. People calculate the odds and decide a possible mine is better than certain starvation. So they walk back to their villages, back to hidden sacks of rice and fruit trees they planted before the war forced them out. The Burma Army knows the IDPs will come back. That is why they plant mines inside homes. A mine in a field is more easily avoided than a mine in a family home or food storage site.
Saw Htoo, a survivor I spoke with, described it to me this way: “Before the fighting, we kept oil, soap, and rice around our house, buried underground. When the fighting started, we ran away. Later, when there were no Burmese soldiers, I went back to get the things we had hidden. That’s when I stepped on the landmine.” He cannot return home now. The mines are still there.
Before the war, this village had around 2,000 people and more than 350 homes. Only 10 homes remain standing and the ruins of the village are full of mines. Hundreds have already been removed, but many more are still hidden in the ground. They are laid in the remains of homes, places of worship, footpaths, water sources, and farmland. The ground itself has become a weapon.
Back at the church, three of the men I spoke with were missing a leg. Each had stepped on an M14 antipersonnel mine laid inside his home. The M14 is small, round, plastic, with almost no metal content. Standard metal detectors can’t find it. The Burma Army knows this. They use it precisely because it’s hard to detect, and because it doesn’t kill quickly - it maims. A maimed farmer causes more damage to the Karenni as a people than a dead one. A maimed farmer is a burden on his family and his community. That is the inhuman calculation.
Khu Reh is another survivor. He had been trying to help his friends remove mines from an area. He’d had some basic training but no formal certification and no proper tools. When one of his friends tried to move a mine and it detonated, he was severely wounded. The blast took his left eye, cut open his neck, and maimed his hands. He isn’t the only one; people with partial training and no equipment try to do this work because no one else will. That’s part of why properly equipped local teams matter.
He sat across from me with what remained of his scarred arms resting in his lap. He didn’t ask for anything. He just told me what happened.
Naw Paw, the woman in the group, didn’t have a visible injury. Her loss was different. Her husband had already lost one leg fighting in the war. When the food ran out in the camp, he was the one who went back to their home. He’d already lost so much. Maybe he thought the worst had already happened to him.
When he stepped on the mine buried inside their house, the blast took his remaining leg. The force of the explosion threw him backward. He landed in the stream behind their house. He drowned there, bleeding, alone. She’s raising their five children in the IDP camp alone now. She told me this with tears in her eyes but without looking away.
Then she stopped and said she wanted to say one more thing. She trusts God. Her face changed when she said it. There was joy where the grief had been a moment before. I see this in Burma. People who have lost everything still trust the Lord with a faith that doesn’t depend on circumstances. They suffer and they hope at the same time.
The last man I spoke with had stepped through a tripwire laid across the floor of his home. He heard the grenades before he could move. The blast shattered his legs but didn’t take them. He has healed slowly, with no professional medical care. Today he’s on our demining team. Every morning he goes out to remove mines from the land that nearly killed him. When I asked him why, he had three words: Somebody has to.
In 2024, Burma recorded 2,029 landmine casualties, the highest of any country in the world for the second year running. The number doubled from 1,003 in 2023, which itself almost doubled the 2022 figure of 545. More than Ukraine. More than Afghanistan. More than Syria. On average, more than five civilians are killed or injured every day. The true number is likely higher. Many casualties in remote areas are never reported. Eighty-six percent of the victims are civilians. Twenty percent are children. Children walk to school, fetch water, and play in fields without knowing what a pressure plate looks like in the dirt. Since 1999, more than 9,200 people in Burma have been killed or injured by these weapons.
This isn’t a legacy problem from a war that’s ended. The Burma Army is still planting mines today. Burma is one of only twelve countries still actively producing antipersonnel mines. The junta is planting them and producing them at the same time. International demining organizations aren’t permitted to operate freely in Burma. The UN Mine Action Strategy for Myanmar 2025-2026 acknowledges this plainly: humanitarian demining is prohibited by the junta. They can warn people about landmines. They can’t remove them.
Education alone is not enough. Being careful where you walk doesn't help when the Burma Army mines your home. Identifying the M14 hidden in your food storage won't stop you from starving.
In the absence of formal demining, civilians do this work themselves at great personal risk. They use rakes. They use their bare hands. Tu Reh, a man at a community meeting, told me, “I lost my leg last year trying to clear a path to my house. I didn’t have any tools, just a stick. We are desperate to have our lives back.” They have no protective equipment and no training.
The Karenni Interim Executive Council (KIEC), the governing authority in Karenni State, asked the Free Burma Rangers for help. In response, we partnered with their Emergency Rescue, Home Affairs Department to start a community demining program. I (Jonathan Moss) lead the FBR contingent of the program but ultimately we work under the authorization of local leadership like Naw Mu, the village chairwoman. She moved back into her village before anyone else. She and her elderly mother cleared contaminated land by hand before the demining teams arrived. “As leaders,” she told me, “we have to come and live here first.” She isn’t a deminer. She refused to ask her people to come back to ground she hadn’t tested with her own feet.
We train people in the community in the safest procedures available given our equipment and conditions and then help them implement a three-phase demining operation. Phase one is a controlled burn to expose landmines. Phase two is digging through ground and rubble with an armored backhoe to detonate some mines and create corridors for movement and further work. Phase three is deminers manually removing mines and using a flail, another tracked and armored vehicle with heavy rotating chains that strike the ground, to detonate the rest. The village owns the operation. FBR provides the training, the technical lead, and the equipment.
The operation is currently ongoing and the team has already destroyed or removed hundreds of explosive hazards across the village. Phase three is set to begin in June 2026. We cleared antipersonnel mines, anti-tank mines, mortar rounds, RPG components, and a 250-pound aircraft bomb from family homes, footpaths, fields, the village church, the school, and the perimeter of an old Burma Army camp. We used metal detectors, controlled burns, mechanical backhoes, AI and drone mapping, and manual removal. We cleared thirty-five percent of the village area in two months. That pace is fast for demining in an active conflict zone. Not a single deminer was injured.
We are developing a Burma Mine Action Standard, an adaptation of international mine action protocols for the reality of active conflict. When the day comes that the international mine action community can enter Burma freely, our documentation, our trained teams, and our maps will be ready for them. In the meantime we do the work no one else is doing.
The backhoes, the detectors, and the protective gear were funded by donors who read our first report on this work in August 2025 and decided it mattered. The remaining work will require more time, more equipment, and more support.
We will fail to meet all the physical needs here. The scale is too large and our resources are too small. But we can be here. We can train people. We can clear some of the land. We can sit with a man who lost both arms and a woman who lost her husband, and tell them they are not forgotten.
When you probe the ground outside someone’s home, when you take physical risk on behalf of another person, something shifts. It communicates what words can’t: you are worth protecting. Your land is worth working. Your family is worth the danger. We remove mines so people can live. We share Christ so people can live forever. People need both, and they hear one when you’ve offered the other.
Before we left the meeting with the survivors, Pastor Soe stood outside his bombed church and said it plainly. “Please do not forget us.”
The man going home for food. The neighbor kneeling over a mine he can’t leave. Naw Paw raising her children by the stream where her husband drowned. They are still there and we can still help them.
We ask for prayer first. Pray for the people of Karenni State, for the deminers on our team, for the families still in the camps, for Naw Paw raising her children alone.
We ask for help to raise awareness. Burma has the world’s highest landmine casualty rate for the second year running, and most people can’t find it on a map. Tell someone.
We ask for support. There are still thousands of mines in the ground. Every mine removed from a village requires fuel, equipment rental, detectors, protective gear, and food for the men and women doing the work. The IDPs also need food; families are still going home to get food. People who have already lost so much are risking everything to come back.
"Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute." — Proverbs 31:8
Thank you and God bless you,
Jon Moss and the Free Burma Rangers
