Antiland mine campaign on wheels
A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Dec. 19, 1982. It was a sunny day in the jungle somewhere in the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Tun Channareth, along with a group of soldiers, was halfway to the destination when they came across a mined area.
Twenty-two-year-old Channareth (or Reth for short), was a soldier for the Cambodian government.
The company of soldiers stepped carefully on every inch of the mined area, watchful for the possible presence of their enemies. The eerie silence was shattered by a deafening explosion.
Several soldiers fell and Reth found himself badly injured. He had stepped on a mine. The land mine shrapnel also hit several other soldiers, but fortunately for them, they suffered only minor injuries.
Stripped of all his weapons, Reth was left alone in the middle of the forest, because the remaining soldiers retreated to help those less seriously injured.
Later, he was found by two members of a reconnaissance party who had been sent ahead. But Reth had already lost one leg.
Reth begged them to let him have an axe so he could cut off the dead weight of his other leg.
However, his saviors did not allow him to do so. Instead, they tried to convinced him that only a doctor could kill his pain, stop the blood from streaming out of his wounds and save his remaining leg.
Reth was quickly put in a hammock and taken to Khao I Dang Refugee Camp while drifting in and out of consciousness and losing dangerous amounts of blood.
"There, I remember the doctor, with tears in his eyes, telling me he would have to amputate my other leg," Reth recalled.
Reth stayed at the hospital for four months. After being released, he spent two months in rehabilitation, learning to walk again with the use of bamboo artificial legs. The intense pain caused by the shrapnel forced high into his legs by the explosion quickly made him realize that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
"I felt hopeless," said Reth.
Reth then managed to convince himself that he had to regain his strength. Moreover, his wife, Sam Rach Sovinn, was pregnant at that time, and he had to take responsibility for her and the baby.
Reth began to learn skills, including technical skills needed for wheelchair production. As a member of a Jesuit wheelchair team in Cambodia, he is the designer of wheelchairs adapted according to the individual needs of the disabled person, whether they are an amputee, polio victim or person with a congenital defect.
In his spare time, Reth also helped to teach other disabled people to overcome their immobility and motivate them to strive for a better future.
Reth then made a name for himself as an anti-land mine campaigner. He is one of the four initial authors in Cambodia who launched a signature campaign in favor of a ban on land mines.
"I have suffered from a land mine, and I will fight (against them) in order that no more people suffer as I have done," he said.
His high profile activity brought him to international exposure. In 1995, he met Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk, the Pope, the Queen of Spain, the president of Ireland and addressed the British Parliament -- begging all of them to band land mines forever.
He also spoke at the UN Review Conference on Land Mines Protocol in Vienna and presented the conference chairman with 1.7 million signatures supporting a global land mine ban.
After attending the Ottawa Mine Ban Signature Ceremony in Ottawa in 1997, he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a nonprofit organization that staunchly urges the world to ban land mines.
In 1998, he was appointed an ICBL ambassador and has traveled extensively, including to the USA, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Korea and, recently, Indonesia.
Reth, who hails from Battambang province in Cambodia, was born in 1960. As a boy, he lived for 12 years in Phnom Penh, until the Khmer Rouge took over the city. He, along with the rest of the population was forced out and Reth's family resettled in Trapeang Veng in Siem Reap Province. In 1977, his father had been taken by the Khmer Rouge for "reeducation" like many others, and never returned. Reth later joined a resistance army that sided with the legal government of Cambodia.
In 1981, he married Sam and had six children.
"I was fortunate that I had married her before I lost my legs. No girl in Cambodia would have wished to marry someone who had already lost his legs," Reth jokingly told The Jakarta Post during his recent visit to Indonesia.
During the visit, Reth and ICBL Ambassador for Mine Action Ross Hynes, from Canada, addressed a seminar on land mines at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here.
Reth admitted that, having been given the title ambassador and the Nobel Prize, he felt he had reached the top. However, he reiterated that his struggle was never-ending.
The presence of land mines, referred to by many as "random death traps", still haunts civilians.
The U.S. State Department, in its 2001 report Hidden Killers, said there was a growing international consensus that approximately 60 countries are plagued by 45 million to 50 million land mines planted in their territories.
Furthermore, nine countries still actively use them. "There is still much to be done. I shall only stop fighting against land mines when the world is free of them," Reth said.