Landmines: The invisible killer

SUMMARY: The groundbreaking National Ceasefire Agreement, presented by the Thein Sein government in October 2015 and signed by eight Myanmar Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAO’s), had the immediate effect of quieting some of the battlefields of the world’s longest running civil conflict. Civilians were able to return to their villages and farm tracts to rebuild their livelihoods, unperturbed by the thought of being caught between offensive forces. Villagers across the country confidently took up their old homes and habits in these former zones of intense combat and saw it as a new normalcy, but for some, what at first felt like a return to pastoral tranquility would be suddenly shattered by random, hideous violence when the buried consequences of war were discovered; sections of the countryside had been sewn with thousands upon thousands of anti-personnel landmines.