"The Ground Remembers Everything": Living With Landmines in Arakan

By Admin 19 Nov 2025

DMG | Feature Story

The morning he died, the boy was only going to set a trap.

His uncle had tried to stop him. The mountain above their village in Kyauktaw Township was known to be seeded with landmines, a place where every step could be your last.

"I told them not to go," the uncle recalled. "I said the mountain was full of mines."

The boy went anyway, following another villager up the slope he had climbed many times before. Minutes later, an explosion tore through the quiet hills.

"I ran up the mountain and found one villager already dead," the uncle said. "My nephew was still breathing when we carried him down. But by the time we reached Kyauktaw jetty, he was gone. His arm was severed; his head badly wounded."

For a week, the uncle could not eat. The boy had been his favourite, the one he trusted with any errand, the one he thought would grow up to help the family. Months later, the boy's aunt would also lose a leg to a landmine.

"The mine has destroyed our family," he said. "And they cleared only one path. Civilians don't live on one path."

Their story is just one among many in a new DMG research report on landmines and explosive remnants of war in Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, and Ponnagyun townships. It reveals that for many families in Arakan, the war does not end when guns fall silent. It sits under the soil, waiting.

A War That Doesn't Go Away

Since armed conflict flared in Arakan in late 2018 and escalated again after October 2023, landmines and unexploded munitions have turned ordinary life into a daily gamble.

DMG's survey of 90 respondents found that nearly nine in ten households had at least one member injured or killed by mines or ERW. Behind each number is a face, a family, a future cut short or reshaped around disability, pain, and fear.

These are not soldiers on the front line. Most are farmers, hill-field workers, cattle herders and casual labourers - people whose lives depend on forests, mountains, and fields now laced with explosives.

Many accidents happen during the simplest of tasks:

• Collecting firewood to cook dinner • Fetching water from a stream • Herding cows along a familiar path • Foraging for bamboo shoots to sell in the market • Walking to work, or just standing at home

In this part of Arakan, danger has slipped quietly into the most ordinary parts of the day.

"Sometimes I Ask Myself If I Am Still a Person"

In Ponnagyun Township, a 63-year-old grandfather went out to herd cattle one day in August 2022, just as he had done all his life. He came back without his right arm. He also came back blind.

"Since then, I've felt deeply depressed," he said. "I even thought it might be better to end my life. Then I told myself: no. The rest of my body is still here. I must try to be strong."

Two grandchildren now guide him, feed him, bathe him.

"Sometimes I ask myself, 'Am I still a person?'" he said. "The biggest problem is that I cannot see. If I could see again, I would get them anything they wanted."

He has heard there might be treatment in India, but that world feels impossibly far from his remote village and limited income.

"I just want to see again," he said. "That would be enough."

Widows on the Edge

For many women, landmines do not only take limbs or eyes. They take husbands, partners, and the fragile economic stability of the household. In Kyauktaw, a woman remembers the morning her husband died.

The village head came to the house and asked him to accompany him "just for a while." Her husband hesitated; he needed to tend the cattle. But the village head insisted. A short time later, the sound of an explosion rolled towards the village.

"When I reached him, he was already dead," she said. "He didn't want to go. But he went because he was told to."

The mine exploded just after eight in the morning on August 6, 2024.

Since then, she has been trying to keep her family alive by foraging for bamboo shoots and whatever can be sold.

"If I get sick, I cannot buy medicine," she said. "I cannot even pay my daughter's school fees. The landmine has destroyed our lives."

Pain That Never Ends

Even when people survive, their lives are often split into "before" and "after."

One man in Ponnagyun was collecting firewood in 2019 when a landmine ripped away his right leg and injured his left leg and fingers. At the time, his children were still small.

"I thought I would be separated from my children forever," he said. "They were so young, but after the explosion they had to work like adults because I could no longer provide."

His wife and son began taking any odd jobs they could find. He learned to weave traditional baskets, but with only one good leg and injured hands, the quality is poor; the income smaller.

"When I get sick, my stump hurts so badly I cannot sleep," he said. "I have no money for medicine, so I drink alcohol until I can fall asleep."

More than 30% of respondents in the DMG study reported persistent chronic pain; nearly one in five have difficulty walking. Some live with fragments still embedded in their bodies. Others endure untreated vision loss or neurological problems. Prosthetic limbs are rare, and proper rehabilitation almost non-existent.

"I just want a job," the man said. "Something so I can support my family, instead of being a burden."

Trauma Inside the Home

The wounds of landmines are not only on bodies. They are also in dreams, in the way children cling to surviving parents, in the sudden silence that falls on a family when aircraft roar overhead.

Among 78 family members surveyed about psychosocial effects, almost a quarter said they constantly re-experience the traumatic event - hearing the blast again, seeing the blood again, feeling the same panic.

Others described:

• Always feeling on edge and "hyper-alert"

• Difficulty sleeping; jumping at loud sounds

• Nightmares and intrusive memories

• Losing interest in social life

• Feeling emotionally numb or detached

A man in Mrauk-U who lost his wife to a landmine in January 2025 described how grief has seeped into every part of his life.

"I can't sleep at night," he said. "I think about my wife until morning. Our family depended on her, and now she is gone. I have no money. I cannot work. It feels like living in hell." Children watch their parents break down, or drink themselves to sleep, or sit in silence.

In the DMG study, families repeatedly asked for one thing that is rarely mentioned in official plans: counselling, for both survivors and their loved ones. Villages Surrounded by Invisible Lines

In interviews across the three townships, villagers listed where they believe mines and unexploded ordnance are most likely to be found:

• Forested hills and upland farms

• Former military bases and battle sites

• Roads and pathways in and out of villages

• Schools and health centres

• IDP camps and nearby areas

In other words: almost everywhere.

One farmer said he now walks the same narrow tracks to his hill fields every day, stepping only in old footprints, scanning the ground while balancing a heavy load on his shoulders.

"Sometimes I feel like the earth itself hates us," he said. "But if we don't go, we don't eat."

Yet, half of the communities surveyed have never received any mine risk education, and only a tiny minority know which organization to contact if they find a suspicious device.

Telecom blackouts and travel restrictions make it even harder to call for help when something happens.

"People are living with death under their feet," a DMG researcher said. "And most of them don't even know who they can call."

After the Coup: Less Help, More Fear

Before the 2021 coup, villagers in some areas occasionally received assistance from government clinics, international agencies, or the ICRC. Those channels have largely dried up.

Major international organizations face severe restrictions on movement. Many are barred from most areas of Arakan, or limited to Sittwe and its surroundings.

Meanwhile, the United League of Arakan/Arakan Army has been able to clear some mines in locations it considers critical, but it lacks equipment, funding, and protective gear. For villagers, this means walking the same dangerous paths season after season, knowing that nothing has changed underground.

"We Just Want a Chance"

Despite everything, survivors speak not only of pain but of hope.

A young Mro woman from Ponnagyun was just over 18 when her husband lost a leg to a landmine while collecting bamboo shoots in 2019.

"At that age, I wanted a normal life," she said. "When other people went to work, I wanted to go with them. But with one leg missing in the family, everything changed."

Now 23, she has a daughter. Her parents support them, but the costs are crushing.

"I can't do heavy labour," she said. "But I want to run a small grocery shop. I want to stand on my own feet, even if one of them is gone."

She, like many others, asked not for charity, but for opportunity - a small business, a loan, vocational training adapted to physical limitations.

What Needs to Change

DMG's research points clearly to what mine survivors in Arakan are asking for:

• Livelihoods they can manage with their disabilities, especially for widows and young women.

• Prosthetics, proper medical care, and pain management, including surgery to remove fragments and specialist treatment for those who have lost their sight.

• Counselling and mental-health support for survivors and their families, particularly children.

• Widespread, practical mine risk education, using visual materials and local languages for non-literate communities.

• Faster and safer clearance operations, with better equipment and protective gear for teams.

• Uninterrupted humanitarian access, including through neighbouring countries when necessary.

Most of all, they want the right to walk to their fields, their schools, and their water sources without wondering if each step will be their last.

"The Ground Remembers Everything"

In the villages of Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, and Ponnagyun, the war is not only in memories, photographs, or destroyed buildings. It is also underfoot, silent and waiting.

The ground remembers where soldiers once walked, where artillery fell, where children played before the blast. It remembers everything.

The people of Arakan are asking the world to remember them too - not only when there is fighting on the front lines, but in the long years after, when the noise stops and the hidden war below the soil continues.

Until the mines are cleared and survivors are given the support they need, every journey to the forest, every step onto a mountain path, every child's walk to school is an act of courage. And every safe return is, quietly, a victory.

DMG Feature Story - Based on survivors’ quotes of DMG's October 2025 Landmine Report

Download the full PDF here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X1SMfVSCWeh8utIhSS0rsyEydOpNA8kb/view?usp=sharing