Myanmar recorded more than 1,000 landmine and unexploded ordnance casualties in 2023, the highest in the world, according to UNICEF and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Independent human rights experts said this figure represents only part of a wider crisis as the junta escalates attacks on civilians, including people with disabilities. They reported that soldiers have forced civilians to walk through minefields and have blocked medical care and prosthetics for victims, actions that violate the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and UN Security Council Resolution 2475.
Children are among the most affected. UNICEF confirmed that more than 27 percent of the casualties in 2024 were minors, out of 1,052 verified civilian casualties in 2023. This is a sharp increase from 2022, when 390 incidents were recorded. Children are especially vulnerable because they often cannot recognize explosive devices, and mines are placed in homes, schools, playgrounds, and farming areas.
Victims face further hardship as amputees are being criminalized by the junta, which associates missing limbs with resistance activity. Many amputees are now hiding to avoid harassment and arrest. Experts highlighted the case of a young woman who lost her leg and was later denied a prosthesis because junta forces blocked access to the materials needed to make one.
In resistance-controlled areas, there are very limited resources for prosthetics. Most funding comes from private donations routed through ethnic civil action groups and churches. In Karenni State, for example, there is only one rehabilitation clinic for amputees. Across all resistance-controlled areas, waiting lists for prosthetics can be long while donors struggle to raise money for each artificial limb.
Jon Moss is one of the few volunteers who has come to Burma to help with the landmine issue.
Moss is a U.S. military veteran with a law degree who served as a Navy Special Operations officer specializing in Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD). He said he had always wanted to join the military, but the deciding moment came when he saw the Syrian government use chemical weapons on civilians. “That was it for me. I was like, I need to do something.” He joined the military because he wanted to help people and prevent that kind of atrocity. When he learned that EOD technicians disarm everything from grenades to nuclear and chemical weapons, he said, “I felt like I want to do that.” He completed EOD school, dive school, and jump school.
After leaving the military, he decided he wanted to come to Burma and support demining efforts. He joined his first mission with the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) in 2022. Moss described seeing M14 anti-personnel mines scattered throughout villages, booby-trapped stick grenades, and 500-pound bombs with half-torn fuses that had failed to explode. He said unexploded ordnance and active mines were everywhere.
Moss returned to the United States for seven months to get married. When he came back to Burma, he found the war had intensified. “Drones and Y-12s dropping mortars and all that kind of stuff all over the place.” This time he entered the field specifically to carry out demining. Another EOD technician from Ukraine accompanied him, and they brought a detector to search churches and school areas for mines. But the detector malfunctioned, and the local teams had no formal training. Moss said they had no option but to probe by hand, creating extremely dangerous conditions. Even so, they continued assisting local teams and provided instruction on mine probing, tourniquet use, and basic detector operation. Local leaders later invited them back to help launch a larger demining effort, and Moss began developing a program to support it.
He explained that they are collaborating with a partner in another country to build a flail, a heavy machine equipped with chains designed to detonate anti-personnel mines and clear ground before deminers go in by hand. Donors have since stepped forward to support the effort, enabling Moss and his colleagues to equip local demining teams. “We’re buying personal protective equipment, face shields, armor for their bodies, mine probes. And then we’re putting a curriculum together to do training.” His goal is to pilot two demining teams and deploy them into Karenni State.
They were invited by the Karenni Interim Executive Council, the civilian government, “to go in and start clearing some of these grounds, using our flail and using our detectors and using our PPE and all that. And our teams that we’ve trained to go in there and start clearing the areas.” Moss explained that their goal is to meet international standards. “We want to do it to an international standard. So, the same way you’d see The HALO Trust or MAG (Mines Advisory Group) or these other legitimate demining orgs. They follow a standard. We want to try to follow that standard as close as we can. But understand that we’re in a conflict zone.”
Demining work has taken place in nearby Cambodia for decades, but that is only possible because the conflict there has ended. Burma, however, is often left out of similar aid because major organizations will not violate international law by entering a country without an invitation from the internationally recognized government, which in this case is the same military junta responsible for killing civilians and blocking humanitarian access. Most major organizations also will not operate in active combat zones. Demining is dangerous under any circumstances, but even more so when you are exposed to air and drone strikes and all sorts of attacks by the Burma military.
Moss said, “So, we’re going into an area where others will not go. And we are going to do the demining. Under fire. Under fire.”
In addition to removing as many mines as possible, Moss wants to build a sustainable system. “We want to establish a mine action center. And that would legitimize even more so our demining efforts.” He explained that such a center would handle more than disposal. “The mine action center wouldn’t just be responsible for disposing of the mines. But we’ll actually do non-technical surveys of areas where there are mines to map where mines are located. And then we would then give that information to a team. And then they would go in there and take care of the mines. And you would train local teams.”
Moss described the biggest hurdles in demining in Burma, beginning with the issue of access. “There is no access to humanitarian aid that comes into Burma. So, there is only stuff that we can bring in and stuff we can bring in through our teams.” Even transporting equipment is uncertain. “Getting a flail in there, I don’t know how we’re going to do that. But we’ll figure out a way to do it.”
Money is the next barrier. Because international aid and large organizations will only deal directly with the junta, resistance-controlled areas rely almost entirely on small private donations. Moss said, “A demining machine that they would use in Ukraine or some of these other areas costs half a million dollars.” Inside Burma, no donors can raise that amount, and the few cross-border aid groups that exist often conclude that the same money would save more lives if spent on medicine or food rather than a single machine clearing only a few mines per day.
Moss emphasized that the half-million-dollar price tag for a flail is only the beginning. “And that doesn’t include the maintenance. That doesn’t include the shipping from another country… we don’t have the money. We don’t have the people.”
He added that even basic equipment strains budgets. “It’s getting the right equipment here… if we buy ten detectors, that’s $30,000 for ten detectors. That’s a lot of money for us.” On top of the cost, equipment is sometimes delayed or blocked entirely because of restrictions on shipping batteries and other components.
He reached out to major demining organizations, but they refused to come for legal and security reasons. Under international law or under their internal bylaws, large NGOs cannot enter a country without an invitation from the internationally recognized government, which in Burma is the same junta bombing civilians and blocking aid. And most major mine-action organizations will not operate in active combat zones, which excludes nearly every area where demining is needed.
He also contacted qualified deminers, people who regularly risk their lives clearing explosives in Africa or other post-conflict environments. But large organizations offer salaries, insurance, medical evacuation, and protected transport. Moss told them that in Burma there is no salary, no insurance, no evacuation, and they must accept being shot at while working. Most declined immediately. “Nobody wants to come here to do this,” he said. “It’s a closed country.”
Since he cannot bring outside trainers into Burma, Moss hoped to send ethnic deminers abroad for instruction. But that plan faces the same obstacles, no funding, no institutional support, and practical problems like most candidates lacking passports or English. He explained that the international community will not recognize their work as humanitarian demining unless it meets IMAS, the International Mine Action Standards. “If you want to follow the IMAS standard, you have to have IMAS training. If you want to be IMAS trained, you have to go to these training camps or these training schools that are in Denmark and in Kosovo. So it would be great if we could get one of these programs to come here. And I’ve already mentioned that to some people.”
The problems Moss faces with demining aid are the same problems people face with aid for internally displaced people, food, medicine, amputee rehabilitation, prosthetics, and everything else. Foreign governments will only provide government-to-government aid, and large international organizations refuse to enter a combat zone or operate in resistance-controlled areas, which now cover more than 70 percent of the country. Small organizations that are willing to help have limited budgets and can reach only a very small fraction of the 40 percent of the population that is in dire need of assistance.