EASTERN BURMA—In the 2010 Hollywood movie “The Hurt Locker,” Jeremy Renner plays Staff Sergeant William James, a gritty bomb disposal expert with the US army. His traumatic experiences defusing Improvised Explosive Devices, IEDs in Baghdad propel his character from a “swaggering cowboy” to an emotional wreck, a tragic hero in a sea of despair.

In eastern Burma, far from the razzmatazz of the Hollywood red carpet and gushing Oscar-winning performance speeches, a 40-year-old Karen Buddhist named Kay Poe goes about his job of handling landmines quietly and without a fuss.

Over the past 20 years, Kay Poe has defused and planted thousands of landmines. He has no idea how many. Stockily built, he sits in shorts and a t-shirt on the balcony of a bamboo hut smoking tobacco rolled in newspaper.

His demeanor is calm and humble. He helps his wife look after their seven children. He is nervous about being interviewed and does not want his picture taken. Later, he tells me that he worked for 10 years underground in Rangoon as a spy for the Karen National Union (KNU). He said he prefers to keep a low profile.

In saying that, Kay Poe is a well-known name in Karen military circles. His knowledge of the terrain is second to none; his deftness at handling explosives is legendary. And, of course, after more than 20 years treading mine fields, he is still alive.

Before answering the obvious question about the morality of landmines, he takes a long drag on his cigarette and smiles. Then he looks at me straight in the eye.

“I know exactly what you are getting at,” he says. He leans over and picks up two defused landmines in his left hand, and gestures at them with his chin.

“These are killers. I accept that. They can kill soldiers, women, children. They may even kill me.

“However,” he says, then pauses to smoke. “If we don’t plant landmines, the Tatmadaw [Burmese government forces] will hunt us down freely. They will not fear us any more. They have far more men than us. They are ruthless, and they will defeat us.

“As long as we have the means to conduct guerrilla operations by encircling them and laying mines between our villages and their battalions, we retain an advantage. They are afraid of leaving their bases.”

Unlike the elaborate protection the bomb disposal units in Iraq wore in “The Hurt Locker,” Kay Poe goes to work without so much as a flak jacket—no mask, no gloves, no armor. He walks in flip-flops carrying a mine detector. When he comes across ordnance, he squats down and digs it up with his hands and carefully defuses it. When he roots out foreign ordnance, he takes it home to examine, to learn the tricks of the trade.

When asked about close shaves, he said, “I nearly went deaf once after a landmine accidentally went off near me. I had blood coming out of my ears, nose and mouth.”

He said he has experienced several blasts, but has been lucky. He said that many of his friends have been killed or lost limbs.

Kay Poe received training from a Western landmine expert. “We work slowly and systematically when we plant a landmine,” he said. “If we are careless, we will surely get hurt.”
Nevertheless, several of Kay Poe's colleagues believe he has a charmed life. The superstitious say Kay Poe enjoys the protection of mystic spirits. For his part, Kay Poe is not superstitious. He does not wear amulets and does not have yantra— protective Buddhist tattoos.

Kay Poe has just returned from southern Karen State (Brigade 7) where he assisted an allied force of Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and renegade Democratic Karen Buddhist Army Brigade 5 forces against the Burmese troops.

For several weeks, Kay Poe led a small guerrilla unit that operated quietly by night, laying landmines on routes that the KNU anticipate the government troops will take, and defusing previously laid ordnance to allow the Karen rebels to move freely.

Metaphorically speaking, Kay Poe's duty is to open doors for the rebels while closing doors to the Burmese army. It's a tactic that has been handed down through Karen generations since they took up arms in 1948.

Burma is one of the country's with the highest rates of landmine victims in the world, according to the Geneva-based International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). It accuses both government troops and ethnic rebels of using landmines.

The Karen guerrillas have long said they only plant landmines in self defense: to protect their villages and front lines.

The KNU doesn’t release any official figures regarding landmine victims, but one KNU official estimated that around 20 to 25 KNLA soldiers are injured every year by blasts.

Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, a Thailand-based landmine researcher for the ICBL who travels regularly to ethnic areas, including KNLA bases, said he doesn’t regard the landmine as a wide military strategy. Instead, he said, landmines kill and maim friend and foe indiscriminately.

“The landmine is an antiquated military strategy,” he said. “It is different to any other weapon because it is indiscriminate.”

According to the ICBL, Burma is not one of the 156 nations that are signatories to the 1997 Landmine Ban Treaty.

Burmese military sources have said that the landmines used by the Burmese army mostly come from Russia, China, India and Singapore, none of which are signatories to the 1997 treaty.

“We [the ICBL] call for an immediate halt in the use of any landmine by anyone, anywhere,” said Yeshua. “We call for a genuine cease-fire between the government and ethnic armed groups.”

He said the landmine is an “invisible enemy” for civilians as they must go to jungle for their daily survival, usually to hunt, farm, fish, forage for food, and cut wood and bamboo to make houses.

“The KNLA told us that they issue warnings to villagers not to travel where they planted the landmines,” said Yeshua. However, he said, several villagers he has interviewed said that they were not told the whereabouts of any landmines.

“We know that KNLA soldiers also get injured frequently by their own landmines,” he added.

He claims the landmines planted by government troops are much more powerful. “People rarely survive a blast by those mines,” he said.

He said the Tatmadaw usually plant explosives in and around villages when they leave or around their bases when they abandon them. They also plant mines on trails used by villagers, in paddy fields and vegetables gardens.

Kay Poe stretches and says he has to conclude the interview. He says he has a trip scheduled for tomorrow and he has to go and prepare everything. He shakes hands and says good-bye.

As the suns sets behind the Karen mountains, we watch him strolling calmly down the trail, smoking a cheroot.

Photo caption: KNLA soldier Maw Klu stepped on a landmine years ago. (Photo: Roger Arnold/The Irrawaddy).

This article originally appears on the Thailand-based magazine, The Irrawaddy.

Saw Yan Naing is an ethnic Karen journalist from Burma, currently living and working as senior reporter at Thailand-based The Irrawaddy Magazine, a leading Burmese news agency in exile. He focuses in reporting about human rights, press freedom, democracy, violence, and war in Burma. He can be reached at yannaing@irrawaddy.org or fittiger@gmail.com.