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Wednesday, October 18
Cambodian aims to rid his country of land mines
Associated Press
SYDNEY, Australia -- With a solemn bow, hands held in a
prayerlike clasp at his chest, Cambodia's standing volleyball
captain Cha Hok announces to the world the two things he wants in
life: a Paralympic gold medal and a homeland rid of land mines.
They are two gigantic tasks for a nation littered with up to 10
million land mines and for a team that was only invited to the
Sydney Paralympics after another nation withdrew.
"I think the gold medal will come first," the 46-year-old Hok
said, through a translator, after a reception Tuesday at New South
Wales Parliament House on the eve of the Paralympics opening
ceremony.
He agrees that, with continuing foreign aid and implementation
of an international ban on land mines, Cambodia could some day be
free of the hidden killers that were strewn across the nation
during three decades of civil conflict. But first things first.
Of the 11 players in the Cambodian standing volleyball team, 10
have lost limbs through contact with land mines, including Hok, who
was 23 when he had a leg amputated after coming into contact with a
land mine while he was fishing. The remaining player has polio.
That's no disadvantage, says Chim Phan, who had a leg amputated
after stepping on a land mine in the 1980s when walking in the
forest. Nor is the lack of funds to outfit the team with the most
advanced prosthetics.
"In my opinion, (winning) doesn't depend on a prosthetic leg,
it depends on the physical ability of the team and the training,"
said Phan, who gained international celebrity in 1997 by riding a
cycle from Paris to Brussels as part of a campaign to ban land
mines.
Phan lives near the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he
builds wheelchairs for amputees. He started sprinting in 1996 and
has won two silver medals at the Far East Asian and South Pacific
Games. But he switched to volleyball because it was his only chance
to make the Paralympics.
Chris Minko, an Australian who went to Cambodia five years ago
and has since been drafted by Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen as
an adviser for the National Paralympic Committee, said the
volleyball team had a huge role to play in foreign diplomacy.
"The important thing about this is it's far more than sport,"
Minko said. "It's Cambodia coming back into the world and the
(volleyball players) are representatives of the new peace and stability
in their country."
Minko described volleyball as Cambodia's "de facto national
sport," and said the government was hoping the Paralympic team
would highlight the problem of land mines -- and also return home as
champions.
Government estimates show that one in 384 Cambodians have had a
limb amputated as a result of land mines or unexploded ordnance.
About 14 percent of Cambodia's 11.4 million people have some form
of disability, the bulk from injuries caused by mines or unexploded
ordnance.
About 40,000 people were injured by land mines in the 20 years
between 1979 -- the demise of the communist Pol Pot regime -- and
1999. Of those, about one-third died from their injuries.
Casualties from land mines have decreased from 1,700 in 1998 to
1,000 last year following foreign funding for demining operations.
The International Paralympic Committee granted Cambodia a
wildcard entry to join qualifiers Canada, the United States,
Australia, Poland, Slovakia, Israel and Germany in the volleyball
competition.
Minko said as a warmup, the volleyball players entered the recent Far
East Asian and South Pacific Games for disabled in Bangkok,
Thailand, becoming the first Cambodian team to compete
internationally in decades and picking up a silver medal in the
process.
"They're not ranked, but they're going for gold," he said.
Cambodia had one athlete compete at the Sydney Olympics, which
ended Oct. 1. Rithya To was the 80th of 81 finishers in the men's
marathon, the final event of the games, coming in more than 53
minutes behind gold-medalist Gezahgne Abera of Ethiopia.
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