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Fighting Landmines with Fame

U.S. singer visits Cambodia to raise landmine awareness

Mary Chapin Carpenter

By Associated Press

American singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter will visit Cambodia this month on a trip that organizers hope will raise awareness about the problem of landmines.

Carpenter, who has won multiple Grammy awards for her country music, will be joined by Terry Allen, a singer-songwriter and visual artist from Texas, and Cambodian American author Luong Ung.

The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which assists land mine victims in Cambodia, is hosting the visitors.

“These are people who have helped us, and it’s a chance to see our work first hand and give them firsthand knowledge of land mine problems facing developing countries,” Larrie Warren, the foundation’s country director for Cambodia, said on Feb. 9.

Musicians such as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith, John Prine and Bruce Cockburn have rallied to the cause, and in the past two years have staged a series of benefit “Concerts for a Landmine Free World” in the United States.

Carpenter supports the U.S. advocacy group Campaign for a Landmine Free World, and visited Bosnia last year on a trip aimed at raising land mine awareness in the West, Warren said.

Loung Ung.

Allen has published a book about Asian children, and Loung Ung, a staff member of the foundation, wrote First They Killed My Father, an account of her family’s suffering at the hands of the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime.

More than 100 people are injured each month in Cambodia by landmines or unexploded ordnance, according to government statistics. Warren said the figure is down from a peak of 400 per month in the early 1990s, largely because of increased landmine awareness in the Cambodian countryside, where millions of mines still lie, a legacy of almost three decades of war and unrest.

Carpenter and her companions will visit a hospital, a landmine victim assistance project and a de-mining organization, and meet with Cambodian officials, foreign diplomats, and aid workers at a reception, Warren said.