Myanmar recorded more than 1,000 landmine and unexploded ordnance (UXO) casualties in 2023 alone, making it the world's deadliest country for such injuries, according to UN reporting from November 2024. That toll sits inside a broader global figure: nearly 6,300 people were killed or injured by mines and explosive remnants of war in 2024, the highest annual count since 2020.

The human cost accumulates across generations. Bu Ri lost a leg to a landmine decades ago. Six members of his family have since suffered similar or worse fates. His story is not anomalous — it is the structure of life across large swaths of a country that has been in active armed conflict for more than 75 years.

A Contamination Problem That Predates the Current Conflict

Myanmar's mine contamination reflects layered conflicts, not a single episode. The HALO Trust, which has operated in-country since 2007, describes the territory as highly contaminated by explosive ordnance accumulated across those decades. The Landmine Monitor tracks casualties resulting from engagements between the Myanmar Armed Forces (MAF) and a range of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and People's Defence Forces (PDFs) — a patchwork of fronts that has expanded sharply since the February 2021 coup.

What has changed recently is the pace. Human Rights Watch reported in November 2024 that junta forces have increasingly deployed antipersonnel landmines — weapons banned under the Ottawa Treaty, to which Myanmar is not a signatory — with indiscriminate effect on civilian populations. More than 100,000 homes have been burned down amid the wider conflict, and the mine-laying has accelerated in step with the military's counterinsurgency campaign. Antipersonnel mines, by design, cannot distinguish a combatant from a farmer or a child walking to school.

Displacement, Access, and the Barrier to Return

Contamination does not merely injure; it freezes geography. Decades of mine-laying have made large tracts of agricultural and residential land functionally off-limits, and the ICRC has documented since at least 2017 how mine fields impede the return of displaced persons to their homes. With internal displacement now in the millions following the coup and subsequent civil war, that dynamic has sharpened considerably.

Aid delivery compounds the problem. UXO contamination restricts the movement of humanitarian workers, narrows the corridors through which food and medical supplies can travel, and raises the cost and risk of every operation inside conflict-affected states. The EU Emergency Response unit noted in April 2025 that UXO poses a direct threat to both civilians and aid workers — a constraint that humanitarian planners treat as a constant variable in Myanmar operational planning.

Response Capacity vs. the Scale of Need

The response infrastructure is real but overwhelmed. The ICRC runs both a landmine risk education program and a Physical Rehabilitation Programme for survivors — prosthetics, physiotherapy, psychosocial support. Its mine awareness work, expanded through April 2025, trains communities to identify and avoid contaminated areas amid active conflict and natural disasters. HALO Trust continues clearance operations. These programs are meaningful. They are also operating against a contamination problem that grows faster than it is being cleared, in an access environment constrained by active hostilities.

Globally, landmine contamination affects land in nearly 70 countries, according to UN data. Myanmar's position at the top of that casualty table is not a matter of geography alone — it reflects an ongoing policy choice by armed actors to use indiscriminate weapons in densely populated rural terrain.

The Ottawa Treaty, adopted in 1997, has 164 states parties and has driven down global stockpiles and casualty figures over decades. Myanmar has never joined. Neither has the United States, Russia, or China — a fact that limits the diplomatic leverage available to treaty signatories trying to change behavior on the ground.

Until the conflict itself pauses or ends, clearance organisations will be clearing less ground than is being newly contaminated. The generational arithmetic of Bu Ri's family makes that plain: one injury in one generation does not close the account. It opens one.