Cambodia plans to clear mines in 237 villages covering an area of 28 million square meters in 2007, said an official of the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC) on Thursday.

CMAC Deputy Director General Heng Ratana told a dozen officials from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and 10 delegates from eight African countries, who came here to draw experience of mine clearance and weapons collection.

The center expects to demine 28 million square meters of land this year, at the cost of 11.44 million U.S. dollars, he told the deputies from Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda.

Meanwhile, he said, in 2006, CMAC, the kingdom's flagship demining organization, cleared around 26 million square meters of land and found 35,745 pieces of anti-personnel mines, 1,062 pieces of anti-tank mines and 113,296 pieces of unexploded ordinances (UXO).

In addition, he said, from 1992 to 2006, CMAC has cleared 170, 988,776 million square meters of land and found 346,735 pieces of anti-personnel mines, 6,573 pieces of anti-tank mines and 1,141, 172 pieces of UXO.

Later on Thursday, CMAC officials took the delegates to a demining field in Chrey Tom Village, Kdol Tahen Commune, Bor Vel District, where they listened to Ratana's introduction and witnessed the detonation of a detected mine.

The deputies came to Cambodia to attend the six-day workshop on Asia-Africa Cooperation on Peace Establishment in Africa, which was started in Phnom Penh on Wednesday under the sponsorship of JICA, co-founder of CMAC.

According to CMAC, there were more than 400 human casualties over mine and UXO explosions in 2006 in Cambodia, or 50 percent decrease over the average number of the previous six years.

Due to 30 years of armed conflicts, Cambodia has become one of the world's most heavily mined countries with an estimated four to six million of such "hidden killers" buried underground in areas as extensive as 2,900 square kilometers.

All the mines and UXO may take another 150 years for the kingdom to clear out, statistics said.

Source: Xinhua