Mined Lives. 25 years by Editorial Blume

Editorial direction Leopoldo Blume Photography, texts and concept Gervasio Sánchez Digital treatment of images David Vicente, Juan Manuel Castro Prieto. AuthSpirit Layout Anna Valls Torres “Mined Lives. 25 Years” logo creation Paco Gómez García Translation Angela Reynolds Lockyer Edition and coordination Cristina Rodríguez Fischer First edition in English language 2023 © 2023 Naturart, S. A. Edited by BLUME Carrer de les Alberes, 52, 2.º, Vallvidrera, 08017 Barcelona. Tel. 93 205 40 00 e-mail: info@blume.net © 2023 of the photographs Gervasio Sánchez © 2023 of the texts, their authors I.S.B.N.: 978-84-19785-47-3 Legal Deposit: B. 13230-2023 Printed in Brizzolis, Madrid All rights reserved. Reproduction is prohibited all or part of this work, whether by mechanical or electronic means, without the proper written permission of the publisher.

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MINED LIVES 25 GERVASIO SANCHEZ YEARS

In memory of John Berger, who died on 2nd January 2017, and who supported Mined Lives from the start with his magnificent prologues in 1997 and 2007. Reading his books About Looking, Another Way of Telling, and his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europe, Lilac and Flag) made a huge impact on this author and this project.

In memory of Ana Alba, who died on 6th May 2020 at the height of her professional life, and who was with me in Sarajevo at the start of Mined Lives, in the 1990s. She was unbeatable when she soared into life. She conducted herself with great mental fortitude and taught important lessons on self-respect and dignity, until her strength abandoned her, to every one of us who still love her, her beloved sister Amaya among them.

In memory of Aurelio Martín, the heart and soul of the Premio Cirilo Rodríguez, the most prestigious independent recognition awarded in Spain to special and foreign correspondents. He died on 16th June 2023. Father of Clara and Pablo, partner of our cherished Cheli, he was a wonderful journalist, a wonderful colleague and above all, a wonderful person. Aurelio Martín turned Segovia into the annual capital of Spanish journalism during the award ceremony, soon to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. In a country often so sectarian, 25 people from the press and media of every affinity including half-a-dozen independent journalists, take part in the jury that examines the candidates put forward with the utmost rigour. A landmark in the history of Spanish journalism from which we all should learn.

PROLOGUES JOSEP SANTACREU

IRENE VALLEJO

JON LEE ANDERSON

RAFAEL DOCTOR RONCERO

PATRICIA NIETO

DAVID RIEFF

CARMEN SARMIENTO

DIEGO SANCHEZ MALDONADO

GERVASIO SANCHEZ

STORIES SOKHEURM MAN MAO RATTANAK JOAQUINA NATCHILOMBO ADIS SMAJIC MANUEL ORELLANA MEDY EWAZ ALI ZAR BIBI SOFIA ELFACE FUMO JUSTINO PEREZ FANAR ZEKRI MONICA PAOLA ARDILA APPENDIX CONTRIBUTORS

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GERVASIO SANCHEZ

Mined Lives is a never-ending project, much like the aftereffects of anti-personnel mines. I have been working with victims of this scourge since September 1995. In 1997, 2002 and 2007 I presented different versions of the project, which has developed throughout most of my professional life. Now, I have returned with Mined Lives. 25 Years and I am sure there will be a Mined Lives. 40 Years and, why not, Mined Lives. 50 Years in 2047, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, signed in Ottawa (Canada). The ravages caused by mines are permanent. The victims in this project were chosen randomly in African countries like Angola and Mozambique, in the Asian countries of Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq, in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Colombia in Latin America, or in European countries like Bosnia-Herzegovina. I came across them in hospitals, about to undergo amputations or severely wounded and near death when they were children, in orthopaedic clinics where they were trying to walk again on plastic legs, in charitable foundations where they were mistreated and abused, or in families who were only just managing to survive. Thanks to new technologies, I can keep in permanent contact with several of them. I know about their problems as they happen, I wish them happy birthday, I am delighted by their little victories, I feel sad when I get bad news. Several of these victims are part of my universal family, I know more about them that many of my closest relatives, perhaps because the pain they have suffered transcends time and makes morally obliged to be more attentive. One of the victims calls me “father” and has named her fifth child after me. I began Mined Lives more than a quarter of a century ago, thanks to a curious commission from a gossip magazine enabling me to travel to Angola and come face to face with an underworld of horror and pain. The war was over but the victims multiplied daily because of the explosions of the anti-personnel mines planted by the various armed forces in areas emptied by the fighting, and where those displaced people were coming back to start over their lives as farmers. They died or were injured by tiny hidden warriors, made lethal by the slightest pressure. In 1995, I had spent over a decade photographing the most brutal violence in different continents. I knew what a mine was because I had avoided them in El Salvador or Nicaragua while I travelled with the armed forces during combat, and in the

Balkan conflicts where I would check over any destroyed building before I went in, in case it was booby-trapped with a bomb. What I didn’t know was that mines cause greater damage when the conflict is over and the refugees return home after years away. Government armed forces and irregular groups such as guerrilla, paramilitary or mercenary forces always forget to deactivate the mines they have spread far and wide over the same fields that the farmers are going to cultivate. The civilians have no option but to plant their crops to eat, or die of hunger. The mines are always waiting for the next victim. They remain lethally fertile over the years and decades. In 1995, I was also tired of taking photos of dying people whose names I did not even know, in different places of violent conflict. The dead piled up by the thousands in the wars I documented despite the generalised apathy and cynicism. The death of one Western citizen had more repercussions than those of thousands of Africans, Asians or Latin Americans. The culture of triviality had become prevalent in the most advanced societies and politicians were indifferent to so much suffering so far away. In the mass media, there was hardly any room to showcase these dramatic stories, as they published instead articles whitewashing the most atrocious behaviour of unscrupulous politicians and businessmen. I decided that it was vital to change the way I worked after the impact I felt on reading a reflection in Susan Sontag’s classic essay On Photography: “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” I felt there was a strong connection with the very current reflection of the great writer Albert Camus: “We must understand that we cannot escape common pain and that our justification, if there is one, is to talk about it while we can, in the name of those who cannot.” The ratification of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention at the end of 1997 coincided with the publication of the first part of Mined Lives. The convention was the culmination of the successful decade-long battle by over a thousand NGOs who came together to achieve the total eradication of anti-personnel mines around the world. At that time, eighty-four countries were affected by mines. This has been reduced to sixty at the moment, although there are tens of thousands of mines planted on their land. One hundred and sixty-four states have ratified the Convention to date, although the United States of America, Russia and

China have not signed, and they have the largest stockpiles of mines in the world. Moreover, they are all members of the United Nations Security Council, allowing them to veto any attempt to sanction states that violate the international convention. There are also other countries that continue to use anti-personnel mines despite having signed the Convention. When I started Mined Lives, the youngest victims like Sokheurm Man from Cambodia, Adis Smajic from Bosnia or Sofia Elface Fumo in Mozambique, were thirteen years old. They are now over forty, they have formed families and live surrounded by their daughters and sons. Some victims have had better luck than others. In Angola, Joaquina Natchilombo is an old lady of seventy with more than twenty grandchildren and she is happy because she returned to her family land, after being forced to flee decades earlier because of the fighting. Manuel Orellana, from El Salvador, has raised a settled family and he is now a grandfather. He enjoys visiting places he frequented when he was a child, and that he had to abandon during the war. In Nicaragua, Justino Pérez is being a father to his current partner’s granddaughter, after losing touch with his biological children, and he owns a plot of land, paid for in instalments, where he grows all the food they need to survive. I met Medy Ewaz Ali from Afghanistan when he was eight, and he now lives in Madrid with his sister after fleeing their country when the Taliban returned to power in the summer of 2021. Zar Bibi, who lost both legs when she was fifteen, has married for love, an unprecedented act in Afghan society, and she has two children. Fanar Zekri, a Kurd who lost both legs when he was six years old, is now thirty-four, he got married a year ago and his goals are to buy a house and to have two children. The Colombian Mónica Paola Ardila, blinded by the explosion of a mine when she was just seven, struggles daily to overcome the emotional trauma left by the mine blast and the repeated sexual abuse she has endured since infancy, her wellbeing having been ignored by the Colombian state. The victims featured in this documentary project symbolise the tragedy affecting hundreds of thousands of victims of anti-personnel mine explosions around the world. All of them have a story to tell about their fight for survival and dignity, and our obligation, since we are incapable of putting an end to the violence, is to respect their life experiences. I have tried to approach them with the greatest respect and I have not conditioned or changed the way they act or behave. I have never wanted to steal the suffering of others. For years, I have insisted that war does not end when Wikipedia records it. It is a mistake to think that a piece

of paper on its own can establish a peace process. Wars permeate the societies affected with such brutality that the populace needs years or decades to overcome the appalling consequences. I never forget that I was a first year Journalism student in the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (Autonomous University of Barcelona) when the USSR invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Nearly forty-four years have gone by, the country is still at war and it gets more and more difficult to find Afghan people who remember what the word “peace” means. Millions of Afghans have been born, have grown up, raised families and got old in the war while my professional career improved and strengthened. This is the injustice of being born or living in territories devastated by everlasting war, always spurred on by the huge armaments industry. Those responsible for so much suffering hide behind opaque business interests and acronyms. The armaments industry grows more powerful and impenetrable every day despite laws on arms controls passed by the parliaments of democratic countries, which are not worth the paper they are written on when it comes down to the business of death. One of the specialities of our governments, businessmen and bankers is presenting themselves to the rest of society as advocates who respect universal values and current legislation, while using secrecy and impunity to rewrite and break those laws and kowtow to the most obscene pragmatism. The people who shout the most when they are in the opposition are the ones who submit the quickest to the official script as soon as they reach the halls of power. When I presented Mined Lives in 1997, I used the names of the children of the highest Spanish officials in the national, regional and local governments to remind them that the children and teenagers victims of the anti-personnel mines could have been called the same, had those officials’ children been unlucky enough to have been born in the afflicted countries. In the prologue to the 2007 edition, I noted that all the Spanish governments, from the start of the democratic transition in the mid 1970s, had accepted the shameful business of the arms industry, including anti-personnel mines, and I suggested that all the Spanish presidents could be indicted in an international court for their permissiveness and complaisance in the arms trade. At that time, the first government led by the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the president who made most use of the word “peace” during his term of office, had doubled the sale of Spanish armament during the first term. When the second term ended, he had become the best arms dealer in Spanish

history. In 2004, Spain sold 405 million euros’ worth of arms. At the end of 2011, we had reached 2431 million euros. Talking ironically, I always recommend using the four-times-table we learnt at school to show that multiplying four by six is simply increasing the numbers six-fold. Furthermore, like all the other governments after this one, Zapatero’s government broke the Spanish law on foreign trade in defensive materials (Ley de Comercio Exterior de Material de Defensa y Doble Uso, ley 53/2007), passed by the Spanish Parliament in December 2007 to prevent the sale of armament “when there are reasonable indications that they could be deployed in actions to disturb the peace, to exacerbate tensions or latent conflicts, or that they could be used in a manner contrary to the respect and dignity of human beings, in order to carry out internal repressions or in situations that violate human rights, or that are transferred to countries known to reroute the material sent.” When the conservative Mariano Rajoy became president (after Zapatero), it was business as usual and he even designated Pedro Morenés, a well-known arms dealer, as Defence Minister. The ministry itself strengthened the arms industry without taking into account who we sold to and the laws we broke. It was like putting the fox among the chickens. The earlier record from the previous incumbent was pulverised with sales of almost 4,347 million euros in 2017, over ten times more than our sales in 2004. The new Arms Trade Treaty approved by the UN in 2014, whose golden rule is “no authorisation of trade to commit atrocities”, did not help to improve the situation. Amnesty International has accused the various Spanish governments of the past years of “little transparency.” Under the governments headed by Pedro Sánchez, including the second one with the support of left-wing party Podemos, arms sales have continued at the same rate as in earlier governments. In 2019, the business grew 8.6 percent over the year before and Spain moved back into the sixth place of the “Champions League” of the countries with the highest sales of arms in the world. In 2020, there was a record of

authorisations for arms deals with 22,545 millon euros in the first half of the year, double the sales of the two previous years combined, although the COVID-19 pandemic prevented some of the contracts being completed. In the current term of government, the Spanish law on the arms trade was modified by decree to include a Verification Protocol and a new Certificate of Final Destination, with the aim of a better control over the arms exported. But, as Amnesty International has pointed out, this decree does not include “measures to guarantee that the arms sold are not used against civilian populations.” In June 2021, Amnesty International “asked for the suspension of the transfer of Spanish arms to Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Israel and Turkey, due to the risk that they may be used to commit atrocities in Yemen, Libya or the occupied Palestinian Territories, among other places.” In 2022, Ukraine became one of the main destinations for Spanish armament, and Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship that systematically violates human rights and is directly involved in the terrible war in Yemen, continued to be the top destination for our exports. The governments of all political parties have expressed their satisfaction with the arms deals agreed with this dictatorship and other countries in the Persian Gulf who systematically breach human rights. Mined Lives. 25 Years is an outcry against a terrible injustice and a daily drama. It shows how the permanent physical injuries in their damaged bodies affect the victims, the many times an artificial limb has to be changed, the cost of multiple surgeries, the psychological effects that are as destructive or perhaps even more so than the mutilations, the pain stemming from the struggle to get better, the joy when small challenges are overcome. This is a contribution to the fight against the cynicism and hypocrisy of our government officials, who always take cover behind the lack of transparency and the impunity, incapable of taking trascendental decisions that would end so many hidden tragedies in this great industry of war and death.

MAO RATTANAK BATTAMBANG (CAMBODIA)

On 18th January 2007, shortly after turning eleven years old, Mao Rattanak was playing with his friend La, thirteen, near the iron bridge in Battambang town centre, when he found an explosive, probably an anti-personnel mine. He picked it up from the ground and hit it against a rock. He was caught full on by the blast. Some passersby took him to the World Mate Emergency Hospital in a few minutes, where he underwent emergency surgery. He lost all vision in his right eye and partially in his left eye. His right hand was amputated, as well as two fingers from his left hand. Kike Figaredo, a Spanish Jesuit and prefect who has lived in Cambodia for over thirty years, took him into the Centro Pedro Arrupe in Battambang, specialised in caring for children injured by mines or with severe disabilities. There, he was able to continue his primary school lessons, though he gave up before finishing secondary school. Now, Mao Rattanak is twenty-seven, he lives with his wife Ña Molika, who is the same age as him, and their four children: Karona, Muta, Ruchana and Rattanak, aged from six years old to two months. They live in a very modest house given to them by his mother, now deceased. His beautiful voice means he can work several days a week as a wedding singer, while his wife looks after the children and the housework.

2007