“A Shared Experience: Striving for Safety”, a documentary about clearing landmines in Vietnam, was screened in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 5. (Photo: GICHD)Geneva (VNA) – “A SharedExperience: Striving for Safety”, a documentary about clearing landmines inVietnam, was screened on the sidelines of the seventh Meeting of States Partiesof the Convention on Cluster Munitions in Geneva on September 5.
Filmed in Europe and Vietnam, the documentarywas produced by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining(GICHD) in partnership with Vietnamese Defence TV and aired in Vietnam in April2017 on the occasion of the International Day of Mine Awareness.
The documentary aims to improve understanding ofresidual risk management from the perspective of Vietnam and compares theissues Vietnam faces to the situation in European countries, including how minesfrom World War I and World War II are managed.
The screening was held by the GICHD in thepresence of Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the UN Duong Chi Dung,representatives from the World Trade Organisation and other internationalorganisations in Geneva, and speakers from UK-based mine action and explosiveordnance disposal consultancy Fenix Insight.
In his remarks at the event, Dung said Vietnamis among countries most heavily affected by mines and explosive remnants of war(ERW) with about 800,000 tonnes of unexploded bombs and mines left,contaminating 6.13 million hectares of land or 19 percent of the country’s area.They have killed more than 40,000 people and injured about 60,000 others since1975, he noted.
Vietnam has been working with the GICHD tominimise the effects of ERW, he said, adding that experts from the GICHD have assistedVietnam in applying long-term risk management in coping with ERW since2015.-VNA
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