Bui Van Thien, 12, and three of his classmates walked to school after a particularly heavy rain storm in central Vietnam. The downpour had been so severe that fields were flooded and part of the ground at the side of the road had been washed away. But they knew the route from their tiny village of Gio Hai. They had used it daily for more than five years and never ventured too far from the track. This time, the group stumbled, either by accident or out of inquisitiveness, on to a landmine. Three of the boys died instantly, while Bui survived the initial blast with horrific wounds to his groin, left arm and head. He made it back to the village, a poor coastal fishing community of about 200 people which is in Gio Linh, the most northerly district of former South Vietnam in Quang Tri province, from where he was taken to a nearby hospital. But as with many young mine victims, his body could not cope with the massive trauma of being blasted with shrapnel at point blank range and he died about a month later. These deaths added to the 25,000 people, mostly civilians, who are killed or maimed every year in similar explosions in what has become a global disaster. But what makes this incident even more appalling is that the device that killed Bui and his friends was sown more than 20 years ago by retreating American and South Vietnamese soldiers fleeing the advancing communist forces from the North. 'There had been a serious flood and the top soil had been washed away and the landmine had come up,' said Hong Kong based anti-mine campaigner Jim Monan. 'We don't know what they did and we'll never know now as this kid is dead. They either touched it or threw stones at it.' He tried unsuccessfully to talk to Bui's grief-stricken parents to gather information for his study. What upsets Mr Monan, who was in the area at the time conducting research into the scale of the problem for Oxfam Hong Kong, as part of a United Nations study on the impact of landmines on children, is that this is not an isolated incident. According to his findings, which are the first to be collected in the country, since 1985 in Quang Tri province alone, 449 people have been injured and 474 have died. A third of all victims were children. 'The reason why Vietnam is an interesting case is because the war has been over for 20 years and kids are still getting blown up,' Mr Monan said. 'Until we found this out in 1993 the international community didn't know Vietnam had a problem because Vietnam never told anyone. 'This child [Bui] lived within three kilometres of an American naval base, Cua Viet. As the Americans and the South Vietnamese armies retreated, they heavily mined those areas.' He first came across the human destruction when asked by Oxfam Hong Kong to investigate a serious drought in Quang Tri where communities had lost all their crops and were starving. Provincial authorities explained that this had caused a knock-on effect and forced many farmers to dig up mines to sell as scrap metal so they could buy rice to feed their families. 'I went there to look at this drought and I came across these scrapyards all over the place, and these scrapyards just blew my mind, they were full of bomb casings, dismantled mines, GI's helmets, star shells and mortars, some of which were still live,' he said. 'It is one of the poorest provinces in Vietnam and one where Oxfam Hong Kong is working. What they are finding is that the landmines and the other UXOs [unexploded ordinance] are a barrier to their development work in agriculture which is being impeded by the existence of this military hardware.' Mr Monan is an irrigation and agricultural development consultant but he became so moved by what he discovered in Quang Tri that he is now campaigning to make the international community aware of the plight of the farmers and fishermen - and the fact that landmines kill far more civilians than soldiers. 'Since I went through this conversion, this is my major humanitarian campaign,' he said. 'I've seen these kids, I've talked to them. Oxfam Hong Kong is spearheading the campaign in Asia to call for an international ban on the production and utilisation of landmines so I give my time to Oxfam Hong Kong to feed into this international campaign.' According to UN statistics there are about 110 million mines in 64 countries. Assuming nobody lays any more, Mr Monan said it would take 1,000 years to clear them at the present rate, at a cost of US$33 billion (HK$255 billion). 'It can cost between US$3 and US$30 to make a mine and anything between US$1,000 and US$8,000 to lift one,' he said, explaining that Vietnam's army could clear mines for 50 US cents a square metre compared with international agencies which cost US$5 a square metre. As part of the growing movement to publicise the carnage, Mr Monan, who has lived in Asia for 18 years, said an American non-government organisation, Peacetrees, had donated US$90,000 to local authorities. The money is to be used to clear mines from an unusable area of land, plant trees and pay for a museum which will be used to educate children and promote mine awareness. 'Before the unification, part of Quang Tri province was in North Vietnam, part was in the South,' 56-year-old Mr Monan said. 'So it was a big, big battlefield. 'And it contained a large number of US military bases. The bulk of these kids . . . it is mines that are blowing them up. 'After I'd been there for a couple of years I suddenly realised I was walking in areas where there were potentially mines. I was walking in the village where the four kids were blown up and they were blown up just at the side of the main road through the village. 'There is danger everywhere there.' As part of his research Mr Monan has compiled a gruesome catalogue of civilian victims, who have either been killed or maimed, which he is using in a series of lectures to Hong Kong schools and associations. Among them are twin brothers Ngyuen Duc Hoa and Ngyuen Due Huynh who were six in September 1994 when they went to watch a scrap dealer working on an anti-tank device in his yard while on their way to school. The mine exploded, killing the dealer and badly wounding Hoa and Huynh who suffered brain damage and severe facial injuries. 'They're physically damaged and psychologically damaged,' said Mr Monan, describing all mine victims. 'They get as good a treatment as the province can provide in terms of health care and rehabilitation into the community. 'The emphasis is very strong on rehabilitating these kids back into the community, which is excellent. 'Landmines terrorise civilian populations. They terrorise communities. They terrorise civilians far more than they ever damage armies.' Due to the continuing destruction from the Vietnam war-era explosives many farmers, especially in Quang Tri, are too scared to work their farms with some losing two generations to explosions in fields that had been safely tilled for years. According to Oxfam Hong Kong at least 3,500 hectares of farmland - an area far larger than the territory - in the province's Gio Linh district are uncultivated due to the presence of mines. One crop from this land could generate about US$389,000 and sustain 2,100 families for a year. Mr Monan said a rudimentary mine clearance programme, with villagers taught to poke long poles in the ground until they hit something hard when an expert would be called in, was instituted in Quang Tri from the end of the war in 1975 to 1985 when 58,747 devices, including UXOs, were made safe. Since then there has been no systematic work carried out due to financial and technical constraints. Even with more advanced equipment and training one of the most common anti-personnel mines found in Indochina, the Chinese-made Type 72A, is constructed almost entirely out of plastic and is nearly undetectable once buried. More than 5,250 of these have been made safe in the province since 1975, according to the Provincial People's Committee in Quang Tri. Others are booby-trapped and even skilled professionals face grave risks when handling the deteriorating and unstable devices. But this does not stop impoverished farmers from trying their luck searching for mines, bombs and shells which are then melted down in small road-side foundries and sold for scrap metal. 'There are now guys in Quang Tri who have metal detectors,' he said. 'They are actually professional metal collectors - and it is dangerous.' The scrap collectors can earn US$1 a day digging up ordinance - in a country where the average yearly income is just US$200.