HE Heng Ratana, Director General of CMAC, at a press conference on the morning of August 18,2025

HE Heng Ratana, Director General of CMAC, at a press conference on the morning of August 18,2025

Let me explain this a little more technically. During the recent visit of foreign delegations from 33 countries and several international partners, organized by the Thai Minister of Foreign Affairs, Thailand displayed a number of PMN-2 landmines.

The mines shown were intact and had not been detonated. Notably, their arming pins were still in place—yet once an arming pin is removed, it cannot be reinserted. This leads to a simple but critical question: if these mines were truly recovered from minefields where they had been laid for detonation, how could they still appear in an unused condition with arming pins intact?

The PMN-2 mine was developed in the 1970s as an evolution of the earlier PMN mine produced in the 1950s. Cambodia imported these mines during the conflict of the 1980s. Following the restoration of peace, Cambodia destroyed all remaining stockpiles in 1999 and officially declared that we no longer possessed such mines—a fact that has been fully recognized by the international community.

I can therefore confirm that the mines displayed by Thailand were not old mines removed from Cambodian minefields. If they had been, they would not have had arming pins intact. While it is technically possible to transport unexploded mines, the fact that these were packed neatly in boxes for display shows that they were not retrieved from active minefields, but rather prepared specifically for demonstration purposes.

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