When you aim an AK-47 or a piece of artillery, you know what you are aiming at. But a land mine is different. It is not removed. It can become a menace for years and decades ahead. Mines don't distinguish between a footfall of a soldier or a woman collecting firewood or a child taking livestock into a field.
Mines are also devastating medically.
Patients with bullet wounds may be discharged from the hospital withing three or four days. But a land mine victim's stay is typically much longer. The patient has to be rehydrated, has to be taken into surgery, will then come out an, and if there is a complication, which is often the case, go back into surgery, and finally is going to have to have an artificial limb. And it it's a seven or eight year old child who receives an artificial limb, it mabe have to be replaced with a new one every five or so years for the rest of his or her life. In developing countries, and particularly an almost exclusively agrarian country like Cambodia, a high incidence of land-mine deaths and injuries can be devasting.