Miss Landmine aims to highlight the horrors of landmines, and celebrates the inner strength and beauty of survivors.
WITH their flawless ebony complexion, beautifully made up faces, pretty dresses and tiaras, the participants for Morten Traavik’s beauty pageant look like any other contestant of such competitions.
They proudly pose for pictures in bikinis along a beach. They swing on hammocks. They perch on velvety sofas.
And then you see the prosthetic limbs on each contestant. For this is Miss Landmine, a beauty pageant with a unique manifesto that aims to promote female and disabled pride and empowerment.
The event also aims to get people to re-examine established concepts of physical perfection, raise landmine awareness, and challenge inferiority and guilt complexes that hinder creativity in the historical, cultural, social and personal spheres.
“Miss Landmine ultimately celebrates true beauty, and replaces the passive term of victim with the active term of survivor,” Miss Landmine director and creator Morten Traavik, a Norwegian artist, explains in an e-mail interview with The Star.
Traavik’s unusual project came about in 2003 when he frequently visited war-torn Angola’s capital, Luanda, with his then-girlfriend who had an Angolan father. They could not travel much because of the thousands of landmines littering the countryside that claim countless lives each year. Angola is one of the world’s most heavily mined countries.
One day Traavik came across street children staging a beauty pageant in an alley on New Year’s Eve, and they promptly asked the intrigued foreign visitor to be a judge.
“It struck me as being so different from all the commercialism our western culture associates with such pageants,” Traavik recalls.
“On the contrary, it was a feel-good experience; it was more like a street party attended by the whole neighbourhood. The kids organised everything themselves, with girls from seven to 17 going through the motions of a regular beauty contest with great earnestness and dedication.
“At some point, these impressions of the country gave birth to an idea that was brewing in my imagination,” says Traavik.
“As an artist, director and actor, I am bored with my rather self-serving work environment. I wanted to apply my skills beyond the self-imposed inner exile of the arts scene to a more challenging and unpredictable reality outside.
“It has been my objective all along that Miss Landmine would have a political or humanitarian impact. We only had one main criterion, that any woman or girl can participate as long as they wanted to. The women taking part are not being regarded as victims to be pitied. Rather, they are just like any other contemporary Angolan woman.”
In 2008, Traavik’s idea became a reality. He collaborated with local and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to disseminate information on the pageant that was open to women who had survived landmine explosions.
Miss Landmine was funded by the Norwegian Arts Council and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which had played a pivotal role in the global ban against unexploded ordnance (UXO) in December 2008 in Oslo.
The pageant was co-funded by the Angolan government and the European Union Mission to Angola.
An international voting process was conducted through the Miss Landmine official website for 10 participants, while another 20 vied for the title in front of an audience.
Angola’s First Lady Ana Pauyla dos Santos crowned Augusta Hurica, 31, representing the province of Luanda, the first Miss Landmine Angola.
Hurica won a specially designed and customised prosthesis worth US$15,000 (RM45,000) from one of Norway’s leading orthopaedic clinic.
“We didn’t impose strict criteria on our global jury,” says Traavik. “We encouraged them to understand each participant’s story, background and strengths. The final events are staged along the lines of your regular Miss America-style pageant. No reason to alter a winning formula.
“There can, of course, be only one or two winners – the jury’s choice and the winner of the international web vote on our project website. However, the ladies who participated were fully aware that this is more than a beauty pageant, that they are employed as my fellow artists in a campaign to influence attitudes, both outside and within themselves.”
Currently there are no landmine survivors’ networks for Angolan women, and Traavik hopes that the Miss Landmine project will act as a nucleus for such a network.
This network can run community-based rehabilitation programmes with support from national authorities and international NGOs.
“Each participant can be assigned as a Miss Landmine representative in her own province, and be responsible for assisting other women in the same situation. They can monitor ways to empower women through education and healthcare.
“We hope that a successful Miss Landmine pilot event will act as a catalyst, both in Angola and other landmine-affected countries, for the project to develop, with or without the assistance of the original Miss Landmine team,” says Traavik.
From Angola, Traavik launched another pageant in Cambodia in 2009, drawing 10 contestants. The pageant had stirred sentiments, both positive and negative. Some saw the pageant as a celebration of beauty beyond prejudice; others felt it exploited landmine victims. It took a turn for the worse in Cambodia.
Miss Battambang, Dos Sopheap, 19, from the Damnak Lourng Village, won the first prize that included a set of custom-made titanium prosthetics and US$1,000. She’d lost a leg in an explosion in 1996.
“It felt like having a leg again,” Sopheap was reported as saying after receiving her prize, adding she was keeping her cash award for her education in hopes of becoming an economist.
However, the voting and subsequent crowning ceremony had to be done in secret after the Cambodian government, bowing to protest from a western NGO, banned the pageant in March 2009. They called it “an insult to the disabled, making a mockery of Cambodia’s landmine victims,” said government spokesperson Khieu Khanarith in a wire news report.
“Neither the government nor its western aid worker collaborators in Phnom Penh cared to ask any Miss Landmine participants how they felt about taking part,” Traavik tells The Star in response to the criticism.
“Why can’t we allow Cambodia’s landmine survivors to decide what’s good for them? I’m disappointed that the government is riding roughshod over the people’s right to self-realisation.”
After the ban, Traavik managed to meet 10 participants all over Cambodia, presenting them with press packs containing newspaper clippings from international coverage of the pageant, as well as a cash prize of US$300.
Since that episode, Traavik says he has received informal requests to organise new Miss Landmine competitions from various countries. And the project continues to draw media interest.
Traavik says he is currently tied up with his art projects and does not have the time or capacity to organise another Miss Landmine pageant.
“I would really like the Miss Landmine concept to branch out into other countries and conflict zones with landmine problems, of which there are still plenty around the world,” he says.
“The beauty pageant in this particular situation is not an end in itself, but rather a means of expression to get a message across.
“What do I see when I look at the pictures of Miss Landmine contestants? I see true beauty. I see beautiful women who are proud, dignified and comfortable with who they are. And that strong, feel-good factor is all the while undermined by the tragic stories of mutilation and war that inevitably stay with a landmine survivor.”
But has Miss Landmine made any difference?
“I think Miss Landmine has raised awareness inside and outside Angola and Cambodia of the problem of landmine contamination and the identity of disabled people and landmine survivors in general,” says Traavik.
“Of course, Miss Landmine won’t make landmines go away, or change the participant’s lives overnight; it was not intended to.
“What’s important is that Miss Landmine has been a tool for the participants to overcome prejudice, fear and discrimination. It allows them to highlight their abilities while acknowledging their disabilities, both to themselves and the outside world.”
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