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Refugees Magazine Issue 130: (Sri Lanka) – Landmines: Cleaning up after the guns fall silent
It was surely one of the most bizarre sights of the war. "I was in Mannar district when I saw a small and rather strange herd of cattle," recalls Luke Atkinson of the Norwegian People's Aid group. "On closer inspection, I noticed that most of the cows were three legged. They had each had one leg blown off by mines.
"The farmer had kept them alive by binding their wounds but he appealed to me, ‘What can I do with these three-legged cattle? What can I do?'"
Atkinson is a de-mining consultant helping to train a cadre of 600 field staff for the Humanitarian De-mining Unit (HDU), an organization responsible for cleaning up the Tamil Tiger-controlled areas of Sri Lanka. The army and other international groups are working in government-controlled areas.
Regions emerging from long conflicts – Cambodia, the Balkans, Angola, Afghanistan – all face a lingering nightmare legacy of war including minefields, booby traps and unexploded military ordnance such as bombs and shells.
And though the encounter with the crippled herd of cattle had an almost tragicomic element, it underlined in a peculiarly poignant way a similar physical threat facing Sri Lanka's returning civilians, their livestock and their ability to rebuild shattered local communities.
The army laid more than one million mines during the two-decade long war, the LTTE a smaller but unknown number. The military recently agreed to share with civilian de-miners precise maps of their minefields, a move Atkinson said would be invaluable in reducing the inevitable number of casualties and speeding up de-mining activities.
The consultant said he was already impressed with the discipline shown by many returnees who had moved back into their old homes, but had resisted the temptation to venture into uncleared and potentially lethal farmland just a few yards away.
RISKY WORK
Still, the situation remained highly dangerous, both for the mine clearers and civilians.
One six-man team was recently at work on the shoulder of the country's main north-south artery, the A9 truck road. To the untrained eye, its method of operation appeared basic, even primitive and fraught with risk. Each de-miner was dressed loosely in flimsy rubber wellingtons (gumshoes) which offer little protection against unexploded material, flak jacket, visor and white hardhat.
Their gear was recently upgraded, according to the team leader directing operations through a bullhorn as the men spaced themselves at 15 metre intervals and began work. Traffic rumbled by a few feet away. A beautifully dressed woman in heels walked daintily by, seemingly unconcerned about any imminent surprise.
The de-miners were each armed with an unsophisticated, long-handled and rusting garden rake with which they vigorously combed and then cleared the underbrush. The leader insisted to a skeptical visitor that the rake strokes were too light to trigger any lurking mines, but would merely uncover them after which they could be detonated on the spot or made safe and removed.
Each 30 minutes the teams were changed to allow the men to rehydrate with huge gulps of water. In one day each de-miner cleared just a few square yards. Each earned 7,000 rupees ($80) per month, a good salary in Sri Lanka, and the work will certainly last for several years.
But even though the problem here may not be quite as dangerous as in places like Angola, the toll is still enormous. An estimated 1,000 persons were killed or injured since civilians began returning home in large numbers. In one particularly tragic incident a de-miner blew himself up when he mistakenly sat on a mine which had only been unearthed a few minutes earlier.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 130: "Sri Lanka – Emerging from the ruins" (April 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (880Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here.
