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Millions of land mines threaten refugees who are returning and humanitarian workers. De-miners are at work to make it safe again.
©Los Angeles Times
January 3, 2002
DASHT-I-RABAT, Afghanistan -- Twenty-three years of bloody conflict seemed mercifully over when a busload of refugees from this village an hour's drive north of the Afghan capital happily lumbered toward the homes they hadn't seen for as long as a decade.
So eager were the passengers to reach the ruined village that, only a handful of miles from their destination, the driver pulled off the main road to cut the final corner of their long journey.
Then the bus drove over an antitank mine, blasting the vehicle into a twisted wreck and killing all 17 people on board.
That Nov. 17 tragedy on the brink of a joyful homecoming was a reminder for Afghans that the wars that have plagued them for a generation may be over, but the killing has yet to stop.
The land mines lacing the ochre fields and rutted roads across this country kill or maim at least 20 people every day and are keeping millions from returning to their homes and fields despite the long-awaited peace now prevailing.
International humanitarian aid agencies trying to help Afghanistan recover recognize mines as the single most daunting barrier to the return of normal life. Fields are too dangerous for farmers to plant the crops that could feed them, and the few orchards and vineyards that have survived contain mines that can blast hundreds of people and animals to their deaths.
"As soon as the Taliban left, people started returning despite the mine hazards. This is happening all over the plains, which is why we have to make this agricultural region a priority," explains Ahmad Nasir, head of the explosive ordnance demolition teams for the HALO Trust, the Hazardous Area Life-Support Organization.
The largest of a handful of such nongovernmental operations at work under United Nations auspices, HALO has 1,200 de-miners and has been at work since 1988 locating and destroying 100,000 pieces of unexploded weaponry in Afghanistan each year. But with the U.N. estimating that 5-million to 10-million mines have been buried in Afghanistan by successive waves of combatants over the past two decades, making this land safe for peace could take a lifetime.
HALO is concentrating its resources on clearing the eight most strategic and heavily mined of Afghanistan's 30 provinces, a job that project director Tom Dibb estimates will take about eight years if additional funding to expand and accelerate the current, $3.5-million annual program for this nation is forthcoming.
Because Afghanistan was at war for almost a quarter of a century, the country has plenty of former military sappers who need only a couple of weeks' training to handle a de-mining job.
The pay is $105 a month for a six-day workweek and omnipresent danger, but the foreign-funded organizations working to free Afghanistan from its buried terror nonetheless have little problem finding willing and able employees. With the vast majority of Afghans out of work and per capita income averaging only $4 a month, the jobs provide a good living by local standards along with the fringe benefit of doing something that helps heal a society devastated by war and destruction.
Along the 7-mile road that skirts Dasht-i-Rabat and links the old and new roads to Kabul from Bagram, dozens of men in flak jackets and clear protective visors sit cross-legged in the powdery beige dirt, slowly scanning 2-inch strips of ground with metal detectors. The strip of dirt is then carefully scraped away unless the detector emits telltale crackling, in which case the de-miner gingerly pokes the suspect area with almost horizontal piercings with a thin rod. Most mines are planted with their detonators facing up so as to catch a human foot or a car tire, Nasir explains.
The majority of the mines menacing rural Afghans are crude metal devices scattered by the Soviets during their 10-year occupation and bloody struggle against resistance fighters armed and supported by the United States.
At Bagram -- which is being used by U.S. and British forces as well as the United Nations and an initial array of foreign military and charter aircraft -- de-mining and collection of unexploded cluster bomblets have been a priority since late October.
U.S. forces deployed around Kandahar also are busy clearing mines from the airport to open another corridor for desperately needed food aid. Three U.S. Marines were injured last month when one of them accidentally stepped on a mine at the airport.
But the answer to feeding Afghanistan's hungry masses is clearing the farmland they are eager to plant, those supervising the de-mining say.
Although Afghanistan's bountiful harvest of mines makes the work more hazardous here than in any other country, Dibb contends that the job of getting rid of them is not insurmountable and could be achieved within five years if sufficient funding and attention were provided.