Sher Mohammad Jahesh and Sher Ahmad Haidar – Pajhwok Afghan News*
KABUL, May 22 2006 (IPS) – In Afghanistan, the most mined country in the world after Cambodia and Angola, landmines and unexploded ordnance kill or maim people almost daily.
The victim may be a boy sitting on the mountainside, tending the family s sheep or a truck driver who swerved to avoid a pothole. Or it could be a farmer who returned from a refugee camp in Pakistan to till his ancestral land.
Of Afghanistan s 20 million people, an estimated four percent (750,000 men, women and children) have been disabled by landmines. A legacy of the country s prolonged civil war and Soviet occupation, they were responsible for the deaths of 154 people and injuries to another 703 in 2005 alone. Many cases are believed to go unreported.
On Apr. 24, at least eight children, between 5 and 8 years old, were wounded when a mine exploded in Lakankhel Village, Nahrin district in northern Baghlan. The children were grazing their sheep in the area. One of the injured lost an arm.
Provincial governor Mohammad Alam Rasikh said it was a Soviet-era mine. He blamed the Halo Trust , the largest foreign charitable demining group operating in Afghanistan, for failing to clear the area despite requests by the authorities.
Mines were used extensively around many of the major cities in Afghanistan. While Kabul was mined by the mujahiddin (religious warriors) after the withdrawal of the Soviets, the latter heavily mined the regional capitals of Kandahar (south), Jalalabad (east), and Herat (west).
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Extensive mining also took place inside the cities of Kandahar and Herat. For example, in Herat, the huge barrier minefields laid by the Soviets which ran through the western part of the city were laid to defend the city against mujahiddin insurgencies from close to the Iranian border.
The verges of important roads in and out of the cities were mined, and mines were used to protect strategic supply routes, such as the road from Pakistan to Kabul, and other major arterial roads. The lines of red warning rocks demarcating minefields, which run along the sides of roads, are a common sight while driving in Afghanistan.
Mujahiddin commanders mined Kabul extensively after the fall of the pro-communist regime. Between 1992 -95, the Afghan capital became the focus of heavy fighting between rival mujaheddin factions. Large parts of the city particularly western Kabul -ûwere mined as a result of house-to-house fighting.
When the Taliban ousted the mujahiddin from Kabul, mines were reportedly used on the front lines north and west of Kabul, and north-east of Herat, where there was fighting between ex-mujahiddin commanders and the Taliban forces.
In October 2001, coalition forces began bombing the Taliban. Thousands of high explosive bombs, including cluster munitions and missiles, were used in the nearly two month long military operations.
It is estimated that between 10 to 30 percent of the munitions did not detonate due to technical or mechanical failure. Unexploded ordinance (UXO) continue to pose a serious threat to the lives of the local population.
On May 3, two children were injured, one of them seriously, when a mine exploded on the outskirts of Ghazni city, on the main highway from Kabul to Kandahar. The victims were playing with the mine. Earlier the same week, two other children were wounded in a similar incident in Khogyani district in Ghazni province.
The task of clearing mines falls to some 7,600 deminers currently operating in the country. They work under the auspices of a number of mostly Afghan organisations which with western funding trained deminers in the refugee camps of Pakistan after the 1989 withdrawal of the former Soviet Union.
In 2003, the current Afghan government and the United Nations embarked on a joint 10-year plan to rid the country of mines and buried explosives by February 2013.
Afghanistan, which joined the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, or Ottawa Convention, on Sep. 11, 2002, has begun destroying its stockpiles of mines. According to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a network of 1,200 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in 60 countries, Afghanistan has the biggest demining programme in the world.
Landmine Monitor which was created by ICBL to assess the international community s response to the humanitarian crisis caused by landmines, has reported that from March 2003 to 30 April 2005, a total of 28,893 stockpiled mines were destroyed in cooperation with demining NGOs.
A landmine impact survey conducted between November 2003 November 2004 has reduced the area of estimated contamination from 1,350 sq km to 715 sq km.
Landmine Monitor s 2005 Afghanistan report -the 2006 report is scheduled to be released on Sep 13 -has stated that in the previous year, over 33 sq km of mined areas and nearly 70 sq. km of battle areas were cleared, destroying over 5,000 antipersonnel mines, 500 antivehicle mines and one million other explosives
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is the main source of casualty data, there may be as many as 100,000 landmine and UXO survivors. Disability rights are guaranteed by the 2004 Afghan Constitution.
But the social security benefit of 300 Afghanis a month (about 6 dollars), paid to about 300,000 recipients, including mine survivors and other people disabled by the war and the families of those killed in the war, is insufficient to maintain a basic standard of living. (*Released under arrangement with Pajhwok Afghan News)
