Focus on mine clearance

At either end of a field of mustard coloured grass in Senafe, southern Eritrea, the former trench lines are separated by just a few hundred metres of open land. Apart from the hastily erected rocky ramparts behind which the soldiers huddled, there are few other signs of war. But beneath the waist-high grass that sways in the wind sweeping across the valley lies the deadliest legacy of war. When Ethiopian armed forces gained the upper hand in their border war with Eritrea in June last year and drove deep inside Eritrean territory, this sleepy frontier town became the front line in Africa's deadliest war. At night, under cover of darkness, Ethiopian and Eritrean sappers, spades strapped to their backs, were sent out to dig shallow holes and lay rows of mines as their last line of defence. But before those defences could ever be tested a cease-fire was signed, and in February the armies withdrew, leaving their mines behind. Six months later, officials of the HALO Trust, a British de-mining charity formed in 1988, arrived in Senafe to begin the painstaking task of removing the menace to allow the inhabitants of the town and its surrounding villages to start rebuilding their shattered homes and lives. Phil Straw, who heads the HALO Trust operation in Senafe, hopes that by January they will be able to declare the area mine-free. "Before we started clearing the mines it would have been impossible to walk from one side of the field to another without stepping on a mine." Straw said the HALO Trust and other de-mining groups operating in Eritrea were working in concert with Eritrean de-mining groups, and that they had also received good cooperation from the Eritrean Defence Forces, whose minefield maps have saved the mine-hunters valuable time in decontaminating the sites. Perhaps most importantly, they are raising awareness on mine issues among the local population, many of whom are prevented from going home by the prevalence of mines. To the west of the minefield a desperate band of 9,000 villagers are gathered tightly together in a makeshift canvas camp. They are just some of the tens of thousands of Eritreans displaced by the fighting, now unable to go home. For many of these people now living in the camp, home is a village called Tisha, little more than a stone's throw away, but the hundreds of mines which litter the ground between them and their village make the journey home an impossibility. "If you look just to the right of that tree over there, you can see my house," said a 55 year-old farmer and part-time shopkeeper, Ahmad Salih Umar, pointing an outstretched hand and squinting against the afternoon sun. "It brings tears to my eyes to know that I am so close to home, yet I cannot return." For now, he must content himself with life under canvas, living on the proceeds from the sale of the few shop items he carried away with him when he and his family fled in the face of the Ethiopian army's advance in June last year. But thanks to the HALO Trust, and their extensive network of locally trained mine clearers, Umar and his fellow villagers should be home by January. Worldwide, HALO Trust employs 4,800 local staff and just 30 expatriates, a policy that has made the British charity a favourite with donors. "Its fantastic that they employ so many locals and so few expats," said Silje Vikoy, an executive officer with the Norwegian foreign ministry. "It's the kind of project we like to support." One such local staff member is team leader Mehretab Gebremeskel, who completed his training in September and has already cleared 290 mines from the Senafe minefield. "I am not doing this for the UN, or for the money, I'm doing it for my country," said the young man, who knows all too well the danger that land mines pose to the returning civilian population. Last month Mehretab was startled by a loud explosion which echoed across the valley from an area some distance away from where he and his colleagues were working. "I had told the old man so many times not to graze his cows there. I guess he didn't want to listen." It took Gebremeskel and his colleagues more than an hour to reach him, and when they got there they found one of his legs missing and the other hanging loose from just above the knee. "By the time we got him out of the minefield he was dead. All I could think was, why didn't he listen to us?"

The Senafe minefield, with Senafe town in the background.

Sadly, the same kind of human tragedy is being played out right across southern Eritrea while teams of de-miners race against time to cancel out the threat. Senafe's is just one of 450 minefields in Eritrea. No one knows how many unexploded mines and ordnance (UXO) lie waiting for unsuspecting farmers, but it is estimated that it will take a staggering 10 years to clear them. Dave Edwards, the chief of operations for the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre, said that so far his teams had unearthed 2,000 mines and close to 20,000 units of UXO in the 10 million square metres they had so far cleared. "So far, we have had recorded civilian casualties from mines and UXO amounting to 51 deaths and 110 injuries, but this figure is a woeful understatement. The numbers must be well into the hundreds."