UNMEE pleads for help to speed up de-mining

The United Nations made an impassioned plea to the international community on Friday to help speed up de-mining in Ethiopia and Eritrea after a spate of serious injuries.

Dave Edwards, a mine expert with the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) said one man was killed and four injured in several blasts this week alone. "We need to speed things up, but we need the assets to be able to do it, and we need the backing of the donors to do it," said Edwards of the Mine Action Coordination Centre (MACC). He said the scale of the problem was "horrendous".

Edwards, who is the MACC director of operations, said that defusing the thousands of deadly landmines in the 25-km buffer zone between Ethiopia and Eritrea would take years. He said MACC currently lacked expensive specialist equipment to quickly identify and defuse mines and were forced to rely on a "manual and unsophisticated" approach.

Ethiopia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world as a result of the many wars which have ravaged it. Tens of thousands of mines and units of unexploded ordnance (UXO) litter both countries after their most recent conflict – the bloody two-year border war with neighbouring Eritrea. "We have got the good building blocks with the basic de-miners, we have lots of basic de-miners," said Edwards.

Edwards said they now needed dogs and mechanical devices able to rapidly identify mines for defusing. He noted, however, that the equipment was expensive. "Once they are in place they are extremely cost effective in the long term," he added. "All we need now is to convince the donors to put the money behind the specialist capacities such as dogs and mechanical devices to speed up the approach."

Edwards said mine information received from both countries on were they had laid mines was helping with clearance. "The information we are getting is accurate and we don’t have a problem with it," he said. But he told a video-link press conference in both Asmara and Addis Ababa that there were still gaps – albeit small ones - in the information. "There are exceptions to that and of course a lot of it is from memory of the conflict so there are some exceptions."

Mine and UXO blasts cause horrific injuries. He said the accidents last week had been caused by two mines and by UXO left from the war which ended with a peace deal in December 2000. An UNMEE military observer and his interpreter were injured in a blast on Sunday. A day earlier, a farmer had been killed and a tractor driver injured after detonating an antitank mine. And just days later, on Tuesday, a nine-year-old and 15-year-old were injured in UXO blasts.

The UNMEE acting spokeswoman, Gail Bindley Taylor-Sainte, told the briefing that the row over Badme – which was sparked after journalists were taken to the Ethiopian-administered village via Eritrea - remained unresolved. The Ethiopians had put in place new checks at the airport for UNMEE peacekeepers, and called for the Dutch force commander, Maj-Gen Patrick Cammaert, to be replaced. She said the issue was being still being discussed at the highest levels between the UN and the Ethiopian government.