At least 17 killed by mines in 2005 –TMAC

Some 1,800 anti-personnel mines have been neutralised in Tajikistan this year, the Tajik Mine Action Centre, responsible for the clearance, said on Tuesday. Cold weather means the demining season is now at an end in the mountainous Central Asian nation. Mines killed at least 17 people and injured many more this year. Almost all the victims were civilians collecting fire wood or grazing cattle along the border with neighbouring Uzbekistan. Two border guards perished from mines at the end of November on the Tajik-Afghan border, TMAC noted. “The majority of mine accidents have taken place in [the northern area] of Soghd as a result of mines installed by the Uzbek authorities on the Tajik-Uzbek border. Though the Uzbek authorities say they started mine clearing on the border several weeks ago, their actions have not been confirmed,” TMAC chief Parviz Mavlonkoulov, said. Tashkent installed anti-personnel mines on its 1,050 km border with Tajikistan during and after civil war in Tajikistan in the mid-1990s, in an effort to deter insurgents from crossing into Uzbekistan. The location of the thousands of remaining mines are not marked and civilians routinely step on them and are either killed or horrifically maimed. “We have spoken to Tajik border guards and local people living along the border and we could not find evidence that [demining] work had begun. This does not mean that clearance is not happening, but we need more communication with Uzbekistan so that we can tell people where it is safe and where not,” William Lawrence, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) chief technical adviser at TMAC, said. Lawrence called for greater regional cooperation in resolving the mine issue. “As far as TMAC is aware, there is no dialogue about mine action issues between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This is regrettable because we would prefer to have direct contact between our two countries so that we can develop a programme that will assist in clearing landmines from our mutual border,” he added.