Focus on landmine threat

Ten-year-old Rauf lost his left leg after stepping on an antipersonnel mine two years back while playing in a field near his home. Now he hobbles to school in his village of Bargabary in the Bajaur Agency, a tribal district adjacent to the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, far from the conflict in neighbouring Afghanistan. Rauf's 16-member family is destitute in a remote and marginalised part of the country. "I want to read more, and maybe one day I will play again," he said. His story highlights the ever-present, but little-publicised, threat arising from the presence of landmines, which have maimed and killed hundreds over the past two decades in these semi-autonomous tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. "There are two landmine incidents every week," Faiz Muhammad Fayyaz, the chief executive of the Community Motivation and Development Organisation (CMDO), the only mine-action NGO in the country, told IRIN. The problem is partly a legacy of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s when Moscow dropped mines from the air over vast areas along the border to stop Pakistan-based Afghan mujahidin from crossing into the country. The thousands of randomly scattered mines present local people with the usual difficulties, but here the problem is compounded by the fact that there are no records of where the mines were dropped. Conventional minefields also exist in the border area, but again, no records are available. "People cannot go to their fields, and the ever-present threat of landmines risks livelihoods and creates a huge scare," Fayyaz said. A poor health infrastructure in this marginal region means that detonating a mine is often fatal. CMDO said 44 percent of landmine victims died because of a lack of medical facilities. In a regional household survey carried in 2000, CMDO identified up to 700 landmine victims since 1980. Other data suggests that landmines also remain in the ground in northern parts of Baluchistan Province bordering Afghanistan. "There are incidences of mines being used in tribal feuds and sectarian violence," Fayyaz said. He added that there was a pressing need for a comprehensive survey of the region to determine the extent of the problem. Apart from the threat from mines planted years ago, these weapons continue to be used by feuding tribal groups in the region. The lack of enforcement of firearms and weapons legislation in the region means that landmines can be bought openly in arms markets operating there for just a few dollars, according to eyewitnesses. However, CMDO maintained that it had no evidence to support this. The Kurram Agency, another remote tribal belt, west of the NWFP capital, Peshawar, also suffers from the scourge of landmines. The area is prone to sectarian violence between Sunni and Shi'ah Muslims, and landmines are sometimes deployed when conflict breaks out. CMDO is engaged in mine-awareness programmes - primarily aimed at the young. It has trained some 300 volunteers to stimulate mine awareness, along with educating up to 70,000 people on the danger of mines. The NGO also helps with the rehabilitation of victims by paying for their treatment and supplying them with artificial limbs. "We need technical assistance and training for demining to clear the areas most threatened," Fayyaz stressed. Islamabad acknowledges the problem. Malik Azhar Ellahi, a disarmament director at Pakistan’s foreign ministry, described the threat posed by landmines as a "definite problem". But he acknowledged that a lack of understanding of the problem and limited information on the location of the mines were hampering efforts to clear them. However, he believed the Pakistani military had the capacity to dispose of any mines located. "Our own military is very capable of doing the job," he said. Although Pakistan has contributed to international efforts to clear mines in Kuwait, Cambodia, Angola, Bosnia and Western Sahara, there are few signs on the ground that it plans to tackle the same problem resting on its own doorstep. But Islamabad said it was addressing the issue, and pointed to the fact that the government was helping CMDO to operate in the unstable tribal areas by providing security. Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1997 Ottawa treaty banning the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel landmines, which has been ratified by 124 countries and signed by nearly 150 nations.