UN says demining to be completed by April 2003

The UN said on Friday it expected demining for border demarcation to be completed by April 2003 "at the latest".

“The problem for us at the moment is we don’t know exactly how many pillars are going to be inside a mined or an unexploded ordinance-contaminated area," said Phil Lewis who heads the demining team for the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE).

“Until we know that we can’t give you a definite time of what it is going to take to clear all the sites because we don’t know where they are, or how many there are," he told a news conference in the Eritrean capital, Asmara. But, he said, "we anticipate that the demining of those sites will be completed by latest, end of April 2003, and maybe before that, depending on how many actual sites end up in mined areas".

Aerial photography, which will be used in the border demarcation, ended on Friday and the information will be sent to Sweden for quality assessment, the UN said. The maps that will be made from the photographs should be ready by August and will be used by the survey teams from the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC).

The independent Boundary Commission, based in The Hague, issued its crucial ruling on the new border between the two countries on 13 April. The sides fought a bitter two-year war, sparked by a border dispute in May 1998.

Lewis said that by mid-May, UNMEE would start the formal clearance of access routes to the areas where it is likely border posts will be placed. "We have done some of this work already," he said. "It is no accident that many of the routes that have been cleared are in potential areas where demining will have to occur for demarcation [to begin]."

"What we are doing at the moment is humanitarian demining, general clearance," Lewis said. "What we'll be doing in support of the EEBC project, is 'spot clearing' - we'll only clear a very small area inside either a minefield or contaminated area." He added that this would be a much faster process than clearing an entire minefield.

He said UNMEE estimated that the area to be cleared amounted to about 200 km, as much of the 1,000 km-long border was defined by rivers and areas where there was no major contamination, as there had been no conflict. "We think, based on what we know and what we've been planning on at the moment, that we will have to demine in the vicinity of about 50 areas where the pillars will go in mined areas," Lewis added.