Creation of regional landmines centre

Djibouti is to create a regional landmine Research and Training Centre to promote the Ottawa Ban Treaty on the elimination of landmines. Representatives from the Djibouti-based Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and a delegation from Yemen, tasked Djibouti to set up the centre and formulate common regional policies on the issue at the end of a three-day conference. Djibouti Foreign Minister Ali Abdi Farah declared at the opening of the conference last Thursday that his government would “spare no effort” in the creation of a centre to serve the Horn and the Gulf of Aden, and called for a common regional policy, assistance to landmine victims, and demining programmes. One of the immediate tasks would be direct assistance to landmine victims. This would come in the form of post-operative care, prosthetics and psychological counselling for landmine victims and their relatives. In the Horn of Africa region “thousands of mutilated landmine victims of the sub-region represent an economic and social burden that will become rapidly unbearable not only to their families but to the community as a whole,” the minister said. But he stressed that weak regional economies are, for the most part, undergoing International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes and cannot shoulder the cost of introducing and maintaining a landmine assistance scheme. Horn of Africa governments were “hardly in a position to take charge financially in a situation where a single child amputee would need no less than 25 prostheses in his lifetime”, Ali Abdi Farah remarked. The US ambassador to Djibouti, Lange Schermerhorn, said the regional conference was a timely opportunity to develop a strategy to address the landmine threat. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) - an NGO and Nobel Peace Prize winner attending the Djibouti Conference - said that, in the 2000-2001 period, the US planned to contribute approximately US $1.1 million for a mine action programme in Djibouti. The project would make use of US military trainers and contractors who would “establish a complete demining programme including training, equipment and facilities”. The American assistance would also upscale the training of about 30 Djiboutian soldiers by the French forces stationed in the Red Sea state. “In 1998, French Foreign Legion technicians assisted Djibouti’s military with the destruction of 350 kg of landmines and unexploded ordnance”, ICBL said in its 2000 Landmine Monitor Report. Much of northern Djibouti is economically crippled by the constant fear of landmines laid during the conflict involving the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD). Since last February, the Djibouti government and FRUD have been fine-tuning a reconciliation agreement that allowed the head of the radical wing of the former rebellion, Ahmed Dini Ahmed to return to Djibouti, in late March 2000, political sources told IRIN. The military conflict devastated northern and southwestern Djibouti between 1991 and 1994. The reconciled parties are said to have agreed to reveal all mined areas but no systematic survey or accurate data collection exists on the landmine problem in Djibouti, the source said. On a wider scale, three other IGAD member states - Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea - are among the worst mine-affected regions in the world. The ICBL report says that Ethiopia and Eritrea are suspected to have made extensive use of landmines – possibly tens of thousands devices - during their two-year border conflict which broke out in 1998. Somalia is considered to be a heavily landmine-affected area because of rival Somali factions, but few statistics are available, the ICBL report said.