Landmines, the silent sentries all fear

The teenage boy sitting on the roadside fears the rebels will come for him next because they know his house, his village. He fears they could drag him off as they dragged away and executed his father when he came to the aid of victims of a landmine explosion. The boy’s father, a hunter, was in the forest last March when he heard the boom of the blast that ripped apart a vehicle and its passengers, leaving 13 dead. “He had been hunting. He came on his motorbike to see what he could do. He had a mobile phone,” he said. The boy often returns to this spot where his father died and gets off his bike and remembers. Heavy with grief, he looks at the ground as he explains how the rebels, seeing the gun and the mobile phone, accosted the hunter, dragged him under the canopy of trees on the edge of the dirt-road and shot him dead. Others in nearby towns refused to help the injured and bleeding victims who had crammed onto the bench seats of the blue truck to make the short journey from their coastal communities of Varela and Suzana, to the trading town of Sao Domingos in northern Guinea Bissau, close to the border with Senegal. “People were too frightened to help, frightened of more landmines or mostly just frightened of the rebels,” said Italian priest Guisseppe Fumagalli, known to everyone as Padre Ze, who has run the Catholic mission in Suzana since 1968.

The wreck of the blue truck, ambushed by rebels

Residents say the mine - an anti-tank mine the size of a large dinner plate - was an ambush gone wrong. The bus driver had been making money gun running, they say, but on that day, his load was innocent civilians - most of them women heading to market. The explosion came at 9 a.m., three days into a government campaign in March to expel separatist rebels fighting across the border in Senegal’s Casamance region, out of northern Guinea Bissau. Padre Ze heard the blast and knew it had occurred somewhere on the bumpy dirt road leading to Sao Domingos. “I called the hospital, they knew the blast had caused deaths and injuries, but no one had arrived at the hospital - everyone was too frightened to go down the road,” said Padre Ze. So Padre Ze, accompanied by a man from Varela who was concerned for his missing wife, jumped in the mission’s car and sticking to the hard ground for fear of more landmines travelled to the explosion site. By the time they arrived, three hours had passed. The man found his wife dead, but continued to help the living. Back and forth the priest travelled, ferrying the injured to help. It was only on his third return trip from the hospital that he spotted a badly injured woman in the bush who had tried to crawl to help. By the time he was able to return to her, she was dead. The Guinea Bissau government launched a six-week campaign against a hard-line faction of the Senegalese separatist Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) in mid-March. As the fighting against the MFDC faction headed by Salif Sadio closed in on Sao Domingos, 126 km north of the capital Bissau, residents fled.

Northern Guinea Bissau is poor and rural, villagers live without electricity or running water

Many of the young men were frightened of being mistaken for rebels and shot by soldiers drafted in from the capital. Older men who stayed in town to keep an eye on the family home said they saw dead rebels lying in the street, dressed like any other local youngsters in t-shirts and jeans. The gunfire ceased at the end of April, but the fears remain. According to villagers, as the rebels retreated they planted a string of anti-personnel landmines in their wake. Farmers in communities strung along the Guinea Bissau-Senegal border, particularly around the village of Baraka Mandioka where Sadio’s hardline rebels had a major base and which thus saw the worst of the fighting, are too frightened to harvest their cashew crop in case they stumble across mines. “We are not encouraging these people to go back to their farms as we cannot be sure about the mine situation,” said Mamadou Alfa Djalo, head of office for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Bissau which is distributing food in the area. A UN-backed de-mining programme with CAAMI, the national mine action coordination centre, has begun along the 45-km stretch of road working from Sao Domingos to Varela. But while the team of seven painstakingly sweep metal detectors over the soft sand of the road where anti-tank mines could be quickly and easily laid, local cars, trucks and mini-buses zip past them leaving a cloud of dust.

A cashew nut, growing below the cashew fruit, still on the tree but nearly ripe for harvesting

As the fighting ended towards the end of April, the government carried out its own de-mining exercise, sending two tanks and two columns of foot soldiers along the length of the road without incident. Since then local transport has largely resumed, though the road remains closed to UN personnel. The de-mining team coordinated by CAAMI have uncovered only nuts and bolts and scraps of metal after hours of searching. But a close inspection of the roadside carried out during the work indicates that the biggest job could lie in snaking pathways and tracks through adjoining farmland. Fallen trees blocking tracks through the undergrowth, broken bottles planted on upturned sticks, and cigarette packets wound tightly around tree-trunks indicate to mine specialist Simon Coaton, working with CAAMI, that as well as the Baraka Mandioka region, an area of land has also been mined around the village of Nhambalam which lies just north of the Varela-Sao Domingos road. Nhambalam village is walking distance from the spot where the ambush was laid for the blue truck, and residents say many rebels were based in the area. A hand-scrawled sign nailed to a tree says “Zone of Nhambalam is prohibited”.

School kids pat the head of a fallen statue of leader Amilcar Cabral laid in a broken crate in the capital Bissau

And in recent weeks two people have had near misses with land mines in just that area, both of them triggering the tiny devices designed to blow off a man’s lower leg as they rode over them on their bicycles. In both cases the bicycle, and not the rider, took the brunt of the blast. “People know the risk but they can’t not go into possibly dangerous areas as they need to get to their farms - they have to eat, they have to live,” said Coaton. Much of the cashew nut harvesting is done by children who fill buckets with the nuts that drop to the forest floor when the fruit turns a blood red ripe. Most anti-personnel mines can sit easily in the palm of the hand. Costing only a few dollars to produce, they are easily and quickly laid, acting as a silent sentry for years. Removing them is slow, costly and in the dense vegetation of northern Guinea Bissau, extremely difficult. Guinea Bissau’s landmine problem goes back as far as the country’s war of independence from colonisers Portugal, when both sides planted landmines to defend their positions. The war ended in 1974, but even this year unexploded munitions from that war of 30 years ago maimed three children, fatally injuring another. Other unexploded devices date back to the short but bloody 11-month civil war of 1998 and 1999.

Information posters on landmines are pinned up in classrooms across the north of Guinea Bissau

Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish landmine devices have all been found in Guinea Bissau. The government signed up to the international convention banning anti-personnel mines in 1997, although the signature was only ratified in 2001. Globally, 150 countries have signed the ban, though mines continue to kill or maim an estimated 20,000 people a year - and around one fifth of all victims are children. Pinned to school walls across the northern border region of Guinea Bissau are posters warning children of the dangers of landmines. And Coaton warns that more mine accidents could happen as the seasonal rains begin. “As the rains fall, the top soil shifts along with any mines,” said Coaton. “So footpaths that are being used without any problems today, could be hiding a nasty surprise.” SS/ CCR