FEATURE-Deminers slowly recovering south Sudan lands
By Opheera McDoom
ANDOLU, Sudan, April 12 (Reuters) – Adam is a lonely figure kneeling in the blistering sun on the side of a mountain in this remote part of Sudan, gently poking away at the rocky ground.
Dressed in bright red armoured jacket and a helmet, he is working to demine vast swathes of land in Sudan’s south, a painstaking process essential if millions of people displaced by civil war are to return to their homes under a new peace deal.
Adam’s home is the Nuba Mountains, a hilly and green area in central Sudan which saw some of the worst atrocities of the war, Africa’s longest civil conflict.
He is one of about a dozen Sudanese deminers trained by international experts to carry out the delicate task of searching for land mines in Nuba.
The biggest danger is local people and grazing cattle who wander unperturbed in the live mine field surrounding him. A goat set off a mine last month, and anyone in the vicinity is likely to be maimed by flying shrapnel.
“No matter what you tell them, if a farmer has to walk through a live mine field to get to his crops, he will,” said Canadian demining expert Mark Argent, who has worked in the Nuba Mountains for 14 months.
The work is slow and tedious, and Adam’s equipment is basic — gardening tools for digging and cutting away brush, a metal detector, and a prodder to locate the mines.
Four teams of deminers in Nuba are clearing up to 500 to 700 square metres a week, Argent said. Defining the boundaries of a minefield is one of the biggest problems.
“We have people telling us in good faith where they laid the mines, but with the torrential rains they get washed down the hill and you have no idea where they are,” he said.
“YEARS AND YEARS”
Asked how long it could take to demine the south of Sudan, about the size of France and Germany together, he said: “Years and years — I mean they are still demining mine fields from the Second World War,” he said.
Argent said they had found around 100 land mines and about 55 other unexploded ordnance since beginning work to demine the small field around an outcropping hill.
The tiny village of Andolu, a few straw-roofed huts nestled at the foot of the hill, was a government garrison which withstood many offensives by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Both sides laid mines around it, he said.
The SPLA signed a peace deal with the government in January to end 21 years of war. The southern conflict claimed 2 million lives and forced more than 4 million from their homes.
The south was mined by both sides, but over the years the mines have been moved, paths have changed and maps are often out of date. Experts say the south is not heavily mined, but the sheer size of the area of conflict is the main challenge.
“Just one land mine constitutes a mine field,” Argent said.
The war broadly pitted the Islamist government based in Khartoum against rebels from the mainly Christian and animist south, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.
A ceasefire in the Nuba Mountains ceasefire was signed at the end of 2001 and demining has been going on as people return to their homes, doubling the population of the area.
As people flood back, more and more mine fields are being discovered because cattle and farmers set them off accidentally.
BLIGHTED FARMLAND
The Nuba Mountains has some of the most fertile soil in Sudan, but experts say millions of acres of land is out of bounds to farmers because of the risk of mines.
Driving through the region, labourers can be seen working by the side of the dirt tracks, making clay bricks to supply the huge demand of those returning to build homes.
Jon Bennett, U.N. team leader of Sudan’s Joint Assessment Mission which has drawn up a post-war development plan for the country, said southern Sudan’s land mine problem was serious and funding was not included in a $2.6 billion appeal being launched at a donor conference in Oslo this week.
He gave a rough estimate of $25-30 million to do basic demining along southern Sudan’s main routes.
Argent said the work was expensive, labour intensive and slow. “Even if you use machines, dogs… you still have to use men to go over to check the ground afterwards,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Emma Batha in London)