Eritrea’s national demining programme suspended

ASMARA, June 25 (AFP) — A national programme to clear landmines in Eritrea has been suspended after the government confiscated 40 vehicles used by the country’s mine action agency, anti-mine campaigners said in statement Saturday.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) said “mine clearance has now stopped in Eritrea … because the government seized in April 40 vehicles that had been in use by the national mine-action agency as part of a UN demining assistance program.”

Habtom Segid, the deputy head of the Eritrean Demining Agency, the country’s demining authority, said his body had ordered its mine clearance teams to temporarily suspend their work in early April as a result of the government’s seizure of demining vehicles, the ICBL statement said.

The Eritrean government has for its part announced, still according to the ICBL statement, that it will not renew the contracts of most of the foreign experts working on a UN-funded programme to assist with mine action.

“Taken together, they (the vehicle seizures and the downsizing of the assistance programme) represent a halt to national demining in the country”, Paul Collinson, the head of the UN development agency’s mine action programme for Eritrea, was quoted as saying.

However, the suspension does not affect demining operations in the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ), the buffer zone straddling Eritrea and Ethiopia where the UN Peacekeeping Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) is deployed.

The ICBL is a coalition of non-governmental organisations formed in 1992 to help campaign for the eradication of mines in the world. The campaign’s coordinator was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

According to ICBL, a total of two million mines are believed to have been laid in Eritrea during World War II, the country’s independence struggle against Ethiopia (1961-1991), and the 1998-2000 border war against the same neighbour.