Final peace deal in Sudan to increase pace of clearing landmines: UN
NAIROBI, May 29 (AFP) — A final peace deal in Sudan would quicken the pace of clearing landmines in a nation which has been wracked by conflict for 21 years, top UN officials in charge of anti-landmine operations said.
“We are hopeful that the signature for a (final) peace agreement will increase the level of resources needed for demining,” the UN Mine Action Service Director Martin Barber told journalists in Nairobi, after returning from a week-long visit to Sudan.
“It will definitely increase the pace of demining, because the government and (southern rebel) Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) are committed to the exercise,” Jim Pansegrouw, the chief technical advisor at the UN Mine Action office in Sudan, told AFP.
Khartoum and the SPLM/A capped two years of intense political negotiations in Kenya on Wednesday by signing deals on how they will share power and administer three disputed regions in the centre of the country, once the war ends in the oil-rich south.
The deals do not cover the 15-month conflict raging the western region of Darfur.
Pansegrouw explained that UN anti-mining survey teams started working in Sudan last November and around 50 experts are currently active in different parts of the country. Apart from demining, he added that the teams are educating people on the dangers posed by landmines.
Barber said that in the course of the long-running conflict, both sides laid landmines along defensive positions, around garrison towns and along roads and scatters others as they retreated from positions.
He warned that refugees returning to their villages face danger since uncharted anti-personnel and anti-tank mines are still littered in large swathes of land across the African country.
“Many communities are going to find (landmines) when they return home… We really hope we can keep the number of casualties to a minimum by raising awareness, quick action in key areas and thorough marking of areas we cannot clear immediately,” Barber said, explaining that it was impossible to know the number of mines laid in Sudan.
Apart from Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia, which are the most heavily mined countries in the world, Sudan and Mozambique lie in the second category, Barber said.
In Sudan, “we are giving roads a top priority,” he said, adding that it would take three years to complete demining in 2O out of the 26 states in African’s largest nation, which are heavily mined.
Sudan became the 141st nation to agree to ban the production, sale or buy mines in April this year under the international anti-personnel mine-ban treaty known as the Ottawa Convention that was drawn up in 1997.
The war, which has pitted mostly Christian and animist rebels in the south and northern exiled opposition groups against the Islamic regime in Khartoum, has left at least 1.5 million dead and an estimated four million people displaced.