Bosnia lacks money to clear mines
SARAJEVO: Muriz Jukic keeps reliving the day last winter when his tractor hit a land mine, unleashing shrapnel that tore out one of his eyes and left him stumbling and screaming.
"I dream about that flash and I wake up soaked in sweat," said Jukic, 43, who was wounded while gathering firewood near his home in Vitinica, a village in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Thirteen years after Bosnia's three-year war ended, mines are still claiming scores of victims. A closer look shows the problem is not that officials do not know where most of the explosives are buried, but they just cannot seem to scrape together enough cash to remove them.
Under an international treaty, Bosnia was supposed to be free of mines by next March. Instead, it has quietly obtained another decade to clear 220,000 remaining mines and other unexploded ordnance that pose a hidden menace to schoolchildren, farmers, hunters, hikers and woodsmen.
The authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most mine-infested nation in Europe, acknowledge the problem. Take all the former front lines where most of the mines lurk, put them end to end and you would have a belt reaching more than a third of the way around the world.
Since the war ended, mines have inured 1,665 people, including 487 fatalities. This year, 19 people were killed and 18 others hurt.
Eliminating the threat "is not the impossible task we once thought it would be," said Sylvie Brigot, executive director of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, based in Geneva. "It's possible to get rid of all these mines, provided there's a plan in place so funding is secured."
But a review of documents and interviews with senior officials coordinating the effort found that Bosnia was raising only about a third of the $50 million a year that Prime Minister Nikola Spiric said his impoverished nation needed to rid itself of mines by 2019.
Unlike many other crisis areas worldwide, where soldiers laid the mines and military records detail where they were buried, Bosnia must also grapple with "guerrilla minefields" where records are more sketchy, said Ahdin Orahovac, deputy director of the national Mine Action Center.
A typical record, he said, might indicate that there were three mines near an apple tree. But when officials scout for the spot, what was an orchard is now a forest, "and all we know is that somewhere there are three mines."
"It's the biggest problem in the world," said Orahovac, pointing to a large map covered with clusters of colored dots. Blue marks places that have been cleared. Red marks areas still mined. And there is a lot of red.
Salih Hadzic is among the people working to find the mines. Wearing a flak vest, a helmet with a protective visor and green cotton pants stained with soil, he sweeps a squawking metal detector over a hillside on the outskirts of Sarajevo.
"I have to concentrate; if I let my mind wander, it could be fatal," said Hadzic, who is forbidden to drink alcohol, goes to bed by 10 p.m. and works in painstakingly slow 30-minute intervals with mandatory breaks.
"But when I go home after work," he said, "I know I've conquered another couple of square yards where children can play and no one's going to get hurt or killed."
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