Dateline ACT

Angola 06/02

Land mines cripple peace in Angola

Luena, Angola, 24 July 2002
by Paul Jeffrey

Like many teenagers around the world, 16-year old Ester Cagila enjoys dancing. Yet Cagila dances so that other Angolans will know more about the threat posed by land mines, a brutal tool of war that continues to kill and maim Angolans even though their country is now at peace.

Cagila was forced to flee her home village of Luacano in 1998 when fighting between government forces and UNITA rebels made life impossible. Shortly before that, Cagila’s grandmother had stepped on a land mine while planting cassava in a nearby field. The old woman lost a leg and uses crutches today. Cagila says she often thinks of her grandmother when dancing. "I’m doing this so that it won’t happen to anyone else," she said.

Cagila is part of a theater and dance troupe in Moxico province that educates rural villagers about the dangers of land mines. The group is sponsored by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), a member of Action by Churches Together (ACT), the international alliance of churches and church agencies responding to emergencies.

Originally formed in 1990, the group is called "Havemos de voltar" - We will return. All the participants are people displaced by Angola’s long civil war, which finally came to an end after UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in February.

During the past decade, the group has used its drumming, dancing and skits to help educate Angolans about HIV/AIDS and other community health issues. With the fierce violence of the war’s final stage, its members shifted their focus to land mines, which have maimed or killed more than 86,000 Angolans in recent years.

While estimates of the total number of land mines here vary, they all run into the millions. "No matter the total number, of all the countries in the world Angola is the one most heavily impacted by land mines," said Steve Priestley, director of operations for Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British nongovernmental organization that works in 12 countries around the world. In Moxico province, probably the most heavily-mined area of Angola today, MAG works closely with the ACT/LWF team.

"Whatever you want to do, whether it’s plant a field or rehabilitate a school or open a road, you’ve first got to clear away the mines. The threat of mines has paralyzed the country," says Priestley.

More than 70 types of mines - manufactured in at least 22 countries - have been planted in Angola during recent decades. Mines were installed by the government military, the South Africans, the Cubans, the Russians, UNITA, the police, by neighboring governments and several other Angolan armed groups. This panoply of mine layers makes demining - which includes understanding the strategy and patterns of mine laying - even more complicated. Mine clearance experts say only the Cubans made accurate maps of their mine fields.

The tens of thousands of one-legged Angolans hobbling around their country on crutches provide graphic evidence that most of the mines laid here are small anti-personnel mines designed to maim rather than kill. Yet the explosives are often targeted at civilians, most often women and children, rather than soldiers. Planted near water sources and under shade trees in the savannah, they are designed to terrorize, often with the goal of depopulating the countryside.

Several techniques are employed in removing mines, but none alone is sufficient for all cases. Metal detectors and specially-trained dogs are often useful. Mine-removal machines are employed in some places where the terrain permits, yet certain mines, designed to be thrown from helicopters, can withstand the momentary impact of a vehicle-mounted mechanical flail and not explode. The sustained pressure from a human foot, however, will activate the mine.

Some mines are specially designed to thwart - and kill - deminers. On the road from Luena to Lucusse, which MAG cleared for emergency use in early July, the organization has found mines that are activated by the magnetic field of metal detectors. It also found one mine, whose battery had fortunately run down, which was designed to explode when light hit an optical switch on the mine casing. It may have been one of these mines which killed a MAG deminer on the Lucusse road in 1997.

Unexploded ordnance littering the countryside also poses a deadly threat. Many Angolans have been killed while disassembling unexploded rockets and artillery shells in search of the mythical "red mercury," a substance whose existence is reportedly promulgated by unscrupulous metal scrap dealers.

Peace in this southern African country has brought the dramatic plight of hundreds of thousands of desperate Angolans to the world’s attention. United Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations are rushing to get food and other aid to displaced populations and demobilized combatants and their families in scores of isolated locations around the country. Mine experts warn that accidents are bound to happen unless roads can be completely cleared ahead of aid convoys.

Aid workers acknowledge the risk that humanitarian action can imply in a place like Angola.

No one can guarantee perfect safety, a point that was loudly underscored on July 9 when an anti-tank mine exploded under an aid convoy in Bie province, injuring two people. With not enough deminers to go around Priestley says the focus of demining operations can't be on "chasing mines" but rather on lowering their impact on civilian populations.

"You can run around clearing mines forever and have very little impact on people’s lives" he observes, "so we focus on creating what we call a ‘safer village’, whereby we enter a village and quickly do limited clearance of the important paths and areas for housing and cultivation, and demarcate the remainder. This means that life can begin again, the men can go to the fields, the women to the well."

Yet Priestley says this approach really requires the participation of the people in the community, so MAG has partnered with ACT/LWF in Moxico to make mine awareness and clearance an integral component of rehabilitating lives and communities. Since the mid-nineties, the two organizations have worked together, MAG clearing areas where ACT/LWF would then rehabilitate a war-ravaged clinic or school. ACT/LWF field staff regularly include mine awareness in their education about agriculture or community health. And Ester Cagila continues dancing.

"The educational component of mine awareness provided by LWF/ACT is essential," Priestley says. "This kind of education works best when it focuses on the positive. We need to do more than just tell people what they cannot do. We need to tell them where they can safely farm and where they can safely get water."

With financial support from ACT member Finchurch Aid, ACT/LWF has also sponsored one of MAG’s mine clearance teams in Moxico province. It was that team which provisionally cleared the Luena-Lucusse road in early July, permitting the transport of urgent U.N.-provided food aid to the families of demobilized UNITA combatants at Lucusse.

On July 5, the Angolan government ratified the Ottawa Convention prohibiting the use of anti-personnel land mines. So perhaps no more land mines will be laid here. Yet millions remain, waiting quietly for a chance to take a limb or a life.

Priestley says it’s futile to predict when Angola might be free of the scourge of land mines. "When will this all end? It’s hard to tell. There are still areas of Europe which are off-limits because of land mines laid during World War II," he said. "The world has created a monster here, and we’re going to be removing land mines in Angola for a long, long time to come."