LEGACY OF TH HIDDEN KILLE
Adense silence filling his ears under his thick visor, Sanjin Matkovic slowly inches forward with his metal detector, stopping at every step to insert a metal probe into the dry earth.
He repeats this at two-inch intervals across a patch outlined with yellow tape, searching for landmines.
And every silent dip of that probe could awaken a deadly weapon with a 50-yard kill zone, sleeping in the dirt.
We soon spy one – not below the earth, but perched on the lower branches of a tree, its trip wire laid out lazily across the woodland floor.
“Fear is always present,” admits Sanjin, 43. “But in this job, fear is your friend. The man who stops fearing is usually going to make a mistake.”
Landmines still kill and injure thousands across the world every year. But we aren’t in recently war-torn Afghanistan, Syria or northern Iraq, nor Cambodia, Vietnam or Angola.
This is Europe, Bosnia – where Princess Diana highlighted the threat of mines 20 years ago, on her last official trip, weeks before her death.
Diana’s legacy seemed set when, four months after she lost her life in Paris, 122 countries signed the Mine Ban Treaty, outlawing the use of the anti-personnel devices.
Yet Bosnia has been forgotten. Around 500 square miles are contaminated with the explosives, putting 15% of the population at risk.
Five people a year are hit. All that prevents more casualties are the skull and crossbone warning signs.
Whole villages have become ghost towns behind the yellow tape, families still refugees.
I want people to be able to come back to their homes, and the land they can farm SANJIN MATKOVIC
Last April Prince Harry took up his mother’s cause and pledged the world should be free of landmines by 2025. The British government stepped up and pledged €110million to help.
This Christmas, MAG, the British Mines Advisory Group, raised around €220,000 and last week the Government matched that.
International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt announced the addition to tackle the “hidden, indiscriminate killer”.
Yet only Angola, also visited by Diana, will get the new cash. None of the €110million has been allocated to Bosnia. MAG was only able to secure enough funds to begin work here last year – from Austria and the US.
The only other international group working here is from Norway.
Zoan Grujic of Bosnia’s Mine Action Centre, says Prince Harry’s pledge won’t be possible in Bosnia at the current rate of success.
He began the clearance here with the UN after the war, and has done what he can since. Initially, 1,776 square miles were covered with an estimated one million mines. But he concedes clearance has taken far longer than it should.
“Twenty years after Diana came here people have forgotten Bosnia,” he explains. “If we continue to work at the same pace, there is no way that we will be clear by 2025.”
The painstaking nature and urgency of this work is clear.
Sanjin was working next to a cemetery with graves crumbling into disrepair which cannot be visited by relatives.
“I have been clearing mines in my country for 10 years,” he says after he finishes his strict 30-minute solitary shift. A tenminute break every half hour is enforced in his five-hour day – it is concentration which keeps him alive. “I continue to do this because I want our country to be clear, I want people to be able to come back to their homes, land they can farm.”
Sanjin is Serb, and was a soldier in the conflict, yet today he is working alongside Smail Zuban, 52, a Bosnian Muslim who fought against him in the war between 1992 and 1995, which cost 101,000 lives and led to the first case of genocide in Europe since the Second World War.
Their bond is testimony to the
CLEARER IN BOSNIA MINE
country’s will to move on. “There’s no problem,” both insist. “We work together now for the same reason.”
Collaborating with MAG, the first swathe of land they have designated for clearance is a 40-minute drive from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, near a town called Praca. It is complicated terrain, across steep woodland.
The first area, marked out, using military records and word of mouth, spans 1.3 miles and contains three deserted villages where 60 Serbs lived.
Among the taped-off ruined stone houses, mature plum and pear trees grow – bearing their forbidden fruit, which goes to waste every year.
In the first 100 square yards they have already cleared 68 mines. They are in a mound, ready for detonation
They were laid by both sides in the conflict in this area, which was near the front line. Among them are 22 PMR-2 mines with prickly jackets, designed to fragment on detonation.
There is a MRUD too, the cruellest of weapons, packed with 1,400 metal balls, each able to kill.
“You are more likely to die if you detonate these kind,” says Smail. “Rather than maim or damage a leg, they would reach higher up the body. They have a killing zone of 50 metres.”
Unlike “blast mines” which usually stop working after 10 years, fragmentation mines are designed to last forever and their fuses often become more sensitive over time.
MAG director in Bosnia, Josephine Dresner, says: “Still, 22 years later, people are still dispersed all over the place. And they cannot use their land to farm, for their livelihood.”
This is a huge obstacle to development in a country where unemployment is crippling and the economy has not managed to recover since the war involving Bosnians, Serbs and Croats, following the break-up of Yugoslavia.
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