ANGELS OF THE WARZONE
By Gavin Madeley
ON a suburban street in Subsaharan Africa, the air is filled with the bustle of daily life. Children chatter noisily above the hubbub of traffic, while a young man walks alone down the pavement before pausing by a tree.
For those behind a police cordon who watched as Prince Harry headed down Princess Diana Street in downtown Huambo, Angola, to the Diana Tree, this simple act was bound up with great symbolism.
Twenty-two years earlier, his mother had followed the same path. Then, the route was very different – there were no shops and schools, no busy road filled with cars and trucks. Just loose scrub lined with tall grasses and a row of red warning signs bearing the skull and crossbones.
Diana was pictured there in 1997, close to the tree that now bears her name – the only remaining landmark – kitted out in anti-blast vest and visor in what became an iconic image.
Few locals would have strayed onto that deadly ground for fear of stepping on a hidden landmine, the bitter legacy of Angola’s exhausting civil war. That Diana was able to make such a powerful visual statement in the heart of a minefield was thanks both to her own fearless campaigning spirit and the pioneering know-how of a then little-known Scottish charity whose logo was stamped across her protective clothing.
The remarkable transformation of a no-go zone into a dynamic neighbourhood began with the painstaking work undertaken by the HALO Trust’s mine-clearance experts, whose base was a barn in rural Dumfriesshire.
The trust has grown exponentially in the intervening years into the world’s pre-eminent de-mining charity, employing 8,800 staff in 27 countries and territories, from Columbia to Cambodia.
Since it was founded in 1988, HALO has destroyed more than 1.6million mines, 12million shells, bullets and grenades, and cleared an area equivalent to half a million rugby pitches.
It also deals with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) left behind by ISIS in Iraq and Libya, along with unexploded bombs in Yemen, and teaches Syrian children how to stay safe in the playgrounds, streets and fields littered with the debris of war.
But, while its mission and scope now reach far and wide as one of the world’s largest non-governmental organisations (NGOs), HALO’s roots remain resolutely Scottish.
The old barn may have gone, but its global headquarters are now housed in a converted stable block just a few miles away near the village of Carronbridge.
It has also retained the support of an influential royal patron. When Prince Harry set out in his mother’s footsteps, he, too, wore HALO’s insignia proudly on his shirt.
‘It has been quite emotional retracing my mother’s steps along this street 22 years on,’ he told a group of locals in Huambo. ‘Being here on this transformed and bustling street – the site where my mother once walked through a live minefield – shows the tremendous impact that clearing landmines has on communities and their futures.
‘But let us not lose sight of the reality. Twenty-two years after my mother visited Angola, there are still more than 1,000 minefields in this beautiful country that remain to be cleared. I wonder, if she was still alive, whether that would still be the case.’
Harry was 12 when he lost his mother just months after her visit to Huambo. He was 18 when he vowed to finish the work she had started.
On this trip, he donned the same type of protective face and body armour as Diana to accompany HALO Trust staff through a former artillery base near the town of Dirico, where he detonated a mine.
He described landmines as ‘an unhealed scar of war’, adding: ‘By clearing the landmines we can help this community find peace, and with peace comes opportunity.’
The prince offering these words of hope is now 35 – the same age his mother was in January 1997 when she launched her crusade. He met some of the amputees she cuddled so affectionately on her trip. The symbolism is undeniably potent.
And in that regard, Prince Harry is as vital to HALO’s work as his mother was in her day. ‘He’s enormously valuable. He has the ability to convene people, to attract interest in the issue and has the passion and the knowledge to back it up,’ said the trust’s head of communications, Paul McCann.
‘He first visited a minefield with us in 2010, so he’s got a great sense of what really matters.’
Mr McCann feels the prince has inherited his mother’s steely determination, but also her common touch. He said: ‘I think you see in dealings with people that he’s very natural. Even in the interactions I’ve had with him, he’s got a great sense of humour and is very open with people.’
His talents are going to become critical if the 164 signatories to the Ottawa Landmine Ban Treaty – signed soon after Princess Diana’s death – are to meet their pledge to become landmine-free by 2025.
The US, China, India and Russia – which is thought to have the largest stockpile – are among 32 United Nations members still to sign the treaty – and mines are still being planted in Burma and by Boko Haram insurgents in Nigeria.
Against this backdrop, the HALO Trust has never seemed more essential. The charity was founded in 1988 by the legendary Scottish soldier and politician Lt Col Colin Mitchell, his wife Sue, and Guy Willoughby, a former Coldstream Guard. The trio found their calling not in war, but in clearing up its lethal debris.
Mitchell, whose disregard for his own safety in prolonging Britain’s colonial rule in the Middle Eastern protectorate of Aden earned him the nickname ‘Mad Mitch’, served as a Tory MP for West Aberdeenshire and a defence consultant.
HE was advising the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Army in 1986 when he witnessed the appalling injuries caused by the Soviets’ indiscriminate use of landmines. Two years later, he set up the HALO Trust (Hazardous Area Life-Support Organisation) to perform what his son, Angus, would call the ‘dirtiest and most dangerous job left on Earth’.
What started as a small, selfless enterprise to improve the lives of those living in the direst circumstances grew into a humanitarian phenomenon, largely under the leadership of Mr Willoughby, who stepped down in 2015.
At first, most of HALO’s key staff were ex-military, which may seem counter-intuitive. ‘If you are a soldier, you will have seen what impact mines have and you see that they are indiscriminate and that the vast majority of the people they affect are civilians,’ reasoned Mr McCann. ‘Having witnessed that kind of effect as a soldier, I think that wanting to do something about it is natural.’
While the Army tends to attract those with a taste for adventure who are less risk averse, he added: ‘At the same time, we’ve got people who used to be ski instructors – so sometimes it’s just an aptitude for the outdoor life.’
Nowadays, the vast majority are local people looking for jobs – of the 8,800-strong staff just 150 are ‘internationals’ parachuted in by HALO.
‘We have a project in Angola which employs just female de-miners and it was massively oversubscribed,’ said Mr McCann. ‘Over 80 per cent of the women are single parents and half of them had never had stable employment. A lot of places where we work are recovering from conflict and have little opportunity for employment; you might occasionally get something at a market or some seasonal agricultural work.
‘The difference with HALO is that because we offer a regular monthly
salary, people are able to borrow for a house, they can put their kids through school because they can keep the fees up. It’s not hard to hire people, but the work is fairly labour-intensive, painstaking work because you want to make sure that the land you hand back is completely safe, completely clear.’
Any slip-ups will only add to a terrible toll. More than 120,000 were killed or injured by landmines between 1999 and 2017, according to research by Landmine Monitor.
Nearly half of the victims are children, with 84 per cent being boys. Civilians make up 87 per cent of casualties.
Clearing minefields is also perilous. In the past ten years, 18 staff have been killed while de-mining or handling explosives.
Mr McCann said: ‘We give them skills and proper training. Before every day, there’s a refresher on certain aspects of the job – because what you are doing is something that is both very dangerous and repetitive. It could be tempting for people to cut corners.
‘The key is finding people with the temperament to stick to our operating procedures and stay safe and not let your attention drift.’
Each year, HALO takes in up to 15 international management recruits, who are put through an intensive selection process, which includes various aptitude tasks in the Dumfriesshire countryside. ‘It can start at 4am and they will be told to get to a place, but we don’t tell them the address or how to get there. It is to show us how they can perform under pressure,’ said Mr McCann.
THEY need to be ready to take charge of several hundred people in remote locations in Africa or south Asia, which in the past meant the charity was dominated by ex-military.
‘We do still have former soldiers with the skill set to teach others how to deal with improvised explosive devices,’ said Mr McCann. ‘But nowadays we recruit those with medical or journalistic backgrounds. One of my colleagues used to be an opera singer.’
One of those ‘international’ recruits was Camilla Thurlow, brought up in Dumfriesshire, who hit the headlines when she became a contestant on ITV reality show, Love Island. Viewers struggled to square her model looks with her background as a fully-trained bomb disposal expert.
She has since used her celebrity in a documentary highlighting HALO’s work in Cambodia and its role as a fundraising charity.
Mr McCann added: ‘People maybe think we get all our funding from government, so Camilla’s able to get us to the public and to younger people in particular. She has a fantastic social media following. She is enormously helpful.
‘Just as Harry can shine a light on the impact that mine clearance can have – which is what is so effective about him – she can also give the message that the job’s not finished and has to be continued.’
BUT how much of the job remains is unclear, as there are parts of the world where civilians and aid agencies are denied access. ‘Nobody knows the figure. There were millions of landmines made, insurgent groups planted them, nobody kept records, so nobody really knows for sure,’ he says.
‘We know there are still 60million people worldwide whose lives are impacted by landmines. They cannot get to the local town, or their kids have to go through a minefield to get to school.’
HALO has just launched a fundraising campaign called Breaking Boundaries for a village in Zimbabwe that is surrounded by landmines. Every donation received by December 22 receives matching aid from the UK Government.
Angola is one of the most mined places because of the civil war between the Communist MPLA government and the West-backed UNITA rebels from 1975 to 2002. Official efforts to log their whereabouts show there are still 1,200 minefields left to clear.
Here, at least, the trust can look to the future. It has just signed a £47million deal with the Angolan government to clear 153 minefields in a vast conservation region, a savannah that is home to vital waterways flowing into the Okavango Delta – a Unesco World Heritage site in nearby Botswana.
It aims to enable safe access for the local community, wildlife, conservation personnel and, eventually, to the eco-tourism that could help the region truly prosper.
‘One of the important things about mine clearance is that landmines don’t breed; once they are gone, they don’t come back,’ said Mr McCann.
‘Their impact is finite and places like Huambo will flourish because of it. I think Harry’s right that with the right international support, we can get to the end of the process.’
As it works to eliminate the debris of war for good, the HALO Trust will hope that a prince’s momentous walk down Princess Diana Street is another step in the right direction.