African country riddled with land mines
CUITO CUANAVALE, Angola — Domingos Luis, a 20-year-old farmer, has lived his entire life in a hamlet surrounded by land mines, their lurking threat a constant presence. He remembers the old man who was killed after stepping on an explosive while tending his crops. Wild pigs and deer still set off mines in the nearby bush.
“I grew up with the fear that behind every bush there might be a mine,” he said.
His grandmother Diana Tchitumbo said she explained the dangers bluntly.
“‘If you go there, you’ll be killed and never come back. Don’t go there again,”’ she told him. “And if he did, I beat him.”
Fifteen years after the end of one of Africa’s longest wars, Angola remains one of the world’s most heavily mined countries. Swaths of Angola are still littered with land mines, some produced decades ago in countries that no longer exist.
Nowhere are there more mines than in Cuito Cuanavale, a city in southeastern Angola that was one of the last great battlefields of the Cold War. As the United States and the Soviet Union faced off globally, their proxies laid tens of thousands of mines in this area of Angola then considered so remote and impoverished that it was known as the Land at the End of the World.
Today, as populations have swelled with Angola’s postwar economic recovery, communities now ring the city’s outskirts and villagers are living next to still-active minefields. But the unearthed land mines have stunted Cuito Cuanavale’s growth and impeded government plans to turn the battlefield into a Gettysburglike tourist attraction.
The city’s center has been cleared, but villages press hard against minefields containing explosives set by Cubans, who supported the Angolan government. On the other side of the city, an 18-mile-long defensive strip, meticulously planted with mines by apartheid South Africa’s
soldiers, who backed Angolan rebels, remains untouched.
“Angola has more different mine varieties than most mine-affected countries,” said Gerhard Zank, the country manager of the Halo Trust, a private British organization that clears land mines in Angola and other countries.
Over the years, the organization’s de-miners have found mines from at least 22 countries in Angola, including the former Soviet Union and East Germany, Zank said.
Immediately after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola slipped into a civil war pitting two former liberation movements.
The civil war then became one of the most heated Cold War conflicts on the continent. The Eastern bloc backed the Angola government led by the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, with Cuba sending in troops. The West supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, as the United States’ Cold War ally, apartheid South Africa, sent troops to Angola.
The Angolans and their respective allies clashed in Cuito Cuanavale in the late 1980s in one of the last century’s biggest battles in Africa.
Neither side scored a decisive victory. But in Angola and the rest of southern Africa, the battle — and not the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union — is regarded as the turning point that eventually led to the liberation of much of southern Africa and the end of apartheid in South Africa.
“If it wasn’t for this battle, I can surely say that Nelson Mandela would have died in prison and Namibia wouldn’t have achieved its independence,” said Brig. Jose Roque Oliveira, the department head of the government’s National Intersectoral Commission for Demining and Humanitarian Assistance.
Whatever the battle’s significance, it turned Cuito Cuanavale into what Zank calls the “most mined town in Africa.”
Of the 93,000 mines that the Halo Trust has cleared in Angola in the past two decades, more than a third of them were taken out of Cuito Cuanavale. Tens of thousands more are still believed to remain.
Nationwide, about 32,000 acres of confirmed minefields need to be cleared, and 88,000 acres of suspected areas need to be verified as safe, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor.
Angola was required to clear all such mines from its territory by 2018 under a global treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. But Angolan officials say they will be unable to complete the work before 2025.
At its current rate of demining, Angola won’t be free of land mines until “beyond the year 2040,” said Constance Arvis, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Angola.
The United States, which has been the biggest donor for demining efforts in Angola, has earmarked $4 million this year.
Decreases in international funding also have affected nongovernmental groups, forcing private demining organizations such as Halo to slash their work force.
Officials at the government’s Commission for Demining said that funding was also a problem for the government. Because of a drop in the global price of oil, Angola’s main export, the government’s demining budget has been cut by 60 percent, they said. The Angolan government has focused its demining efforts exclusively on areas of public works, leaving other areas to foreign donors and private demining organizations.