CAMEO Landmine Clearance

A speech given at the DFAIT-organized Winnipeg Conference on Land Mine Clearance and Victim Rehabilitation on 31 January 1997.

Canadian Participation in Humanitarian Land Mine Clearance

The Angolan Experience

It is a particular privilege to be with you today to discuss lessons learned "from the front". I will be covering six areas rather rapidly, and will show some slides at the end to give you a visual feel for Angola and its condition. I will also be pleased to respond to questions at the Chair's pleasure. If you wish a copy of this script, I would be honoured to provide one.

The first question one might ask when discussing the demining of Angola is: "What responsibility does the community of developed nations have to assist such a country with its demining, when the war was internal in the first place?" The answer to this question is very straightforward: "If it had not been for outside nations buying Angola's resources such as oil and diamonds, knowing that the money paid was going towards the purchase of arms rather than the well-being of the Angolan people, and if such countries had not pushed the two warring factions from the outside for their own doctrinal purposes, the war might well have been over earlier, and certainly there would have been far fewer mines". The west, and indeed the east, does have a direct responsibility for the reconstruction and redevelopment of Angola, and this reconstruction and redevelopment require that mines be removed before they can effectively take place. Angola has 10 million people and 10 million mines, all in an area about the size of the province of Ontario - demining Angola is a huge challenge.

Early in 1994, the UN's Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) launched an appeal for funds to set up its Central Mine Action Office in Luanda, Angola, and Canada was the first (and sole) contributor to make it so. DHA had only recently been given the mandate by the General Assembly to coordinate all UN land mine policy and programming, both operational and humanitarian, and CMAO Angola was the first combined mine action centre to exercise this new mandate. The peacekeeping mission, UNAVEM (United Nations Angola Verification Mission), had as its part of the Mine Action Programme to ensure the free passage of people and goods once the peace was signed, and the humanitarian portion was to conduct Mine Awareness Education, Mine Location and Mapping, Mine Clearance in all the areas that were not part of the UNAVEM mission, the training of Angolans as deminers, and the assistance to the government of Angola to form and train the National Mine Action Institute for long-term capacity-building for Angola to manage its mine action programme itself. The only part of the Mine Action Programme in Angola which the government had not invited the UN to initially set up and help it operate was the economic sector - Demining of Refinery Sites, for example, so that Sonangol, the national oil cartel, could resume full refining capacity and thereby generate more revenue for the government.

It was apparent to me when I arrived in Luanda on 1 August 1994, while the civil war was still being waged, that Canada had made an excellent move in enabling the UN to set up the Central Mine Action Office. As a former Canadian military engineer, I fit in very well with the Peacekeepers, and as an ordained clergyman of the Anglican Church of Canada I could relate very well to the UN agencies and NGOs involved in humanitarian relief work. But it was my Canadian citizenship which guaranteed that doors would be open to me, and that fact convinced me more than any that Canada has a superb international humanitarian reputation and a real role to play in bilateral assistance to war-torn societies, and especially in land mine clearance which is an essential "front end" requirement in safely achieving any humanitarian work in a mine hazard area.

The successful accomplishment of any UN mine action programme in a war-torn society requires a very finely-tuned hand - like the conductor of an orchestra where all instruments are different but are of equal value in achieving an harmonious solution to the challenge at hand.

In Angola, the following organizations were involved in the Mine Action Programme, each one having a distinct and vital part in the overall scheme, not only mine action but also victim assistance:

To describe the inter-relationships now would take much longer than the 15 minutes allowed, but I would be pleased to answer any specific questions later on "who did what". I include all these here to show that any national mine programme in a war-torn society is quite complex, but management of such complex programmes is an area in which Canada has achieved international recognition through its UN involvement. Canadians could be equally effective managing a bilateral civilian humanitarian mine hazard removal assistance programme, should the government decide to follow up in that area.

Another area in which Canada could obtain a disproportionate bang for its buck is in the demining quality assurance field. Before willingly returning to their traditional areas to resume farming or other enterprises, displaced persons need to be convinced that their areas are safe. Some demining companies and mine-specialist NGOs have reputations, either deserved or undeserved, for a lack of thoroughness in their undertakings, and a system of quality assurance is necessary for public confidence following their demining operations. Because of Canada's international reputation, Canadian mine-specialist NGOs and companies would be well qualified and accepted to conduct quality assurance inspections of completed work and certify that areas are as hazard-free as can be made under the circumstances.

There are two main ways to do this - one which was proposed by the peacekeeping department was to conduct a detailed inspection of a portion of the area declared cleared by the demining organization and assess penalties based on the ratio of mines found by the inspectors to the total of mines cleared, but the principal problem with this method is that mine clearance is not so much a factor of the number found but rather of the area required to be inspected, and then cleared when mines are found. For complete public confidence, all "findable" mines must be found rather than accepting a less than 100% figure, even though the figure proposed was 99.6%.

The method I prefer is to have a quality assurance inspector accompany the mine clearance organization, and if all procedures and checks have been faithfully carried out, the inspector can reasonably declare that all mines in a particular area which are "findable" have been found by the clearance organization and certify the work accordingly.

There are, however, some very recent technological innovations which when adapted to field use may yet allow an area to be declared "mine-free" with much more assurance and rapidity than if only mine detectors and/or dogs were used to verify the site. Ground-penetrating radar and sonar have the potential to find mines placed below detector depth, particularly if these mines have been reinforced by artillery shells or other ordnance as often happens with deliberately deep-buried mines. Canada has a number of companies working in this high-technology area for purposes other than mine detection, and their products could well be adapted to mine detection use. They would be particularly useful for mine detection on dirt roads and tracks, where they could lead a column of humanitarian aid vehicles in the same way minesweepers lead a convoy of ships. Similarly, one Canadian company has patented an explosives vapour detection machine which has the potential to take the place of mine search dogs. Dogs being replaced by a machine - and you thought that only applied to us human workers!

Although Canada does not make one now, we could also manufacture a mine detector, because we have some very sophisticated hand-held magnetometers being made for our mining industry. What is required for all or any of these innovations to be made is the money for their creation and field-trialling, and once Canada has begun to participate in bilateral humanitarian land mine clearance projects, donations to expand our efforts could be expected. In the meantime, the bulk of research in these areas is being sponsored by the department of national defence for its military engineers' operational mine clearance work. John Evans, from DND's Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES) will be getting into technical details on the state of Canada's art in mine detection and neutralization later today.

In Angola in 1994/5, there were very few areas and communities which had been spared from the scourge of mines. Even the capital, Luanda, had mines placed in it in advance of UNITA's march on the city which almost succeeded - they came within 20 kms of the city, and succeeded in disrupting external water and electricity supplies. The communities in the interior of the country were completely stymied by mines. Around the interior cities two rings of minefields had been laid - the inner by the urban population to keep the rebels out, and the exterior by the rebels to keep the population in.

Yet because their families were starving, women had to cross these twin rings daily to get food and firewood which were outside the perimeter minefields. When I got to Angola in August 1994 while the war was on, an estimated 20 civilian non-combatants per day were being maimed by mines and an equal or greater number killed. We could not keep complete track of those who were killed in the interior communities because if a person was brought to a hospital and declared dead upon arrival, that person was not counted in the hospital records because they did not have to provide any treatment!

The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a british mine specialist NGO, confirmed this suspicion for us by doing research around the interior city of Luena, where there was only one hospital for 80,000 residents and 127,000 internally-displaced people. They checked hospital records, and then visited a representative number of homes around and just outside the city, asking if any families had lost loved ones due to mine accidents - the ratio of those reported dead by families to those recorded dead by the hospital was over 10 to 1.

To live in these areas meant that everyone, including the smallest children, had to be educated and trained in mine awareness - and such education was not just one lecture and be done with it. What had to be established was a new way of living with new safety precautions having to be instilled into people until it became second nature to them. In Toronto or Montreal, or even in Winnipeg with its wider streets, we teach our children to look both ways before crossing a street - in Angola, we taught children that if they did not put an object on the ground they were not to touch it even if it was really inviting like a can of pop or a small plastic toy. Moreover, don't kick it to see what happens! They were to follow the path others had taken to get from here to there, and never take a shortcut through a field or even across unfamiliar property in a community. That was an essential disciplined lifeskill, and you can imagine the social turmoil if we had to do that in Canada. Mine awareness/mine avoidance education and training had the greatest payback record per dollar invested, and is to be encouraged as a bare minimum of assistance to every community wherein there exists a land mine hazard.

Just like the locals in their mined community, all NGO workers needed mine awareness training, but not all NGOs did so. Some were much better at reducing the hazards to those whom they served than for those with whom they worked. The need for quick and early relief to starving or diseased communities had to be balanced with the requirement for safety and security for the NGOs' workers, but in quite a few cases the NGOs were reluctant to wait for mine reconnaissance before they drove down a dirt track or walked through an unmarked food distribution point. Care International had to withhold shipments of food from one starving community for two weeks because of a mine hazard on the roads, and even then they only restarted operations because they allowed their drivers to volunteer to drive without any formal protection from Care's insurance coverage, and many drivers did, because they were truly conscientious workers who put service before self.

Because their workers were stymied by the mine hazard, let alone the Angolans they served, Care International (sponsored by Care Canada) and Save the Children (US) worked with my office and me to add humanitarian mine action to their projects and programmes as an "front-end" requirement. USAID immediately understood these essential needs and fully funded them for both NGOs. Before ground could be dug in to plant the seeds provided with the tools given by the NGO, or a health post re-opened to provide medicines to sick inhabitants, it had to be at least verified that it was not mined or the locals would not work in it, yet the UN wanted to reduce food donations in favour of more self-help farming so the locals could provide their own food. Because Canada has Humanitarian NGOs working in mine-hazard areas in the world, Canada should fully endorse this concept. Canada currently has one demining NGO and two mine clearance companies which could be tasked with integral support to Canadian NGOs working in mine-hazard areas, and donors should be urged to participate in this undertaking.

To close my presentation this morning, I would like to show you a few slides of Angola and its mine hazard challenge. CIDA has been instrumental in setting up the UN Central Mine Action Office there, but Canada should begin bilateral programmes to provide the national visibility that it cannot obtain via multilateral donations. Norwegian People's Aid (NPA), a very competent and caring NGO with a large mine-specialist component, has its workers wear small Norwegian flags on the sleeves of their workshirts, and in Angola people saw those flags and immediately recognized the wearers as friends and trusted mine clearance professionals. My mine survey officer and I, both Canadians, did not have that privilege of national identification because we were working for the UN, despite the fact that Canada had provided the funds for us to be there in the first place. Canada needs to sponsor bilateral mine clearance capacity-building projects so it can gain the same international recognition as a caring nation that Norway receives from its mine-specialist professionals.

I am sorry that I have only been able to scratch the surface, given the short time available, but I sincerely hope I have piqued your curiosity. Thank you very much for the privilege of speaking to you today on this most vital and urgent humanitarian concern. I would be pleased to answer any questions.

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Canadian Participation in Humanitarian Landmine Clearance

Canadian Participation in Humanitarian Land Mine Clearance

The Angolan Experience