SARAJEVO: Almost eight years after the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina the country remains filled to the brim with all manner of weapons and ammunition, the NATO-led Stabilization Force (SFOR) said here on Thursday.

“The amount of ammunition in Bosnia-Herzegovina would cover eight regulation size FIFA football fields to a depth of four metres, being enough to support an army many times larger than the armed forces in this country,” said Captain Julian Gumley, Ammunition Technical Officer at the Sfor Headquarters in Sarajevo.

Over 350 million rounds of small arms ammunition, as he said, still exist among the 3.5 million population, enough to provide a 59 year supply of small arms ammunition to the armed forces here.

Being improperly stored in most cases, such a deadly stock poses a threat to the country’s population.

After two Bosnian Serb officers died in an ammunition storage blast near the northern Bosnian Serb town of Derventa in June, Sfor doubled its efforts to work with local army officials on reducing the threat posed by unsafe and improperly stored ammunition.

The reduction of weapons and military storage sites is also needed for the country’s progress toward NATO membership.

The first step, according to Gumley, would be the reduction of ammunition storage sites from some 160 currently existing to “a final number of less than 10”.

Such a reduction, says Gumley, would decrease the risk to the general population and make it easier to provide adequate security to those remaining sites to prevent arms proliferation, especially to terrorist groups and organized crime.

Maintaining less than 10 weapon storage sites would also be more economical for Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has been in a deep crisis since the 1992-1995 war.

According to Gumley, the more ammunition country has the more storage facilities as well as security needed to protect and maintain it.

“It is costing a lot of money to store ammunition that will never be used,” he said.

Besides the amount of ammunition, is the problem of lack of proper maintenance.

Gumley says the armed forces of the two Bosnian entities — the Serb-run Srpska Republic and the Moslem-Croat Federation — have never done tests to check the quality of the stored ammunition nor how it was stored.

“Sfor inspectors have visited all of the storage facilities and there is evidence to suggest that some ammunition is of poor quality,” Gumley says.

An example of bad ammunition maintenance was the case of a number of sea mines found stored in a disused cattle shed posing a serious threat to the surrounding area.

The only positive thing in the entire ammunition problem in Bosnia was that the authorities of the armed forces of the two Bosnian entities have agreed to reduce the danger in the country.

Under that plan, he adds, many sites would be closed and the number of sites contain-ing ammunition, mines or explosives would be significantly reduced.—dpa