KABUL: At a lecture on the dangers of land mines, the schoolchildren listen in horror as a guest speaker recounts how his left leg was blown off above the knee. It was three years ago, 11-year-old Massoud says, and he had been playing with a kite near his home.“When I arrived over the top of the hill, suddenly a bomb exploded,” the sweet-faced boy says. “No one would come near me because they were afraid another mine would explode. Then I crawled out of the mined area.”

After a quarter century of war, Afghanistan is still littered with millions of land mines and other unexploded ordnance, and more mines are being planted in regions of the south where a Taliban-led guerrilla war against Nato forces is escalating.

Yet as Afghanistan marked International Mine Awareness Day on Wednesday, there is some cause for optimism. Accident rates have declined dramatically thanks to the imaginative and culturally sensitive efforts of organisations such as OMAR — a mine-clearing NGO that recruited Massoud for the lesson in a Kabul mosque.

His audience, a classroom full of boys about his age, listens, their mouths agape. Their wide eyes move from his face to the artificial leg under his grey tunic.

Massoud, who like many Afghans uses only one name, is one of nearly 800 people maimed and killed by the debris of war in Afghanistan every year. That’s less than half the number five years ago when the country was embarking on reconstruction after the fall of the Taliban.

“Some people object to seeing girls in any of our materials. They don’t object to boys, but they do object to girls,” says Susan Helseth, an adviser for the UN Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan who oversees the development of education materials. The Association for Aid and Relief, Japan (AAR-Japan) had to redo a mine awareness booklet whose cover showed a girl and boy sitting together in a class. An Afghan review committee said children of that age should be segregated by sex, so it was reprinted with boys and girls on separate pages.

Despite the many cultural and educational challenges, the mine awareness message, combined with the efforts of deminers, appears to be working. According to the International Committee for the Red Cross, there were 771 victims of mine and ordnance accidents in 2006 — own from 1,717 victims in 2002.

In all, mines and unexploded ordnance have killed at least 942 people and injured 4,543 in the past five years. Most of the victims are male.

Over the years, simple colour-coded messages have been painted on rocks, houses and mountains around the country by deminers: red for danger, white for a cleared area. Also, mine-risk educators use painted diagrams to warn children about land mines, cluster bombs and other explosives.

Despite such powerful education efforts, more land mine accidents appear inevitable. Nearly 90 per cent of accidents happen in unmarked areas, and it would take decades to clear Afghanistan entirely — and that is without factoring in the ongoing violence.—AP