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SARASALI (Sri Lanka): Refugees from Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna peninsula are looking forward to working their land once again after almost two decades of ethnic war.
With the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) working towards peace talks sometime this month or in July, the risks of war are diminishing. This is paving the way for more than a million refugees who fled the fighting to return to the north and east of the country.
But while hostilities may have stopped — a ceasefire was declared in February — it could be years before the land that once grew rice and other crops is free of landmines.
The deadly weapon that regularly maims and kills people was used extensively in the war between government troops and the LTTE and poses the biggest risk to refugees returning home.
“(In) the Jaffna peninsula, it will take a minimum of five years to say it is mine free,” said Don Smith, an American who works for private security consultants Ranco Corp, which is engaged in demining the area with a nine-man team of Mozambican deminers and German shepherd dogs.
Smith, a veteran who has worked to demine several conflict zones, heads the team funded by the US State Department.
The government and the LTTE are planning to meet for peace talks in the next few weeks after the civil war came to a halt under a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire.
About 64,000 people have died in the war which began in 1983 and some 1.3 million of the country’s 19 million population have been displaced.
During the conflict the 750,000 population in the Jaffna peninsula, the stronghold of the Tamil Tigers during much of the fighting, was cut in half because of casualties and people fleeing.
The LTTE’s fight for a separate Tamil country in the north and east of the country and the government’s bid to quell the revolt, entangled Jaffna’s people in a guerrilla war that taught them some hard lessons.
They know how to convert bedrooms into bunkers. They also know that fighters prefer to lay anti-personnel mines, which can kill but often cause grisly injuries, rather than more powerful anti-tank mines.
There are no estimates of how many disabled persons are living in the Jaffna peninsula as a result of mine injuries.
But the Jaffna centre of a charity organization that provides artificial limbs sees about 40 victims each month and the number is rising after the recent opening of roads closed during the war, Nagalingam Sivanathan, an official at the centre said.
PAINSTAKING WORK: One June morning, Smith’s work took him and his team to a field in Sarasali village, about 20 km from main Jaffna town.
Buildings punctured by shells and with collapsed or destroyed roof tops showed this had been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in the war, prompting extra caution from his team.
The dogs, trained to use their highly sensitive sense of smell to detect the presence of a mine, strain at the leash and pull ahead in a straight line until the handler calls a stop.
If the dog smells a mine, it is trained to sit down.
On this occasion, the dog has found nothing, so the deminer drives a wooden spike into the spot to show it is safe.
“They are trained to smell before they step, their neck is longer than their feet, so their nose is in front out there. The mass of its paw is a lot smaller than the mass of a man’s foot, that’s a couple of advantages dogs have,” says George Conrad, the dog trainer on the team.
He says most demining accidents involve the people on the team rather than the dogs.
The deminers work is painstaking, clearing areas 10 feet by 10 feet at a time. It is deliberate and demands high levels of concentration.
But there are times when the quiet work is interrupted with a bang.
The field, where the only sound is of a strong wind blowing from a nearby lagoon, is suddenly alive as a hundred birds are startled by a carefully conducted detonation.
Huge mounds of soil are thrown up in the air, villagers peep out of their homes and for a few moments, Sarasali is reminded of its days of war.—Reuters
