KABUL: Striding down a road lined with red flags and men in flak jackets and plastic visors, Zabit returned to the home he fled three years ago, taking care not to flinch at the detonations booming across the plain. That was none of his business.
Zabit cared about reclaiming the rubble of his home and making it fit for his parents and four sisters, who would soon follow. He did not care about the men pacing the fields with metal detectors, or the signs about mines, or the patch of grass stained red.
A couple of days ago a youth of 17, Maruf, stepped there and set off a booby-trap intended to wipe out a patrol. The mine cleaners had to collect his remains in a sheet.
But Zabit seemed deaf and blind as every few minutes a controlled explosion plumed smoke above the ruins of Dasht Robat, a village on the Shomali plain north of Kabul.
“I don’t know anything about mines. These men can play around if they like, but I’m going home.”
Three years as a refugee in Pakistan had bred impatience in a young man with the job of putting his family back on its feet, as it had in those neighbours who returned to Dasht Robat this week.
They knew that 23 years of war had left Afghanistan one of the most mined countries in the world. They knew about Maruf and the dangers. They did not care. “I have a house to build. See you later,” Zabit said.
The last time refugees returned to Afghanistan in large numbers, in 1998, the little devices planted in doorways, wells, roads and fields claimed 300 casualties a week. This time it is 70 and rising.
Often you see the lucky ones begging on streets, flaunting their stumps. The less lucky are in the graveyards dotting the landscape. Aid agencies are afraid that the stream of refugees will swell a new generation of maimed and dead.
The other day Said Haq, 19, sprawled on a Kabul hospital lawn contemplating life without his right leg, torn off by an anti-personnel mine in front of his house. “I came back to farm the land. I had to take the risk,” he said.
It is a familiar refrain, Laurence Desvignes, a mine expert with the Red Cross, said. “I saw shepherds walking through a minefield with their goats and shouted at them to stop, but they ignored me. They knew the danger, but needed the grazing land.”
The Shomali plain, a frontline for the Russians, mujahideen, Taliban and Northern Alliance, is one of the most contaminated areas. Less than a mile from Maruf’s fatal step lies the carcass of a mini-bus which swerved too far off the paved road five weeks ago.
“Seventeen people died. It was horrible,” Abdul Jamil, the mine cleaners’ supervisor, said. Another 15 have died since, including Maruf, and the death toll for livestock stands at 50.
“We are working as fast as we can but these people are desperate; they insist on coming back before the areas are cleared,” he added. About 200,000 refugees are expected back to Shomali for the planting season before spring.
Jamil is one of 1,200 Afghans employed by the Halo Trust, a British charity which has cleared mines in Afghanistan since 1988. Estimates of the number of mines in the country range from 300,000 to 10 million.
“If the funding continues, we’ll be able to clear the high priority areas within a few years. The rest could take decades,” Tom Dibbs, a Halo coordinator in Kabul, said.
The US bombing delivered a new menace: cluster bombs. Intended to detonate on impact, the yellow “bomblets” had a 15 per cent failure rate- double the rate claimed by the manufacturer, Dibbs said.
Hundreds of containers, each with 202 bomblets, were dropped on the Shomali plain and, according to villagers, they devastated Taliban positions. Those that failed to detonate lie half-buried, primed to go off.
Reports that hungry Afghans were killed after confusing the bomblets with yellow aid packets were untrue, Dibbs said. “Children and teenagers have been injured after picking them up, but they knew what they were. Throwing them to make them explode is a game.”
Ahmad Din, 7, played it two days ago in the village of Syab Quli, hurling a bomblet against the inside wall of a well. A hole in the wall marked the spot and relatives grinned at Ahmad’s nerve.
Some found it less funny. Tous Mohammed, 22, said the bomblets had ruined his wheat fields; craters fringed with grass pockmarked the brown earth.
Watched by villagers on a hill, Abdul Haii, the Halo team leader in the village, set a 500gm charge against a bomblet to destroy it. The whizzing of the fragmentation could be heard through the boom.
Mines triggered by foot pressure seldom harm just legs, the Red Cross says. The genitals, arms, chest and face are usually affected, dirt, mud and other debris being driven into exposed tissue by the blast. The further the debris is pushed, the higher the surgeons must amputate.
Ali Mohammed’s eye was caught by the glint of a metallic object. When the seven-year-old hit it with a rock it blew off his hands, ripped his brother’s leg apart and tore a hole in his sister’s abdomen.
Their father, Ghulam Mohammed, was tearful but fatalistic. He did not care which army had planted the mine. “This was an act of God. I cannot blame anyone.” —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.