It's De-Mining Work but It's Got to Be Done

/moscow Times ^ | Tuesday, Apr. 22, 2003 | Chloe Arnold

[Carpet Kitten]

ALKHANLI, Azerbaijan -- Sheila has been in the de-mining business for nine years. She's worked in Cuba, Kosovo and Namibia and now she's come to Azerbaijan to spend her twilight years probing for mines near the cease-fire line with Armenia before she retires.

She works much faster than the local men who have been trained to search for land mines by ANAMA, Azerbaijan's National Agency for Mine Action. Where a man can clear 11 to 15 square meters of mine field a day, Sheila can clear up to 1,000. But then Sheila is a dog.

One of the cruelest legacies of the eight-year war between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia is the 60 million square meters of land strewn with mines. And that's just on this side of the cease-fire line.

Experts reckon that if the two countries were to come up with a peace agreement over the disputed territory of Nagorny Karabakh and the border reopened, the former conflict zone would be one of the biggest mine fields in the world.

Clearing the mines is a slow and painstaking process -- working at the current rate, it will take more than 60 years to clear the mines this side of Karabakh. But if they weren't using Sheila and 19 of her canine friends, it would take much longer.

With their acute sense of smell, dogs make perfect de-miners. They don't clear the mines themselves, leaving that to their carefully trained handlers. But they can sniff for explosives over vast areas, thereby cutting down the work for the locals.

Luckily for Sheila, de-mining in Azerbaijan is a lot easier than in other parts of the world. Many of the mine fields are flat and clear, not dense forest like in Cambodia or Vietnam.

But that also means dozens of people have been maimed by mines -- farmers plowing the land into fields, shepherds out with their flocks and children playing soccer on the alluring wide spaces that run for kilometers.

From 2000 to 2001, 110 people were injured by land mines in the Fizuli region alone. Nine of them died -- the others, many of them children, have had to adapt to living with one or no legs.

Javid Mehraliyev, who now works for ANAMA, lost one of his legs as a soldier in the Karabakh war. For six years after the war he sat at home drinking and smoking and wishing he were dead. Then ANAMA offered him a job encouraging local people and refugees to train as de-miners.

"Land mines ruined my life and they are ruining the lives of thousands of people all over the world," he told me.

"Of course they should be banned. But unfortunately I can't see it happening anytime soon."