Abstract
After the 1994 peace accord, deminers in Angola often had to dig up artillery shells that were buried in the roadbed and wired to detonate as a group.
The news from Angola these days is almost all bad, given the resurgence of fighting in December between the government and the rebel unita movement of Jonas Savimbi. And with the fighting has come the laying of new minefields in previously cleared areas.
Col. Garth Barrett of Mechem, a South African company involved in demining in Angola, estimates that the environs of nearly every town and all 60-odd airports controlled by the Angolan government in Luanda have been salted with new mines. As is often the case with landmines, estimates are unreliable, but one U.N. specialist reckons that as many as 100,000 or more new mines may have been put down.
The renewed propagation of mines was confirmed in February by Angola's General Albino who, in answer to a question from the Humanitarian Foundation of People Against Landmines, said that “all newly laid mines will be cleared by the [Angolan] army.” He was not prepared, however, to comment on who would pick up the tab for clearance the next time around.
UNITA–an acronym in Portuguese for the total liberation of Angola–has also been replanting mines. Reports (of varying reliability) say that Savimbi's forces have laid anti-tank and antipersonnel mines in parts of the country that the United Nations had certified as clear as recently as last summer. Much of the mine-laying activity has centered around Huambo, the principal city of the central highlands, and further north around Malanje, where the government and unita have been battling for control of Angola's only productive farmland.
The newly deployed mines come from many sources. Some are said to have been purchased from Zimbabwe, although Zimbabwe's government denies it. Many of the mines acquired by unita and the government have come from East European brokers. According to mercenaries I have talked to recently, they include Soviet-era ozm-3 “bounding” mines as well as “old stock” East German ppm-2 and pmn anti-personnel mines. Crates of Chinese Type-72 mines have been spotted at airports in Huambo and Malanje.
A dismal irony: Angola is one of 133 signatories to the historic landmine ban popularly known as the Ottawa Convention, which prohibits the use or the stockpiling of anti-personnel landmines. The treaty entered into force in March.
Almost two dozen African states need minefields cleared and all are eager for help from the international community. But Angola–a huge west African country twice the size of Texas–is regarded by some authorities as the definitive example of how not to run a national mine-clearing operation.
A promising beginning made after the signing of the 1994 peace accord soon gave way to an impasse that included interminable bureaucratic infighting among U.N. personnel, deminers working for private firms, representatives of Western governments who were financing the work, and the Angolan government itself. From the start, according to a 1997 report issued by the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs, differences as to how the problem should be tackled resulted in bitter disputes over the division of labor and responsibility.
In 1996–97, Mechem, a South African company, cleared Angolan roads. Here, a Mechem crew uses a mine-resistant “Casspir” and metal detectors.
At the core, the U.N.-sponsored Central Mine Action Office had almost nothing to do with the government during the first year of mine clearing, because members of the U.N. office were in conflict with governmental bodies and interests (although you would have difficulty getting any U.N. functionary in Angola to admit it). A further impediment: When vehicles and equipment intended for mine-clearing arrived at Luanda and Lobito, the two main Angolan ports, they were seized by the government and held until taxes and import duties had been paid.
Acrimony between the different players resulted in further resources being wasted. Part of the U.N. program was geared to training Angolans to lift their own mines once the United Nations had moved on. A training school was established, manned by U.N. specialists. Because of governmental bureaucratic and logistical obstacles–and, at times, because they failed to grease the right palms–trainers spent six months in Angola without instructing a single Angolan. (One consequence was that during the first three years of mine clearance, only 400 acres were cleared.)
Finally, there was unita, which hampered operations still further. As a result of one delaying action (on the Malange-Saurimo road in the northeast), a U.N.-sponsored mineclearing team sat in the bush for 103 days (at $8,000 a day) while Savimbi stalled and equivocated. Once the teams got through and started work, they found that many anti-tank mines had been removed and apparently stashed.
Much the same applied to the road between Quelenges and Chongoroi in central Angola. It soon became obvious to everybody involved in the mineclearing effort that unita regarded the presence of foreign teams with disdain. Savimbi's people had little regard for the 1994 Lusaka Protocol, which was supposed to have ended the civil war that had gone on for almost 20 years.
One of the biggest problems encountered in Africa is that much of the information related to minefields is hearsay. Many areas believed to have been mined have been left untouched by the local population, sometimes for years. This often causes serious economic dislocation. Near Chimoio in Mozambique, for example, a woman was killed by a mine in a mango field four years ago. The whole 15-acre plantation was believed to have been mined. When sappers eventually went in, they found only four more mines, three of which were duds.
According to J. van Zyl, who for most of the decade headed demining teams in Mozambique and Angola, minefields in Mozambique are relatively uniform. With few exceptions, anti-tank mines are laid only on the roads–and then sparingly and very rarely in concert with anti-personnel mines.
But Angola, where mines have been laid for 40 years, is different, and the problems are nearly insurmountable. Much that has been written about landmines in recent years (see, for instance, “Political Minefield” in the March/April 1999 Bulletin) has focused on anti-personnel mines, the target of the landmines convention. But anti-tank mines, which are not banned by the Ottawa Convention, also present serious problems.
In Angola, anti-tank mines are often surrounded by three or four anti-personnel mines. There is also a lot of un-exploded ordnance lying about. Vernon Joynt, Mechem's chief executive officer, estimates there is five times more unexploded ordnance than mines.
This has led to slow going in clearing roads, says Joynt. To comply with a U.N. contract that specified clearing a seven-meter-wide corridor, the teams could not just drive in with any type of machine and detonate the mines. Each mine–and piece of ordnance–had to be found manually.
While machines are theoretically able to do the job of clearing anti-tank mines in many areas, Angola presented a host of problems. There are almost no permanent bridges left standing in the interior, which is laced with rivers and streams. That made it impossible to use equipment such as the German Minebreaker 2000; the only way to get that kind of hardware to the scene was to fly it in, using cargo craft that were often not available. Once in place, the machines couldn't be transferred overland to another area because of the bridge problem.
As the Mechem teams got busy–they were tasked to do 15 kilometers of road clearance a day–they were stymied by yet another obstacle: Teams would clear a stretch of road and then suddenly find new mines laid behind them. This made quality assurance difficult.
(The reason for finding more mines on cleared sections sometimes had nothing to do with political differences between the factions. In one case, for instance, a Zimbabwean mine-lifting team's vehicle was blown up. A subsequent investigation showed that jealous UNITA soldiers had taken offense to visits by Zimbabwean troops to local women. The transgressors had been warned what would happen if the visitations continued.)
Mechem sent in two teams that worked exclusively on the roads; one to the north (in an area adjacent to the diamond fields) and another in the south. In each case, a 35-man crew manned a dozen 12-ton Casspirs, armored troop carriers developed by South Africa that can absorb under-wheel blasts equal to 21 kilograms of TNT.
In some areas, anti-tank mines were laid under tar (and sometimes in tunnels under the road). Where manual clearance on unpaved roads became essential, the men were expected to cover about five kilometers a day. But sometimes, because of heavy concentrations of leftover shrapnel, progress was limited to 500 meters a week.
Mechem's initial Angolan contract,