Painstaking exercise of clearing Sudan of landmines

PTE KIN Lux scans the rigid, sun- baked soil, his metal detector jumping in tones every time he gives it a bold shove forward.

“There’s something down there,” says Col Mey Sophea, his commanding officer, looking on as Lux, his blood group written on the front of a bomb-proof jacket, replaces the detector with a simple hand trowel.

“But it could take half an hour before he has any idea what it is.” Three wooden sticks are pushed into the ground, enclosing the main source of the noise, then another, 10cm in length, is pointed away from them. It’s from here Lux starts digging, creating a 30cm hole before moving forward.

By morning’s end he has covered 3m of ground.

Finding mines in the tough, black cotton soil of Sudan’s Upper Nile State is hard work for the Cambodian army. But there are few people better able to deal with it, coming as they do from a country still suffering the legacy of its own civil war.

Four million mines were laid between 1979 and 1993 in Cambodia, the second highest figure in the world.

No one knows how many have been laid in southern Sudan. The government in Khartoum says there are at least two million across northern and southern Sudan, with most located in the south.

There are no records, no maps, no accounts from soldiers of the Sudanese armed forces, who laid most of the antipersonnel mines that surround towns such as Dolieb Hill, a former military base that backs on to the Sobat river, a tributary of the Nile that runs down from the Ethiopian highlands.

“It is only when there is an accident in a village that you know there are mines there,” says Rambo Paul Isaac of the United Nations Mine Action Office, with whom the Cambodian army is working.

“It’s not like Europe, where there were records after World War 11, where you can go from the start to finish. Here there is nothing, which is hindering clearing procedures in the country.”

In 2010, seven children died in Upper Nile State alone, according to the southern Sudan demining commission. In one typical incident, children playing by a river bank found a piece of unexploded ordnance thought to be a hand grenade and began throwing stones at it thinking it was an empty soda can. One died and two were seriously injured.

The Cambodian army has three sections of 15 soldiers each working in Dolieb Hill, where work began in November. Five mines and eight pieces of unexploded ordnance, mostly hand grenades and unexploded artillery shells, have been found spread out in a line – 270m long. The work is painstaking, and not a little nerve-racking. Some mines are more sinister than others.

The damage caused by an Israeli-made zero 4 will lead to amputation if there is immediate medical attention. However, others, such as the Chinese-made type-69, are usually activated by a tripwire. They then spin 1m into the air, where they explode and can hit vital organs.

What makes the job more difficult is the nature of the soil in the area.

“It is tough and hard,” says Maj Zacharia Mongjiek, regional co-ordinator for the southern Sudan demining commission. “That makes it difficult to detect mines.”

The job becomes more difficult in rainy season, when deminers can only access Dolieb Hill by river and the mines are washed under a flood of water, a problem for locals who find themselves stranded in the area.

Ever since four people were killed in separate incidents between 1994 and 1995 the people of Dolieb Hill have stopped wandering in the fields.

Livestock still ramble there, though two cattle died in August alone.

“They’ve killed seven of my cattle,” says Wilson Akot Agwin (52), “exactly where the Cambodians are working.”