In Azerbaijan, landmines give no chance for peace

John Wendle 12/09/05

Gourban's eyes shine angrily as he tells the story of the day he had his arm ripped off by a rocket he found while collecting scrap metal on a former battlefield in the Fizuli region of southern Azerbaijan. Like other villagers' stories, it starts simply: "I found a piece of metal in the fields." And then veers into tragedy. Later that same day, Gourban woke up at a hospital missing his left arm from the elbow down.

Gourban's village of Gazakhlar lies two kilometers from the Iranian border and 800 meters from the frontlines of the Azerbaijani regions occupied by Armenian forces during the 1988-1994 war over the breakaway Azerbaijani region of Nagorno Karabakh.

For these shepherds and subsistence farmers, the loss of land has brought suffering and poverty. Armenian patrols now guard the foothills that once provided valuable grazing land for village livestock. With no chance of working the mine-seeded earth, villagers like 27-year-old Gourban have instead been forced to collect and sell as scrap metal the burnt-out anti-tank mines, AK-47 clips and other detritus of war that litter surrounding fields.

The choice is stark: live in safety and poverty, or risk death every day and eat. After recovering from his accident in 2000, Gourban went back out into the fields to continue gathering scrap metal to help support his family. Alternative options for work do not exist.

"Every time we go out into the fields that are left to us we don't know if we will come back," said Natik Mammedov, a Gazakhlar villager who lost his 13 and 12-year-old sons to mines almost two years ago.

Both Armenia and Azerbaijan have cited mine clearing as an issue that promises to prolong talks for a permanent resolution of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Gazakhlar has had between 12 and 14 incidents with mines and unexploded ordnance since the end of the war with Armenia in 1994. Originally, the village was able to support 500 people; now only about 300 people live here. Without the lands to support its livestock, a neighbor of Mammedov says, "the village is becoming poorer every day."

Armenian snipers make any demining operation in this area too risky. But in the dry, brown hills a 20-minute drive northwest of Gazahlar, the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) is trying to remove the mines and let villagers go back to being shepherds and farmers again.

The areas to be demined are chosen by ANAMA according to surveys, the history of accidents and most importantly by a community's need for productive farmland. Once a region is chosen for demining, ANAMA's first step is to have a survey team map and divide the land into a workable, detailed grid.

Remote-controlled tractors carry out the second stage of demining. The white and orange, four-ton German models working the fields near Gazakhlar are fronted with drums with weighted chains attached to them. When the drum rotates, it whips the chains out, causing the weights to strike the ground with 400 pounds of force per square inch – sufficient power to detonate most mines and unexploded ordnance. After a plot has been cleared by a tractor, the land is then divided into 10 x 10 meter boxes to be probed by deminers equipped with metal detectors.

Jabir Samedov lies on his belly in box 1205, probing the earth in front of him, sweating to a dark blue his sky-colored ANAMA-stenciled coveralls. He has been working for the ANAMA for four years as a de-miner. Like many of the deminers, the 28-year-old Samedov was an Internally Displaced Person (IDP). To date, Samedov has found and cleared 13 landmines and dozens of unexploded ordnance.

Depending on conditions such as weather and undergrowth, a de-miner, the third stage in the mine clearing process, can cover between three and five boxes a day. However, the job is made more difficult since the mines were laid by village militias who had no training in laying tactical patterns and mapping as a professional army would have. To help, deminers work with mine-detecting dogs, which can scent an explosive and pinpoint it to within a meter. Once the handler marks the general location of a mine, the de-miner enters the box and will clear the explosive.

With a sector cleared, it can safely be farmed. And chances restored for a normal existence. "The mines need to be cleared," says Gourban, staring intensely at the ground beneath his feet. "There is no future if the mines are not cleared."

Editor's Note: John Wendle is a Baku-based freelance writer and photographer and an editor at Caspian Business News.