To watch mine-clearing in action is to observe a carefully orchestrated and highly trained group effort. Teams of clearers clad in heavy protective clothing painstakingly scrutinise each millimetre of soil with high-tech mine detectors. Once they have located a signal (a high-pitched squeal that sounds like the peacocks that roam the Sri Lankan jungles) they switch to low-tech tools—a rake, a trowel, or even a twig—to gently remove the soil. Then, with gloved but steady hands, they remove the mine, hold it with one hand and defuse it with the other. A coloured marker is inserted where the mine was. Tape linking the markers reveals the extent and the pattern of a particular minefield. In many parts of northern Sri Lanka, the tape extends for hundreds of metres in several directions, across farmland, close to schools and through villages.
‘If all the correct procedures are followed, [mine-clearing] is not as dangerous as it seems,’ said Marc Farino, a co-ordinator and trainer with Fondation Suisse de Deminage (FSD), one of the organisations receiving AusAID support. ‘It takes us 15 days to train a deminer and we are very strict about quality assurance.’
The Jaffna region of Sri Lanka was devastated by war long before the tsunami hit the coast. In an interview with TamilNet, a news service of the Sri Lankan Tamil population, Professor V. Nithyanantham of the Department of Economics at Jaffna University referred to the Boxing Day disaster as ‘Tsunami II’ and suggested that ‘Tsunami I’ was the widespread destruction of infrastructure caused during the height of the military conflict.
Although much rebuilding of the war-torn region is evident (including the new Jaffna library that opened to significant fanfare only a year ago), the ground remains cluttered with bombed and burnt structures. But it is what lies beneath the ground that provides the greatest inhibition to progress.
An estimated one million landmines litter the regions of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. Most were laid in the mid-1990s by both the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). Apart from the obvious personal trauma of loss of limbs, deafness, blindness and disfigurement, there is the added problem of diminished household income, since many of the landmine victims are farmers who can no longer work their land.
Clearing the mines may look excruciatingly slow, but significant progress in the areas around Jaffna has already been made. ‘It