DanChurchAid
Humanitarian Mine Action
From Battlefield to Cornfield
A Case Study of Cluster Munitions Clearance by DanChurchAid in Albania.
Contamination
During the fighting in 1998-1999 between the Serbian military and forces of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), cluster munitions from the arsenals of the former Yugoslavia were fired into northern Albania against armed KLA rebels hiding there. But instead of finding their mark and exploding as they hit the ground, many of the deadly cluster “bomblets” malfunctioned and fell silently back to Earth.
In a scenario familiar to villagers all over the north Albanian countryside, those bomblets that fell near the small village of Helshan remained buried in the soil or hidden in grass long after the battlefields had gone back to agricultural fields.
It is safe to say that before the war in 1998-1999, the inhabitants of Helshan had never even seen a cluster bomb, but they learned to recognize the deadly KB-1 quickly, as people in neighboring villages began falling victim to them. Shaped liked a battery and small enough to fit into a child’s hand, the KB-1 is capable of smashing through a tank’s armor and designed to shower people with ball bearings travelling at high-speed. As word spread, fields were abandoned whenever the small metal cylinders turned up.
Clearance
In 2002, DanChurchAid began training local residents—many of them farmers or school teachers with no military experience—to use metal detectors, GPS, explosives, and strict safety procedures in order to rid their land of this plague.
Under the supervision of an experienced team of Albanian and international advisors, it took a team of DCA deminers a total of 64 days to survey and clear this area just outside of Helshan, known to DanChurchAid as Battle Area Clearance Task SR-1637.
In the end, DanChurchAid’s deminers cleared a total of 43,144m2—that’s about six times the size of a regulation football pitch. During their work they found a total of 53 KB-1 cluster munitions. These were destroyed by controlled demolition, and the area was declared fully cleared and handed back to the community in November of 2007.
Measuring the impact of clearance
In May of 2009, DanChurchAid Albania staff returned to the area to conduct a Post-Clearance Task Impact Assessment. The purpose of the assessment was to check up on the community to determine how it had been using the land since clearance, and to verify no further problems existed.
Beyond the obvious benefit of preventing further loss of human life and protecting the current and future generations of Helshan, DanChurchAid’s clearance of this site released valuable agricultural land back to the community which had been forced to abandon all of it, fearing for their lives.
A 53 year-old resident was interviewed and confirmed that he and his neighbors began using the land immediately after it was declared safe by DanChurchAid. It is now a family’s cornfield, yielding approximately 3000kg of corn per year. The field is bordered by grassy meadows used for the family’s grazing animals, but are crossed daily by approximately 30 families bringing their animals to surrounding pastures. The fields also lie on an access route for about 15 families who get their water from a source on the far side of the cleared area.
Meanwhile, residents had even erected makeshift football goals in the middle of what was once Site SR-1637, in a clear demonstration of residents’ confidence that it is again safe to tread this ground.
