Military

DATE=11/02/00

TYPE=BACKGROUND REPORT

TITLE=NAMIBIA / ANGOLA / MINES

NUMBER=5-47307

BYLINE=CHALLISS McDONOUGH

DATELINE=RUNDU, NAMIBIA

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: The 30-year-old civil war in Angola is spilling over the country's borders into neighboring Zambia and Namibia. The worst fighting is concentrated along the Zambian border, while the situation in northern Namibia has calmed down in recent months. But as Correspondent Challiss McDonough reports from the Namibian border town of Rundu, the war has left a dangerous legacy for civilians living along the border.

TEXT: Seventeen-year-old Kosmasi Kativa remembers two things about the night he stepped on a landmine. It was dark, and it was windy. He says it all happened very quickly.

/// KATIVA ACT IN AFRIKAANS, FADE UNDER TEXT ///

He says - I went out tracking some animals, and when I came back along the same path, there was a landmine. He says it was dark, and is not sure what happened.

Mr. Kativa speaks from his hospital bed. His right leg has been amputated just below the knee. He is the latest victim of Angola's civil war to be struck down, not by bullets, but by mines.

Tens-of-thousands of Angolan civilians have lost their limbs to mines in the past 30-years. But this is not Angola. This is Namibia, and until last year, land-mine injuries were rare. Since December, nearly 100-people like Mr. Kativa have had their arms or legs amputated at this small hospital in Rundu, near the Angolan border.

Hendrik Ehlers is a mine-clearing expert from Germany who has worked in Angola since 1992. His company, People Against Landmines (Menschen gegen Minen) recently sent a six-man crew and a team of mine-sniffing dogs to help clear the Namibian side of the border.

/// EHLERS ACT ///

I work here in Namibia in terms of developing and testing of new mine-clearance devices, since many years. And my wife is Namibian. But I never thought that I would really work on a mine problem in Namibia, and when I came up here I was rather shocked. Because I thought in Angola I had seen everything which has to do with landmines. And what I saw here gave it a completely new dimension.

/// END ACT ///

The difference, Mr. Ehlers says, is where the mines are being laid. He says although there are plenty of civilian victims in Angola and Mozambique, the mines there usually have some kind of military target. Here, people have found them in churches, bars and schools.

/// 2nd EHLERS ACT ///

Here, it is 100-percent targeted against civilian population. Just to terrorize people, to close down schools, to take away from people the possibility to pray. And I found that very, very obnoxious. That is something I have not seen so far. And I have been in this [mine-clearing business] now 10-years.

/// END ACT ///

Government forces say they have routed UNITA rebels from the border region, and there has been very little fighting in recent months. But the land-mines keep turning up, most of them blamed on UNITA rebels who cross the border from Angola. Small rebel units continue to raid Namibian villages for food, and they leave mines behind them.

But because Namibia is considered a relatively wealthy country, donor nations such as the United States and the Netherlands have refused to finance mine-clearing work. People Against Landmines re-assigned one of its Angolan crews to northern Namibia for the month of October. But they had no funding for a long-term project, and they have packed up and gone back to Angola.

In four-weeks, Mr. Ehlers says his crew cleared more than 50-thousand square meters of land. They did not actually discover many mines, but he says that is not the point.

/// 3rd EHLERS ACT ///

It does not really matter if really a mine physically is in the ground. When people think an area is mine-suspect, and people think there might be a mine, then they do not go there. So the mine is existent in their heads, in their minds. It is there. It causes fear, terror. People do not go there, leave their jobs, move places, and suffer. Now if you did a mine clearance and you do not find a mine, but you create the confidence for the people to go back, then you cleared a mine. It was not the mine in the field it was the mine in the heads of the people. Which is exactly the same thing.

/// END ACT ///

Back in the Rundu hospital, Kosmasi Kativa says he knew there had been landmines in the area before his accident.

/// KATIVA ACT IN AFRIKAANS, FADE UNDER TEXT ///

But, he says, the army had just come in and cleared away another mine. They were finished, but I guess they missed one.

Local villagers abandoned the area after Mr. Kativa was injured, although some say they plan to move back home now that People Against Landmines has declared it safe.

Scores of other settlements along the Kavango River also lie empty, while new ones have sprung up along the main east-west highway. People have simply picked up and moved further away from the border, to areas they consider safer.

But it is clear they still do no feel entirely secure. Although there are well-worn footpaths on both sides of the highway, most people prefer to dodge passing cars and walk on the road itself. (SIGNED)

NEB/CEM/KL/RAE