Tricky Steps: Video Report

The Halo Trust is close to helping end the land mine problem on Sri Lanka's Jaffna Peninsula. But renewed violence could set them back.

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
Years of conflict between the Sri Lankan military and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels turned the northern Jaffna Peninsula into a checkerboard of anti-personnel mine belts.

Stephen Pritchard, Halo Trust Sri Lanka program director:
These contain about 50 grams of explosives.

Kevin Sites:
How powerful is that, Stephen? What will that do to you?

Stephen Pritchard:
That will remove your foot or perhaps one lower leg.

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
Clearing minefields obviously isn't a job for the timid, or the impatient.

Stephen Pritchard:
You just unscrew the base, being careful not to put any pressure and it comes out. Basically, what you have here is the booster and detonator. This is the first part of the mine that gets exploded when somebody treads on it.

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
It's painstaking, backbreaking, dangerous work that moves forward inch-by-inch and day-by-day.

Clearing out the land mines» View

But for mine-clearing organizations, like Halo Trust and others working in the Jaffna Peninsula in Sri Lanka, those inches and those days have added up.

Stephen Pritchard:
So far this year there have been two civilian accidents in the Jaffna Peninsula recorded according to government figures. Last year, there were 17 according to government figures, and four years ago there were 90. So we think, yeah, there has been some success in reducing the actual problem.

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
And now they hope they are perhaps as close as just one year away from making Jaffna completely free of mine-related incidents. A job Halo Trust Sri Lanka program director, Stephen Pritchard, thinks is critical because of immediate humanitarian needs in the region.

Stephen Pritchard:
There was a movement of tens of thousands of internally displaced people moving back into the Jaffna Peninsula after having been displaced during the civil war in the '90s and finishing in 2002. Because these people return to their homes, they find mine areas and they need the land, that it makes it such a priority to complete the job of mine clearance.

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
The family that bought this house in Jaffna had no idea the backyard was filled with land mines, until they moved in, and the neighbors told them.

Kevin Sites:
There's a long line of yellow stakes so there's quite a lot of de-mining that's taken place here. And one of the more poignant aspects is that this is basically in someone's backyard. Is that correct?

Stephen Pritchard:
That's correct. The local people who live there actually thought they removed all the mines. However, they have missed some mines as you can see.

Kevin Sites:
It's got to be pretty disconcerting to have a backyard full of land mines, especially when they have children, as that's pretty evident.

Stephen Pritchard:
They're pretty glad we removed them.

Shanthakumary (through translator):
She believes the Halo Trust will clear completely and they will be free from the mines.

Kevin Sites:
Once the Halo Trust clears those mines, will you still be comfortable to let your children play in that backyard?

Shanthakumary (through translator):
Yes, no problem.

Digging with bare hands

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
Halo has almost 400 de-miners, all Sri Lankan nationals who do much of the work by hand. But Halo is also trying to maximize the use of faster mechanical devices, some of which are being underwritten by the U.S. military for Halo to test and develop.

Stephen Pritchard:
Basically, there are some areas in Jaffna where we do mine clearance and the normal method of manual mine clearance is very slow and difficult because of rubble content or because there is a lot of metal in the soil. So it makes it much more cost effective to use machines to actually process the ground with the mines to actually clear the ground. So what you see behind us is a machine that does exactly that.

Kevin Sites:
So bulldozers will come in like the one that's coming in right now and they'll dump this contaminated soil into that sifter and it crushes it. And if there's a mine inside we won't even hear it explode because that machine is so loud, is that correct?

Stephen Pritchard:
That's basically correct. This machine here has destroyed thousands of mines. Though we cannot quantify exactly how many. This is a very effective means of getting rid of contaminated ground and returning it without mines.

Kevin Sites (voice-over):
But despite all their progress, renewed violence in the region and fears that the four-year ceasefire may collapse could dry up donor funding for Halo's and the other groups' efforts just as they're on the threshold of ending the Jaffna Peninsula's mine problems.

Still, Halo's de-miners continue to work, slowly and methodically clearing the minefields even as the security situation becomes more unstable.

Today they removed 22 mines, at the end of the day placing them on this shredding device, which hammers them into hundreds of pieces, helping make 22 more people here safe for at least another day.

Reporting from the Hot Zone, I'm Kevin Sites in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

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