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The Urgent Need for a Sustainable Policy ICG Bosnia Project, July 18, 1997 (Part 2 of 2)
The International Players The main contributors to development of a humanitarian mine clearance capability in Bosnia have been the following:
The aim of most of these parties -- and certainly of the UN and the World Bank -- is to create a "sustainable national capacity" in Bosnia, meaning an infrastructure and corps of deminers which will continue the demining effort for many years into the future. This implies the need to stay involved for an extended period of time. Some of the other players have expressed a more impatient view, arguing that minefields are a Bosnian military-made problem, and that it is up to the Bosnian military to solve it. One example of this may be the apparent US State Department preference for a time-limited effort and a rapid shift of demining responsibility to the Bosnian military. UN officials believe that it is unwise to count heavily on the Bosnian military because of the distinction between military mine-lifting and humanitarian demining, and because the SFOR monitoring of military mine-lifting is cursory. (See following section.) The question of which governments and organisations will stay engaged in the effort to help Bosnia develop a sustainable national capacity is unresolved. An additional important contributor is the NATO-led force in Bosnia (IFOR in its first year and SFOR since December 1996). The NATO-led force has done no mine clearance that was not directly necessary for "force protection," that is, for the efficiency of its own operations and the safety of its own personnel. Accordingly, the NATO presence has had less impact on Bosnia's mine problem than would otherwise have been the case. Nonetheless the NATO force has gradually paid increasing attention to the civilian mine threat. IFOR, which under the DPA had access to the records of the former-warring-faction forces, began by compiling what entity records of minefields were available. It withheld them from civilian organisations such as UNHCR for several months in early 1996, giving two reasons: First, while collecting the data at the onset, IFOR had assured each of the former warring parties that it would not transfer potentially useful military information to the others. Second, IFOR did not trust the quality of the records and did not want to risk exposure to blame for inaccuracies. Later, it adopted a co-operative stance toward the UN MAC and, thus, eventually made the military records it had acquired available. Although the data collected by IFOR/SFOR provides the core of the MAC data-base, the maps which SFOR generates tend to be less useful than MAC maps, for example showing minefields merely as red dots, rather than plotting the recorded sizes and shapes. The reason, according to SFOR sources is that top priority of the NATO force is to stay clear of minefields at all times in accordance with the "force protection" policy, for which a red-dot warning will suffice. The MAC on the other hand is committed to defining suspect areas as the first step in demining, and so it strives for greater accuracy. In the fall of 1996 IFOR began pressing the entity forces to lift mines, warning that if they did not do so they would face restrictions on training exercises and movements out of barracks. The response of the entity forces proved desultory, resulting in the removal of only about 3,500 mines through November. Accordingly, during the winter, SFOR developed a more specific set of guidelines for compliance. Then in February 1997, SFOR imposed a stricter regimen on the three former warring faction forces, requiring that they each build a cadre of 150 mine-lifters organised into specific "counter-mine" platoons, and that the platoons operate at least 20 days out of 30. The threat of restrictions on training and movement was renewed in early March, and SFOR monitors were assigned to watch the platoons in the field to evaluate their "effective effort." This increased the pace of mine-lifting by entity forces, but since the standards of military mine-lifting are haphazard and the criteria for gauging "effective effort" are subjective, and since the entity forces generally pick and choose the locations where they will operate and could conceivably choose to work in areas where there are few or no mines, military mine-lifting is not a dependable contribution to rendering mined areas safe for civilian use. Note above the important distinction between military "mine-lifting" standards and techniques, and "humanitarian demining." The SFOR monitors observe from a safe distance, usually remaining on the pavement and scanning through binoculars. They never set foot in areas thought to be mined and are barred from giving advice, other than a safety warning, to avoid any possible exposure to political criticism or blame. They have to be nearby mainly to determine that "effective effort" is taking place. One of their main responsibilities is to ensure that the entity mine-lifers do not "harvest" mines and save them for reuse. Noting that any mine no longer in place is a step in the right direction, SFOR announces its successful monitoring activities each day at the 11 a.m. news conference in Sarajevo. For the week ending June 29, an SFOR progress report listed 588 mines as having been lifted, with a total of 9,231 since the mandatory mine-lifting policy was implemented on March 10. But SFOR acknowledges that the mine-lifting activity it encourages is in no way to be confused with dependable mine-clearance. The Bosnian Croat forces (HVO) unilaterally halted their mine-lifting activities after the second fatal accident which occurred on 26 June. SFOR officials say many of the HVO units were not taking the job seriously before that date anyway, nor were many of the Bosnian Serb units. They say the level of effective effort has been highest in the Bosniac platoons. The standards of demining by entity forces may improve as the result of training, but the issues of prioritisation of mined areas that are chosen for demining and of measuring the value of "effective effort" remain open. The coercive threat to curtail training activities appears to be of limited effectiveness in producing affirmative behaviour because the former-warring-faction counter-mine platoons can simply "go limp." No assumption that SFOR monitoring implies any form of quality assurance is warranted. A basic question that ICG posed to demining individual specialists is how much land in Bosnia they estimate has been returned since Dayton to "family picnic standards" -- that is, cleared to standard that they would accept for with their own families. The answer was extremely few. The most optimistic, by far, of the demining programmes is the US Demining Co-ordination Centre (USDCC) in Sarajevo which claims as of 20 May 1997, to have "removed and destroyed 1,600 mines and 2,000 items of unexploded ordnance and to have returned over 1.1 million square metres [roughly 272 acres] of land to safe use." Norwegian People's Aid estimates that in a good average month 90 experienced deminers operating without dogs can clear 20,000 square metres; and that depending on the difficulty of the terrain the figure could vary from 2,400 square metres to 72,000 square metres, if backed by dogs. NPA's first project was slow and labour intensive, covering only 10,000 square metres, but it freed 54 single family houses for reconstruction. NPA is widely regarded as meeting the "family picnic test", but the price of quality is time. One way a demining unit can rack up an impressive rate of progress is to be assigned to an area that has easy terrain and few mines. Another is to cut corners on clearance. It should not be surprising that various companies and organisations express doubt about the rate of progress claimed by certain others.
Further Complexities in "Humanitarian Demining" As suggested above, demining is a complicated, multi-faceted activity laden with political, economic and social meaning. The selection of the priorities for a demining effort involves a complex value judgement whether at the national level or at the village level, which incidentally may be in conflict. What matters, after all: the power plant or the playground behind the school? The returnee village or the site for a new industry? One organisation engaged in this debate is UNHCR, which has a commitment not only to refugee returns in general, but in Bosnia, especially to "minority" returns, the return of displaced persons to their former homes in what are now hostile "majority" areas. Since most of the areas where minority returns are conceivable in Bosnia at this time are in the Zone of Separation, there has been a tendency in some circles within UNHCR to press for demining specifically in the ZOS. UN demining officials have committed to deploy deminers trained by the MAC to support UNHCR return projects. However, they regard areas where returns are likely to be contentious as an extremely poor place to initiate demining, since there is a chance that elements in a "receiving entity" will resist, and may possibly place new mines in areas that have been cleared. Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General Martin Barber, who has headed the effort to organise the demining operation in Bosnia, said that clearing areas, only to have them subsequently remined would be the "single death knell" for humanitarian demining. "It would be suicidal as well as homicidal," Barber said. "You simply can't do humanitarian demining without whole-hearted community support of all local authorities. That is a non-negotiable precondition of all humanitarian demining anywhere in the world." Accordingly UNHCR and the MAC are working toward agreement on a priority list initiating mine clearing in places where minority returns are not likely to meet implacable resistance. A "social" or community-based approach to humanitarian demining is increasingly advocated by some NGOs. In general, they use mine awareness training at the local level as a vehicle to assist communities to organise to deal with their specific mine problem. In the course of mine awareness training communities are urged to develop their own priorities, and insofar as possible to develop an indigenous mine-surveying capability. Several such initiatives are being studied or developed now in Bosnia, usually by organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and NGOs such as NPA, and by a newly formed Bosnian women's organisation called Medika Zenica. The centralised data bank and co-ordinating function of the UN MAC has been and will remain crucial in getting the demining effort underway in the political chaos of post-Dayton Bosnia, but there is an equal need to develop the "micro" approach down at the level of mine-plagued communities. Probably the future of humanitarian demining in countries such as Bosnia will combine a systematised top-down international effort to quickly establish a demining data-base and infrastructure, and a grass-roots approach that starts with a mine awareness programme designed around identifying the problems of a specific community, developing an indigenous minefield survey and possibly mine-clearing capacity. It may be that local civil defence organisations, which are widespread in Bosnia, will play a part at the community level. Since mines are military weapons, and since most deminers are civilians with military backgrounds, and since the UN MAC is quasi-military in its organisational approach, it would be natural to think of the demining effort in Bosnia as a quasi-military matter. As already noted, however, the military approach goes only so far. Military-style discipline is needed among deminers in the field, but civilian management techniques are thought likely to make the most of limited funds, so long as contracts are fairly awarded and tightly monitored.
The government of Bosnia and the Government of the Bosniac-Croat Federation established a Mine Protection and Removal Agency (MPRA), and the World Bank allocated funds to support the government programme. But the MPRA soon came to be regarded as a purely Bosniac organisation that was attempting to channel international funding to businesses close to the government. Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb demining officials were wholly alienated. International officials became profoundly impatient with the MPRA, and it was dissolved last February in accordance with the recommendation of the London Peace Implementation Conference in December. The MPRA was replaced with the National Demining Commission noted above. It may be that the same inter-entity feuding that blocked the MPRA will remerge, but MAC and the World Bank now express some optimism. During the first half of 1996, IFOR stood apart from demining for civilian purposes, the World Bank pondered the wisdom of getting drawn in, and the UN struggled, with some help from the US State Department, to devise a national approach to mine clearance. By midsummer it was clear that the MPRA was going to be a debacle, and by early fall the UN MAC had assembled an energetic management team with broad international demining experience. It developed a mine clearance programme that called for four regional offices in Mostar, Banja Luka, Tuzla and Bihac, in addition to the MAC in Sarajevo. In addition to the data base and administrative structure, the MAC set out to train mine clearance, house clearance and survey and marking teams. Through this programme the UN began to establish the backbone of a national mine clearance capacity which, when added to the roughly 900 deminers gradually being trained by other organisations, would total around 2,000 deminers by the end of 1997. But the $39 million sought for the ambitious UN programme was not forthcoming. Commitments to the MAC in 1996 totalled under $2 million, and MAC expenditures for the Sarajevo headquarters were under a million dollars. MAC officials have been forced to spend much of their time in fund-raising activities. Some UN officials believe that the international community has been harder on Bosnia and less generous with respect to demining than it has been in other countries in Africa and Asia. Others note, however, that the relatively sophisticated forms of post-war profiteering and political chicanery in Bosnia eroded international willingness to help. In any event, through November 1996 almost no mines were lifted at all and no ground was cleared to humanitarian standards, except by Norwegian People's Aid which managed to train a hundred deminers at a school established near Tuzla during the summer, and which began limited mine-clearing operations near an NPA housing reconstruction project in the fall. The US State Department programme fielded its first trained deminers in November. Looking back at the turn of the year, few mines had been cleared, and few deminers had been trained. By all accounts, the demining effort in Bosnia during the first year after Dayton was a deep disappointment.
1997: The Turning of the Tide? Since the spring of 1997 the national effort has begun to take a much more coherent shape. The MAC infrastructure is complete and the core of deminers is developing. The State Department's RONCO programme had produced 165 deminers and NPA 100, both groups working through the winter in the relatively mild Mostar region. The European Commission enlisted 236 deminers for training, and SFOR was prodded the entity forces to demonstrate "effective effort" at mine lifting. The World Bank had concluded in the words of its director that "lightly supervised contractors do a lousy job." The bank regarded demining as the least successful of its 16 programmes in Bosnia in 1996, and its new agreements with the government prioritised closely managed surveys to identify areas that could be eliminated from the suspect list, without requiring expensive demining. Revising its budget downward to adjust for the lost time, the UN MAC cut its original plan but opened its regional offices and began training 135 miners and surveyors in May. The funding crisis persists, however. The State Department programme has ended, and the deminers trained are mostly working in ventures funded by the World Bank. The European Commission programme is short term. And the needle is on empty for the MAC, which requires about $350,000 per month to continue current operations, and $750,000 per month to include minefield marking and mine awareness training -- and which would need $23 million to bring the national core of deminers to 2,000 by the end of 1997. As noted above, the immediate questions overshadowing mine clearance in Bosnia and Herzegovina are whether the Council of Ministers will endorse the work of the National Demining Commission, and whether the decisions of the Donors Conference of the Peace Implementation Council will allow the demining of Bosnia to move forward. Several as yet unresolved and fundamental issues concerning demining activities world-wide will have a bearing on mine clearance in Bosnia and as in other countries struggling to recover from mine warfare. In New York the United Nations is reviewing its structure for dealing with "complex emergencies", which increasingly in post-war situations require a demining capability. Demining operations anywhere need to be prompt and sophisticated if they are to have a rapid impact in post-war situations where the political scene is frequently complex and unstable, and where early refugee returns are involved. Bosnia, with its unique political complexities, is only one example. The need for a world-wide demining agency with political clout and operational capability is evident. The open question is where within the UN to place it, and how to fund its operations so that the start-up is swift and the effort leads to a long-term, sustainable programme. Since 1992 demining has been the responsibility of the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, which has a small staff in New York and a headquarters in Geneva. DHA, however, is a "co-ordinating" agency, without an adequate capability to mount and support operations in the field. For this reason UN Headquarters in New York has examined the possibility of placing a world-wide mine clearance agency in some other branch of the UN. Among the possibilities are the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations, the High Commissioner for Refugees, and the UN Development Programme. The Department of Peacekeeping is an emergency agency which usually does not stay involved after a conflict has ended. UNHCR has a world-wide capability to mount field operations and has shown its capacity to adjust, as in Bosnia, to complex situations during wartime and thereafter. But UNHCR is, by definition, focused on refugee returns, rather than on general assistance to a population, and mine clearing is often, but not always, associated with refugees. The UNDP, which managed demining in Cambodia and Mozambique, deals with development issues, of which mine clearance is one. A decision appears likely later in the year. Landmines afflict the most vulnerable civilians inordinately and gravely retard economic recovery. Thus mine clearance has become an urgently required and expensive component of post-war recovery in many countries affected by modern warfare. If demining is not to be subject to the ebb and flow of voluntary contributions to a trust fund, it presumably must be funded by assessed contributions. Mine clearance should not be limited, either during the start-up phase or the long-term operation, by the need for demining officials to divert their energy from their primary tasks in order to conduct emergency fund-raising as has been the case in Bosnia. This too is presumably a subject under review at UN headquarters. Humanitarian demining is a slow, costly and dangerous process in part because of the difficulty of identifying the exact locations of mines so they can be removed or destroyed. Current methods of detecting and clearing mines still depend heavily deminers probing the ground to identify suspicious objects, which is extremely time consuming. In August 1996, the Programme in Science and Technology for International Security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a "Landmine Brainstorming Workshop" scientific conference to examine technological developments that affect demining. The conference concluded that although there is no "silver bullet" that will make mine-clearing easy, there are a number of promising technologies that could make a radical difference over a period of a few years. The conference recommended, first, an immediate effort to make incremental improvements on the tools used in the current deminer-intensive method of demining, for example better mine detectors. The conference also recommended an accelerated effort to develop promising new technology, bringing it out of the test laboratories and applying it flexibly in field situations such as Bosnia. The conference report argued that demining research and development needs to be taken up in a co-ordinated way by private high-tech companies as well as governments, and that the results need to be widely distributed. The states which possess an advanced scientific-military base need to identify mine clearance as a common priority, and need to adopt a collaborative approach. Bosnia is one of the places where improved demining technology could and should be field tested and applied. The Canadian-inspired Ottawa Conference, which is attempting to create a world-wide consensus on the need to ban the use, export, stockpiling and production of anti-personnel landmines, is an important part of the broad context. The effort is generating moral and political pressure on states that, for reasons of military habit and/or economic gain, are resisting the ban. The passage of a ban would of course come too late to ease the situation in Bosnia, but the world-wide attention that results from the growing international debate can only improve the environment in which current mine clearance efforts take place.
Recommendations on Mine Clearance in Bosnia Much of this report has been aimed at exposing some of the seldom-confronted complexities of demining which are in some part technical and, in the case of Bosnia, largely a matter of attitude, funding, commitment and political will. The report has identified some of the principal weaknesses of the demining effort that has evolved to date. It is clear, however, that many lessons have been learned and important groundwork has been laid. To re-recycle a phrase that was coined by Lady Thatcher and was recently borrowed by Secretary of State Albright, this is not the moment for friends of the Bosnian people to "go wobbly" on mine clearance in Bosnia. The UN Mine Action Centre is the core of a focused international effort that deserves the support of the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of all in the international community who are concerned with mine clearance in Bosnia. Two current and closely related questions overshadow mine clearance in Bosnia: whether the Council of Ministers will give unambiguous backing to the National Demining Commission, and whether the 1997 Donors Conference will allow the demining of Bosnia to move forward without the constant, hat-in-hand fund raising that has impeded the Mine Action Centre's efforts to date. Demining has been hindered in the past year by the intragovernmental divisions that have prevented the adoption of the coherent country-wide policies that are essential to attract sufficient and sustained international support. The leaders of all three national groups have a responsibility to make it possible for the international community to help build a sustainable mine clearance capability. The Council of Ministers has never responded to NDC Plan of Action presented several months ago and has made no budget allocation. It is time for the Council of Ministers to fish or cut bait: If it does not support the NDC, what does it support? One way or another, the authorities representing all three national groups must place themselves on the record in favour of a high level government structure that demonstrates to potential international donors that the government accepts responsibility for demining and intends to see that international funding is used for the benefit of the people of Bosnia, and is not treated merely as a post-war commercial windfall for a well-connected few. Donors must look past the undeniable fact that the demining effort in Bosnia has suffered inefficiencies and delays, and should take note that these are not the fault of the international team that has worked hard for over a year to establish the UN Mine Action Centre. The programme developed by the MAC is the product of intense effort by international specialists who came to Bosnia with a prior knowledge of the technical aspects of demining and have since developed a hard-won appreciation for the post-war political complexities. The MAC represents neither an effort to create a "UN empire", as detractors occasionally maintain, nor a "cookie-cutter" approach that imposes a system inappropriate to the conditions in Bosnia. The MAC infrastructure will be of benefit to all other organisations concerned with mine clearance in Bosnia. Governments which choose not to contribute to the DHA Trust Fund because of ideological objections to the United Nations or for some other reason, should co-ordinate their initiatives with the MAC and should contribute substantially, now. Along with the other members of the donors group, states that have economic strength and an advanced military-scientific base -- and especially those such as Germany with a Bosnian refugee problem -- should increase their support to the demining effort in Bosnia. They should take note that as a result of the painful groundwork done by others, their contributions can now be used more effectively. Individual efforts by international players will be broadly complementary, so long as there is agreement on the goal of establishing a mine clearance programme that is sustainable over the long term. The bandaid approach is not helpful, and the impatient, "they-laid-them-they-can-lift-them" attitude that some express with regard to demining in Bosnia is unwarranted. Bosnia's mines problem is no different from any other result of the war: for example, the destruction of the infrastructure, the devastation of the economy, or the creation of a population of refugees and internally displaced persons. All of these are products of the war that the Bosnian people cannot overcome by themselves. If issues such as these are of concern to the international community, there is no good reason that the landmine crisis should be excluded. The demining support provided by the NATO-led Stabilisation Force has been weakened by the qualifications of mandate that have limited SFOR's effectiveness in many other aspects of the peace implementation process. If the member states of NATO are willing to reinterpret NATO's mandate, allowing SFOR to play a more active role, so much the better. In any case, they should be under no illusion that SFOR has contributed meaningfully to date to the demining of Bosnia.
Sarajevo, 18 July 1997 |