Landmines still killing people, livestock in southeast region

Landmines still killing people, livestock in southeast region


Thomas Grove

TUNCELI, TURKEY


29-Mar-07

SNOW turns red at the edge of Tunceli's mountain roads as it soaks up the
bronze-rich soil. Passing that red line is a matter of life or death here, where
violence has endured for 23 years.

Intense conflicts in the 90s and now sporadic violence between the military and
Kurdish guerrillas have turned much of Turkey's rural southeast into a
minefield.

The government has failed to make good on promises to clear up the mines, so for
those people who did not join the hundreds of thousands who fled, simple daily
things such as letting children play outside or going to school have become a
potential disaster.

Hidir Celik is testimony to the danger. His body riddled with shrapnel, pain
registers on his face as he bends his legs to sit, even though doctors keep
trying to remove pieces of the landmine that exploded near him in 2002, killing
five people. Staring into the distance, the plastic replacement for his right
eye is designed to match the brown-yellow hue of his remaining iris.

"Just give me back my sight, give me back my health. I don't want anything
else," says the former scrap metal collector. In fact he was relatively lucky.
When some teenagers dumped outside his store a sack of scrap metal they had
collected in the nearby hills, detonating the mine they had unknowingly picked
up, he only lost his eye.

His accident is just one of hundreds to plague Turkey's rural, mainly Kurdish
southeast region since 1984, when the Kurdistan Workers' Party launched an armed
campaign to carve out an ethnic homeland.

Turkey's failure to clear up an estimated 400,000 mines laid during the conflict
has helped drive the human toll higher even in a time of relative peace while
hampering investment in a region already suffering severe poverty.

"During the 1990s, soldiers laid mines in what were considered points of passage
for the PKK," says Ozgur Kaplan, president of the Tunceli Bar Association, who
is overseeing several landmine cases filed against the state. "The violence has
slowed down now but the mines remained."

Landmine deaths and injuries have risen to 533 since a five-year ceasefire
between the PKK and Turkish military ended in 2004, according to government and
NGO tallies.

It was in 2004 that Turkey promised to stop using landmines in its interior
military operations, and agreed to clear the explosives. The PKK also says it
has stopped using landmines, but a security source said both sides still lay the
explosives. The mines are easily smuggled in by fighters hiding in the mountains
of northern Iraq, where they have access to weapons bazaars.

But with the conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish separatists now
reduced to isolated skirmishes, some villagers have began trying to resume their
former livelihoods.

"People take their sheep out to pastures to graze, but there are mines
everywhere. How can people know where the mines are?" asks local mayor Cevdet
Konak. "The only way to know is for you or your cow to set one off."

No comprehensive studies have been done on the economic effects of mines, but
Konak says they cause great economic damage in the region. "The main industry
here is animal husbandry. But how can you graze your animals if you cannot move,
and what will you do if one gets blown up? Free movement is essential for
attracting investment to a region, for moving forward."

To clear explosives in the south and southeast, Turkey's Finance Ministry has
opened two tenders since 2005. Both were part of an effort to conform to the
Ottowa Convention which gave signatories like Turkey 10 years to de-mine its
interiors.

But both tenders were called off. While most de-mining contracts are based on
cash payments for land cleared, the Turkish ones were set up so the winning
bidder would win the right to establish an organic farm on the cleaned land for
49 years after clearing it, in a kind of "rehabilitate and operate" system.

"The government is trying to get the land cleared without spending any money,"
says de-mining consultant Ali Koknar. "The winning bid has to agree to farm the
land for 49 years. That's not the way the de-mining industry works."

And so the people continue to live, in fear. Reuters


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