Clearing the way home: a blog for International Mine Action Day

Since 2010, the British Government has spent over £5 million on de-mining in Sri Lanka.

Anyone wondering why humanitarian demining agencies are still working here years after the end of the war need look no further than the achievements of UK funded deminers in just two months this year. During February and March, the men and women of The HALO Trust (52% of deminers are women) working with UK support cleared 3,099 anti-personnel mines and 698 other items of unexploded ordnance including bullets, mortars and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from former conflict areas. Their efforts have made safe nearly 73,000 square metres of land in the former High Security Zone in Jaffna and at the Muhamalai minefield in Kilinochchi. These are the highest priority areas for resettlement of long-term displaced people.

Pictured is a deminer who has already removed one mine (its location marked by the yellow stick to her right) and is working towards the green pipe which is a Bangalore torpedo full of high explosives.

One of the people who will benefit is Selvanagagam Sarashwathy. Now over sixty years old, Sarashwathy grew up and spent much of her life at Muhamalai. She and her husband were first displaced in 2000 when the intense conflict on the front line nearby made it impossible to remain. They stayed with relatives in Kilinochchi until 2002. Returning, they found their house and land intact and were able to resume normal life for four years. But the situation deteriorated again. Sarashwathy suffered a chest injury after being struck by fragmentation from an explosion. She still suffers from breathing problems today. After her injury, the family fled again, this time to her husband’s family home in Thondamanaru in Jaffna.

They returned in 2010 not to their land, but a few hundred metres away in Ittavil where the government allocated them one acre. They have built a temporary house, but they cannot earn money from the land because it has no well so her husband does casual labour. They have three acres on and adjacent to the minefield, where their house and well were, and where they farmed 80 mango trees and 170 coconut trees.

Part of Sarashwathy’s farmland is inside a sector of the minefield where UK funded deminers removed an astonishing 1,914 mines in February and March. More than fifteen years after first being displaced, Sarashwathy and her husband, like many people in their community, desperately want to go home and put the war behind them. The UK Government is making that happen.

Further north, on land released from the High Security Zone in Jaffna last year, perfectly spaced rows of beans, chillis and onions sprout from some of the most fertile soil in Sri Lanka. But the small plantation stops at a barbed wire fence bearing a red sign warning of the danger of mines. On both sides of the fence, this land forms part of Thavarasa Illavarasa’s family farm.

Displaced over twenty years ago, Illavarasa has lived nearby with his brother, sister and now elderly parents, waiting for the day when they could start working the rich, red soil of their plots in Veemankamam again. When they were finally able to return in the middle of last year to start preparing the ground for planting, they found that half of their land was littered with anti-personnel mines. Illavarasa found seven mines himself. He began farming the land that was safe, and is now waiting for HALO’s mechanical clearance teams to make the rest of it safe for him.

Thousands of people like Sarashwathy and Illavarasa urgently need to safely access their land for basic livelihoods activities. They have waited a long time. The British Government has committed a further £1.2 million over the next three years to help make that wait as short as it can possibly be.