Last Wednesday was “Fancy Hat Day” at school. Kids came in wearing homemade hats of every size and shape, some covered in plastic fruit and candy bars, others with giant butterflies and balloons and glitter, some with dinosaurs and army figurines pasted to them, one even had her mother, a baker, bake her a hat out of bread, finished with a pastry braid around the edge and tiny bread butterflies off the top. It was rather impressive. And one of the kids, whose dad works in mine action, wore a paper top hat covered with pictures of landmines, cluster munitions, and danger signs. “It’s about awareness,” his father stressed to the child’s teacher.
Thrilled, I took a picture, and promised to post it the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Because here’s the thing: I never, ever hear anyone talking about landmines in Iraq unless a) I bring it up, or else b) they’re one of my friends working in commercial mine action (who I actively seek and out and probably drive crazy with my questions and curiosities).
For the last few weekends, in an effort to take advantage of the warm February Iraqi weather, I’ve been going on hikes with some friends. One Sunday for an unexpected school holiday we went to the Iranian border town of Tawela. Another time we visited the site of the ancient stone carving of Naram-Sin in the mountains about an hour south of Sulaymaniyah – an adventure which took us up a dirt road off the empty highway and deep into a craggy mountain, still slippery with fading snow. On both occasions, between the jokes and snacks and photos, there was a nagging worry in the back of my mind. I winced when our driver, who was scrambling over rocks with us, lost his footing and skidded across loose, gritty limestone to grab a tree and stop from falling into the gully; and again later when we wandered off the path to find a place on the side of the hill to take a pee. At any moment I have a bad habit of expecting the worst to happen. Because I can never really stop thinking about the reality of unexploded ordnance wherever I go. And in Iraq, it’s particularly bad.
It’s difficult to find an updated estimate of how much land remains to be cleared in Iraq and how many landmines are supposedly still in the ground. The Landmine Monitor, though excellently run by the ICBL (I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure to speak with a number of their researchers in Cambodia, Thailand, and Iraq, and all of them are wonderfully thorough in their work) is brief in its discussion of the issues, and its last update was apparently a year and a half ago. But, in conversation with people working in the industry, the number is appalling – thousands for sure, possibly millions.
My frustration by the incomplete nature of the data is further aggravated by the lack of reporting in regards of to ERW. And this is because the UXO issue in Iraq is incredibly complicated. The long history of laying mines across a number of wars, as well as the separated government administrations of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, and finally the fact that commercial companies have a much larger presence in clearance than humanitarian agencies all contribute to a confusing and tangled nature of mine action here.
In addition to the Iraq Mine Clearance Organization (the national organization for clearance in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan), there are a few other humanitarian mine action agencies conducting clearance including Mines Advisory Group and Norwegian People’s Aid. These organizations report their clearance statistics to the Monitor every year. But there are an even greater number of commercial clearance companies, and they are not required to report their activities. This leads to incomplete clearance maps across Iraq, and leaves a possibility that the same ground will be cleared again, wasting time and resources. This is because humanitarian clearance must adhere to a set of international regulations and standards – and as commercial companies are not required to do so (because they haven’t signed any international treaties), humanitarian agencies cannot, with any authority, report an area that was cleared by a commercial company as safe because of the differing clearance standards.
This is more frustrating for the accuracy of reporting, rather than for actual clearance – because the commercial companies mainly work for oil companies. This means they literally bid on minefields to clear as quickly as possible so the land can be immediately drilled. Humanitarian agencies clear land with a different priority in mind – mainly that it will be safe for civilians. But this isn’t necessarily black and white either. Because in addition to this, the US State Department provides much of the funding for humanitarian Iraqi mine clearance, and their priority is to clear ERW leftover by American troops, which means whole areas of, for example, Iranian ERW may be left in the ground and put much further down the list of priority clearance, even if they are contaminating an area of greater danger to civilians. The whole process is incredibly politicized. Though I’ve been told as well that Kurdistan is considerably more organized in its mine action than southern Iraq, which sounds like a bit of a mess. When commercial interests cross with humanitarian ones, things get confusing. And all of these factors contribute to a hugely complicated issue right across the country.
The last – and I think most glaring – difficulty in determining the size of Iraq’s ERW problem is a complete lack of accident reports. Whenever a landmine incident happens in, say, Cambodia, the Cambodia Campaign to Ban Landmines knew about it immediately, either through the HALO Trust or through the Cambodia Mine Action Centre. The newspapers (including two English language papers) always reported accidents, and they were immediately circulated on international listservs. I am still on those listservs, as well as subscribing to a number of local news sources and news alerts. I have never heard of a landmine accident in Iraqi Kurdistan.
“Are they not happening?” I asked a friend in the industry.
“They are definitely happening,” he replied.
Civilian interactions with ERW and UXO resulting in casualties and death happen on a regular basis – especially in the border regions and especially to shepherds. Where were these mystery landmines, then? I wondered. They are literally all around us. Sulaymaniyah down to Halabja is heavily mined, as well the entire Iran-Iraq border all the way south to Basra. In addition to the thousands and thousands of mines laid along trench lines during the Iran-Iraq war (yeah, trench lines, I didn’t know that’s how that war was mostly fought either), Saddam Hussein’s troops laid mines haphazardly throughout the region, sometimes apparently throwing them out of helicopters – meaning they may not be properly set, but that there’s still a shitload of live munitions scattered across the countryside. Lately, marine clearance in the south in gaining popularity as well.
Anyway, all this means that maybe my paranoia when we go hiking is somewhat merited. Whenever we consider heading off the path, I text a friend in commercial mine action (who is also ex-military) to ask him about the landmine situation where we are, and he always immediately orders me to get the fuck back on the path. And he would know.
So it worries me that we don’t talk about ERW here, that it’s so easy to forget about this global catastrophe as soon as I leave mine action and work in something else, for even a little while. I suppose in Iraq we are distracted by the car bombs in town and the pipeline sabotage in Kirkuk, and the explosions that rocked Baghdad’s Green Zone a few weeks ago; the landmines, no matter how ubiquitous, aren’t really our most pressing issue. But if Cambodia and my friends at the CCBL taught me anything, it’s that they should be. Because even the smallest, flimsiest, little plastic bombs that look like toys have a life-changing impact. And until we start talking about them here, they’re not going to be an issue. So I’m going to print out the picture of the kid wearing the landmine hat and put it in my classroom. Because that’s the best place I can start.
DISPATCHES FROM A FRONTIER 