An international aid worker who has cleared landmines around the world says Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will create decades more work for deminers – and unexploded shells are causing problems much closer to New Zealand’s shores, as Sam Sachdeva reports
When your work revolves around clearing the remnants of wars past, a new conflict is the last thing you want to deal with.
But the HALO Trust found itself in exactly that position when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February this year, forcing the charity to suspend its work clearing mines from earlier struggles for territory between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists.
“When the war broke out, we had to pull all of our staff out … we basically relocated to the west and started preparing, frankly, to go back in,” Simon Conway, a former British army officer turned HALO Trust’s head of programme development, tells Newsroom during a trip to New Zealand.
As the Russian forces pulled back from Kyiv in the face of major resistance, the charity’s workers moved back in and started to take stock of the new threats posed by mines and unexploded artillery, with Conway joining survey teams in May and June.
For all the talk out of the Kremlin of modern new weapons, what he saw was instead “the kind of weapons I’ve seen used in the ‘80s across the world” – from vehicle-mounted rockets with high failure rates, to cluster munitions susceptible to falling to earth unexploded but incredibly dangerous, and explosives buried in the ground blowing up trucks with produce and mini-buses carrying aid.
The threat of fatalities has significantly hampered Ukrainian farmers’ ability to harvest their crops, while those who avoid losing their lives in an explosion can still lose their livelihoods.
“The pressure for people to get back to their homes usually means you get people charging back home and you get a big spike in casualties, so if we can get ahead of that, great.” – Simon Conway, HALO Trust
“There's a guy I met literally just after it happened, he'd been blown out of the vehicle but because the mine had hit the rear right wheel, he was sufficiently far away from it that he was kind of OK. But he lost his job, the truck was gone, there was nothing for him to do.”
While it is hard to know exactly how or when the war will end, Conway says the charity had already estimated there was 20 years worth of clearance work on the front line “before it turned into a really hot war”.
He hopes workers will be able to get into affected areas as soon as they become accessible and before people return to their houses, given the risk that comes from a desire to return to normality.
“The pressure for people to get back to their homes usually means you get people charging back home and you get a big spike in casualties, so if we can get ahead of that, great.”
HALO hopes to have 1000 Ukrainian staff in place by the end of the year - but with additional funding from countries and international organisations, it could easily employ as many as 3000 people for clearance work.
It isn’t just the far-flung fields of Europe where such efforts are required, however.
Conway spent last week in the Solomon Islands, where he was shocked by the legacy of the country’s role in World War II as a major site of conflict.
The Solomons bomb disposal unit, made up of just 14 people, cleared 42,000 items of explosive ordnance between 2011 and 2020.
“You look at their call-out map of all the different times they went out to deal with a bomb, and it's just completely covered in dots … naval bombardment, ground artillery bombardment, aerial bombing, there's just stuff everywhere.”
As his team was preparing to fly out of Munda airfield on the island of New Georgia, they made a detour after hearing of a reverend who had called the police about an artillery shell found under his house.
“There was a school, a youth centre nearby and there’s the reverend and his family living in this house … if that thing had gone off, a lot of people would have been killed, and it's now sitting there, just as dangerous as when they dug it up, waiting for someone to turn up and deal with it.”
Conway says there needs to be a comprehensive survey of the Solomon Islands, making use of official records to map out the areas with greatest risk then using a detector to carry out clearance work before the worst happens.
“Particularly around Honiara, the capital is spreading out and entering areas on the hillsides that were fought over. Population pressure inevitably is opening up new areas, and they are definitely contaminated.
“I’ve definitely come away with a sense that the country has been held back by the sheer level of contamination – they've been living with finding ordnance all the time.”
He is hopeful the Solomons’ status as a geopolitical hotspot means countries like the United States and Australia can be persuaded to fund a ramped up removal programme and help the locals to use their land with greater confidence.
Globally, Conway sees cause for optimism: while there is still plenty of legacy work to be done in clearing old explosives, only “pariah” states lay new mines now, while the improvised explosive devices being cleared in the Middle East, while dangerous, do not pose the same generational threat.
But there is still work for countries like New Zealand to do, both through direct assistance for cases like the Solomon Islands and through broader advocacy on the international stage; Conway makes a point of citing Aotearoa’s “great tradition of disarmament work” and previous financial support for clearing mines in the West Bank and Colombia.
“If you can show evidence that you're making progress, then often what will happen is donors will come in and go, ‘Oh, yeah, great, we can see this is working, we want to fund it’, so if New Zealand can play a role, helping to get things going … it can have a kind of multiplier effect where it brings others in.
“If we want stable democracies in the future in the Pacific, then one of the ways of ensuring stability in these countries is to get rid of all the bombs that are threaten people's lives and livelihoods."
