LONDON – This year marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. Since the treaty entered into force, armed conflicts in Africa and elsewhere have steadily receded, and democratization, coupled with international monitoring, has led to a reduction in the use of landmines and other improvised explosive devices (IEDs) worldwide. At the same time, inspiring individuals and organizations have continued to navigate difficult environments to assist victims and clear minefields. But that progress is now at risk. According to the Landmine Monitor 2018,the use of landmines/IEDs is rising at an alarming pace, as are fatalities and injuries from these devices. Most of the casualties are in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Myanmar, and Libya, where rebel militias, government forces, and extremist groups such as the Islamic State have laid new minefields. Because of past and ongoing contamination, the explosive remnants of war continue to affect the lives of millions of people, particularly civilians and children, in around 50 countries. As the international community focuses primarily on limiting the use of landmines, preventing deaths, and assisting the injured, much less attention goes to how these devices threaten post-conflict recovery efforts. The estimated one million IEDs deployed in Yemen and thousands of similar devices in Syria narrow considerably the path to peace and reconstruction in these countries. Complicating matters further, clearance operations are slow, relying on imperfect detection methods and incomplete information. Many minefields were created years or even decades ago, and may have been moved by rockslides, floods, or other natural causes. Demining suffers from coordination problems, as the process is fragmented among various nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies. Governments’ weak post-conflict state capacity makes planning and coordination even harder. The high cost of clearing mines often leads to donor fatigue. Given these challenges, how should demining efforts proceed? For the past few years, we have studied the impact of landmine clearance in Mozambique, the only country to have progressed from being “heavily contaminated” (in 1992) to “landmine free” (as of 2015). Between 1977 and 1992, Mozambique suffered from a civil war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead from violence, malnutrition, and hunger. More than four million of the country’s roughly 14 million people were displaced. According to a 1992 Human Rights Watch report, parts of Mozambique had been “reduced to a stone age condition” and would have to be rebuilt “from scratch.” Thousands of minefields scattered throughout the country, however, made reconstruction challenging. Government troops had used mines to ring-fence villages, towns, and basic infrastructure, while RENAMO, a militant group backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, had used them extensively in its strategy of terror. There were even older minefields left from the country’s 1964-1974 war of independence, when both independence fighters – FRELIMO – and the Portuguese military used them for various reasons. Militias, thugs, and even commercial companies used landmines for military purposes, protection, and terror. While early post-war assessments suggested that there were as many as one million landmines strewn across Mozambique in 1992, our data uncovered around a quarter-million devices across 8,000 hazardous areas. Yet, whatever the precise number, it takes only a few mines to terrorize civilians and curtail economic activity. In our study, we tracked how the evolution of local economic activity in Mozambican localities, reflected in satellite images of nighttime light density, responded to mine clearance operations between 1992 and 2015. We found that economic activity picked up modestly upon full clearance, implying that demining does indeed facilitate development. More important, we determined that demining results in larger relative gains when it specifically targets roads and railroads, as well as villages that host agricultural markets. Giorgio Chiovelliis a Research Fellow at the London Business School. Stelios Michalopoulosis Associate Professor of Economics at Brown University. Elias Papaioannouis Professor of Economics and Academic Director of the Wheeler Institute of Business and Development at the London Business School. Copyright: Project Syndicate
