Bosnia lacks cash to purge killer mines

[Adsos Letter]

Source: AP

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Muriz Jukic keeps reliving the day last winter when his tractor hit a land mine, unleashing shrapnel that tore one of his eyes from its socket and left him stumbling and screaming.

Thirteen years after Bosnia's 1992-95 war ended, mines are still claiming scores of victims. A closer look by The Associated Press shows the problem is not that officials don't know where most of the explosives are buried. It's that they just can't seem to scrape together enough cash to get them out of the ground.

Under an international treaty, Bosnia was supposed to be mine-free by March 2009. Instead, the Balkan country has quietly obtained another decade to clear 220,000 remaining mines and other unexploded ordnance that pose a hidden menace to schoolchildren, farmers, hunters, hikers and woodsmen.

Take all the former front lines where most of the mines lurk, lay them end to end, and you'd have a belt stretching 8,700 miles. The danger zone would reach more than a third of the way around the Earth, or cover at least two Great Walls of China.



Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BOSNIAS_KILLER_MINES?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=HOME

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Land mines... :(

[backscatter712]

1. Ah, land mines and cluster munitions...

The gift that keeps on giving!