The woman wearing the protective vest and helmet froze when she saw the new visitor. When you’re holding an explosives detector in a field that might contain dozens of unexploded bomblets, it is procedure to stop moving when a stranger wearing no protective equipment approaches.
“They have to stop working,” says Lamis Zein, a 31 year-old former English teacher who now works as the supervisor of the women’s demining team for Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA). “If somebody approaches her to less than 25 meters, she is not allowed to continue. Safety comes first.”
The 13 Lebanese women on the team, most of them married with children, have been working for a year as deminers in areas littered with unexploded cluster bombs dropped by the Israelis in the 2006 July War. They were trained by experts in the NPA for a month last year and shortly thereafter went out into the fields of southern Lebanon. It’s a dangerous job. Any one of the small bombs can kill five people at a time.
For the past four days, the women have been working on a hilly site in Tibnin, a village that endured two days of devastating bombing at the very end of the war. “We haven’t found anything here yet, but we still have to check every inch of these 3000 square meters. That’s how big our area is,” Zein says before instructing her visitor to be careful and stick to the asphalt road.
She is a small, veiled woman with large brown eyes. Divorced, she has two girls she sees every week. The older one, who is five, knows what her mother’s job is. “She even asks me questions and now she knows all about it,” Zein says with a smile.
Being a woman and working in a field full of cluster bombs that she can’t see is perilous to say the least. “The families were worried at first,” she says. “But they got used to the idea and now they even find it exciting. And, of course, the salary at the end of the month is very important.”
The NPA “Mine Action Center,” where Zein has her office, is spare with little more than a plastic table in a partially rebuilt house. The office is also home to the NPA’s Mine Action expert Amir Mosanovich., a Bosnian who has the appearance of having seen his share of war.
He doesn’t have time to say too much about his job. “We found one, armed. Two kilometers from your position” his walkie talkie shouts. “I’ll be there in 10 minutes,” Mosanovich responds, strapping on his vest.
Zein gestures to photographs of team members on the wall. “Three of the girls are absent, they are pregnant.”
Zein says every team member has “a vest and a helmet and they have these stakes. Red stake is ‘danger’ and separates a cleared and un-cleared area, the yellow stake marks the place where a mine or a cluster bomb was found, blue stake marks the beginning of every lane where one of the girls works, white stake means safe.”
If one of the women’s explosive detector picks up a signal, she has to dig until the source is found. Then she calls the section commander, Zein, as well as the team that will actually remove and destroy the bomb. When they arrive, and the army has been notified, the controlled explosion takes place.
The liaison
Mohammad Baydoun is the “Lebanese Armed Forces guy,” a big man, wearing dirty sneakers and blue jean shorts. He strides into the center with two more LAF officers in tow, both of them snapping pictures and scribbling notes. As Community Liaison Officer Number One, Baydoun is in charge of supervising clearance operations and documenting accidents in zone number five — from Naqoura to Shebaa and bounded by the Litani River in the North. For his job he must coordinate with demining teams, and visit sites where cluster bombs have been found. There he documents the evidence and sends a report to the Lebanon Mine Action Center in Nabatiyeh, where the LAF is in charge.
“Do you know what just happened now?” he asks, with a sense of urgency in his voice. “An old villager found a live M46 [a kind of cluster bomb] in an area that has been cleared before. It is very dangerous. You can’t be safe around a thing like that. Now we have to call the Central Command in Nabatiyeh. We are going to have a demolition today.”
He says the “accident season” is approaching, since people are starting to get ready for winter and often send children to gather wood. “That’s what happened last week, in Yunin. And then we had the fire in Bint Jbeil during the week end.”
Unseen danger
Many sites in South Lebanon have yet to be fully demined, according to Knut Furunes, the manager for the NPA’s Mine Action Program. “A lot of emergency clearance was done. But now we have to go over those areas again, because everything lying on the top was collected, but what is buried is still out there.”
He is worried about the donors’ willingness to keep funding operations in Lebanon, because most of them believe that the problem is almost solved.
“It is not. Not even one bit,” Baydoun concurs. “The teams are fewer and fewer. NPA has four teams, DCA [DanChruchAid] had three teams, now only two teams, the Swedish Rescue Services Agency are packing, they are done, lack of funding. So are others. They were eight NGOs in the beginning. Now they are leaving. Lack of funding. But the problem is not solved. I’m still seeing accidents.”
But the women’s team is attracting attention, Furunes says. “That’s why we are lucky. We could secure the funding for another year.”