by Pat Sullivan

Corporal Francis Arsenault demonstrates the landmine-detecting equipment used in Bosnia.

The landmine that killed Canadian Master Corporal Mark Isfeld is called the PROM-1. That innocuous acronym sounds like a reference to a high school dance, but unfortunately this PROM–2.5 kilos of drab olive metal surrounding 500 steel balls and a half kilo of explosive–is anything but innocent.

On June 21, 1994, an armoured personnel carrier took Isfeld and some other soldiers to clear landmines near Kakma, Croatia. In the process the carrier accidentally tripped the mine, “an insidious contraption” that jumps about a metre in the air before exploding and sending the steel balls in all directions. It is considered lethal to 50 metres and dangerous to 100 metres.

“Mark was hit from about three metres,” explains his father, Brian. The military worked efficiently in an attempt to save his life–the medical evacuation chopper arrived in 14 minutes–but he died on the operating table at a Czech field hospital in Knin, Croatia. He was 31, and had been married to his wife, Kelly, for less than three years.

Landmines like the PROM-1 are among the world’s most efficient killing and maiming machines. These silent sentinels, which remain on the job long after the people who planted them have gone, don’t require rations or paycheques, and most of them cost less than $30 to make but from $300 to $1,000 to remove.

They are often planted indiscriminately along well-travelled routes; in fact, that’s why Isfeld died. He and sappers from 1 Combat Engineer Regt. were de-mining a water point after the fighting in Croatia had ended.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, says he is but one casualty among many, because at least 110 million landmines are buried around the world and one of them explodes every 22 minutes. The annual toll is 26,000 people killed or maimed; around the world 250,000 people–almost all civilians–have been left handicapped by mines. Clearing these killers from the 69 countries where they lie buried is a task that almost defies imagination. The ICRC estimates the job will cost $33 billion and, at current clearance rates, will take 11 centuries.

The country where Isfeld was killed is far from the main player in this ugly game. Afghanistan leads the list with an estimated nine to 10 million mines in place, followed by Angola in Southwest Africa with nine million and Iraq with five to 10 million. Croatia, with a mere million, ranks around 10th in the world.

If this article had been written in the 1980s, it would be about how little, if anything, was being done to remove mines. In the 1990s, however, things changed. First, Princess Diana put a human face on the impact landmines were having on civilians by becoming patron of the drive for their removal, and her personal popularity made de-mining popular.

Second, Canada and its then foreign affairs minister, Lloyd Axworthy, became lead players in trying to make anti-personnel landmines the pariahs of military technology. In 1997 this resulted in the Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, which in turn led to the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines. The Convention, which called for the eradication of 110 million mines planted around the world and the destruction of 100 million stockpiled mines, has been signed by more than 135 countries, but the major producers, exporters and users–the United States, Russia, China, Israel and Pakistan–still balk. They have all refused to accept it, citing defence priorities, although the U.S. has pledged to sign on in 2006.

For its part, Canada has not produced anti-personnel mines since 1987 or used them operationally since the Korean War. The army has already destroyed its stockpile of the mines, save for some retained for training purposes.

The landmine convention was followed by the federal government’s five-year commitment of $100 million to the Canadian Mine Action Program. More than half the money was turned over to the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA, the agency that is already responsible for managing about 80 per cent of Canada’s $2-billion foreign aid budget. Overnight, humanitarian de-mining became a civilian task and a Canadian growth industry.

One sign of the growth came in 1999 with the formation of the International De-mining Alliance of Canada, IDAC, a private organization created to compete for mine-clearing contracts.

Brian Metcalfe, IDAC’s communications adviser, says there’s plenty of work. Although de-mining has almost always been defined as a job for the military, Metcalfe says soldiers can’t play this role when mines are used to target civilians and civilian infrastructure. “Yes, the military is trained in mine clearance,” he says, “but the idea is simply to clear a path and get where you’re going as quickly as possible. When it comes to humanitarian de-mining, the military has neither the personnel, the time nor the mandate.”

CIDA agrees. It says mine clearance by soldiers is acceptable during military operations when casualties are part of the equation, but not after fighting ends. “De-miners who work to a humanitarian standard focus on returning land to active use, whether agricultural, industrial, commercial or residential,” CIDA explains. “Their percentage of clearance in a given area is 100 per cent. During times of conflict, military de-miners clear a road and nearly three metres on either side to allow military movements. Their rate of clearance is about 80 per cent.”

Regardless of whether the job is done by civilians or soldiers, Stephen Wallace says mine clearance is in Canada’s best interest. Wallace, CIDA’s director of humanitarian assistance for Central and Eastern Europe, says mines create a climate of fear, and the social instability that results can increase the number of refugees arriving on our doorstep. As for Canada’s lead role in civilian de-mining, “it’s safe to say that (we are) working in this area for the same reason it’s involved in peacekeeping–we’re accepted by all sides and we can work everywhere.”

“The human dimension is really compelling,” adds CIDA’s Lisanne Garceau-Bednar, program officer for the mine action program in Southern Europe and Central Asia. “If a farmer can’t plow his fields because of mines, then he can’t feed his family.”

She also argues that de-mining work closely parallels CIDA’s main job of supporting international economic development because mines have a huge impact on a country’s economic capacity.

As of last spring, CIDA’s de-mining work was concentrated in four regions–Kosovo, Mozambique, Cambodia and Bosnia–and had four goals:

*educating people to make them aware of mines and ways to identify them;

*helping rehabilitate landmine victims;

*developing local de-mining capacity;

*funding de-mining to allow life to return to normal.

When CIDA went looking for Canadians to handle the job, it turned to people like Peter Wright, former commander of the combat engineers at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown. He ended his 25-year military career in 1997 and two years later formed IDAC with a South African partner. The new company, which brought together firms with expertise in different areas, immediately won a $2-million contract from CIDA. It won another contract last year.

“In 2000 we had a 50-man team to Kosovo, including two mine-clearance teams,” he says. “The core of the team was about 20 ex-military engineers from Canada and South Africa, who trained Kosovars to do the de-mining and supervised their work.”

The work is dangerous–last August one of IDAC’s South African de-miners lost a leg in an explosion–but Wright has no trouble hiring Canadians. “I’ve got a list of people as long as my arm and I get at least a call a week from people wanting work. You know what they say–it’s not hard to get the guy out of the military, but it’s hard to get the military out of the guy.”

The pay makes the job attractive. Canadians who worked in Kosovo earned $8,000 to $12,000 a month, while the Kosovars they hired earned $600. “We had no problem hiring them either,” says Wright.

One of the Canadians was hired because of his knowledge of dogs. “We used dogs for verification, or quality control,” explains Wright. “Some companies use them for actual clearance, but there are mixed schools of thought on that. I prefer to have them verify that all the mines have been removed.”

Doug Morrison was half of the two-person Canadian dog team that spent five months in Kosovo last year. The team also included two hard-working German shepherds named Kye and Shadow. “The idea is to teach the dogs to find TNT and C4 (plastic explosives),” says Morrison, who operates a dog-training company called K-9 Concepts near Kemptville, Ont. “Basically, we take that smell (of explosives) and introduce them to landmines.”

By the time they were fully trained, the Canadian dogs “would hit on explosive the size of the head of a pin buried three inches in the ground and they would hit on trip wire made of fishing line. So that meant that finding the real mines was easy.”

Morrison, an ex-cop and dog handler with the Vancouver Police, explains that arranging to store the explosives can be a headache. “To train drug dogs you have to have permission to have drugs for training purposes, and to train them to find mines you have to get permission to store explosives. It costs $2,500 for a container to store a piece of TNT that wouldn’t blow up a postage stamp.”

Morrison says de-mining in Kosovo was particularly challenging because there was “no rhyme nor reason” to the mine placement, but the work did allow him to become one of only two Canadians accredited by the United Nations to de-mine with dogs. “It was the hardest test of my life,” he says. “You were assigned a square 10 metres by 10 metres, and each square contained anywhere from zero to four mines. If you missed one, you failed. In all, we had three boxes to clear.

“I was so stressed out by the end of it that I vomited, but we were the only team accredited the first time out. I am very proud of that.”

Brian Isfeld wishes that Kye and Shadow had been available in Croatia when his son was killed. “If they had had dogs at their disposal on 21 June 1994, my son would be alive today,” he says. “I believe that most emphatically.”

Will Morrison go back to Kosovo if IDAC lands another contract? Probably not. “For five months, seven days a week, I was focused on only one thing–getting the dog to work. It was so hard, and now I find I can’t focus on things any more,” he says.

Besides, adds the 50-something Morrison, de-mining is a young person’s game. “We should be training young people. We’re never, ever going to run out of work.”

Is it difficult to find civilian Canadian de-miners? “It’s safe to say that Canada’s capacity in this area is underdeveloped,” adds Wallace. “There was very little Canadian involvement (in civilian de-mining) before 1998, and we have some ways to go in terms of capability.”

Meanwhile, Mark Isfeld lies buried in the Little Mountain Royal Canadian Legion Cemetery in Chilliwack, B.C., and his headstone one more legacy of an endless battle. His dad, who spent 32 years in the Canadian Forces, sees at least some hope for the future. “I am not gullible enough to think that a signature on a piece of paper will make the problem go away,” Brian Isfeld says, “but it will make it easier to track and react to violations of the Convention. It will stigmatize those who sign and violate, and it will undoubtedly save at least one life in the process. And if it saves one life, I must be for it.”

An Evolving Menace

If landmines were people, the German army of yesteryear would be the father. Although mines had a different meaning in World War I, when they referred to the tonnes of explosive that pioneers placed in tunnels burrowed under enemy lines, the anti-personnel landmine didn’t enter its own until WW II.

On both the eastern and western fronts, the Germans made up for a worsening shortage of infantry by planting millions of mines. One of them, the Schützenmine–the infamous Bouncing Betty–is a direct forerunner of the PROM-1 that killed Canadian Master Corporal Mark Isfeld in Croatia in 1994. This spring-loaded mine jumped about a metre in the air before exploding and shooting hundres of ball bearings in all directions.

No German mine was more insidious than the Teller, which Mark Zuehlke described in his highly acclaimed book Ortona. “There were three detonators built into the Teller, one on top, one on the side, and another on the bottom. The (German) paratroopers could position a mine against a building or inside a room, hook a length of wire to the side detonator, and reel it off to a secure position many yards away. When Canadian infantry came near, a German would give the wire a yank and out popped the detonator. Seven and a half seconds later the mine would explode with an enormous blast.”

Landmines and unexploded ordnance from WW I and WW II–UXO in military parlance–are still major problems in many parts of Europe. The Belgian army alone discovers an average of 10 pieces of UXO daily. In England, the beach at Trimmingham was so heavily mined in preparation for the German invasion that never came that it was not reopened to the public until 1972.

Today, the evolving nature of warfare is making landmines more dangerous for civilians. In some places, and particularly in Afghanistan, they have even been made to look like toys in order to maim or kill children. “Current wars and skirmishes are often fought with no recognizable battle lines,” notes the Journal of Mine Action. “As these conflicts progress, soldiers rotate, new soldiers lay new mines and the locations of previous mine fields may be distantly remembered. Today, mines are not just placed as deterrents but to kill. They are placed where people live, work, play and commute to town and no longer around recognizable war zones. Today, the best sources of information about mines are not the rebel and government armies that placed them, but the victims, and the doctors and hospitals that treat them.”

Grim Statistics

The Canadian International De-mining Centre, a humanitarian, not-for-profit group based in Sydney, N.S., has created a mathematical portrait of anti-personnel landmines and their impact. Additional information was were provided by the International De-mining Alliance of Canada, IDAC.

• Number of countries affected by landmines: 69.

• Number of types of anti-personnel mines: 360.

• Percentage of landmine victims who die before receiving medical assistance: 55 per cent.

• Percentage of landmine victims who lose one or both legs: 28 per cent.

• Chance an Angolan is an amputee because of a landmine: one in 470.

• A Cambodian: one in 236.

• Number of prostheses a 10-year-old amputee will need during his/her lifetime: up to 25.

• Number of mines planted annually: 2 million to 5 million.

• Number of mines removed annually: 100,000.

• Area cleared in Kosovo by IDAC in 2000: 200,000 square metres.