No one knows how many mines were buried beneath South Sudan’s soil during 50 years of north-south civil war. However, at least one private company has hired deminers to clear land in the South since 2005’s peace deal. Today the largest portion of this work is called ‘humanitarian mine action’, largely funded by the United Nations.
Contracts are open to both non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector, with at least four companies — Amour Group, Mecham, Ronco and The Development Initiative (TDI) — making money by freeing communities from fear.
Together with the three-year-old government, humanitarian agencies have struggled to meet vast education and health needs, but the demining coordinated by the United Nations Mine Action Office (UNMAO) is held as a success. Some 10,000 km of roads — including key routes between towns — have been opened. More than 2,300 dangerous areas have been identified and 1,101 cleared. Almost 11,500 anti-personnel mines and 2,522 anti-tank mines have been destroyed, together with hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordinances.
Experts believe mine contamination in the South is far less than in Cambodia or the Balkans. Leonie Barnes from TDI’s South Sudan program has cleared battlefields and infested areas close to towns with giant machines like the British Armtrack with its flailing wheel and a Swiss digger with rotating chains and hammers. He thinks the bulk of the work may be finished by 2010, leaving only harder “fiddly” areas to clear.
At least two towns were strangled by rings of mines in the war and key roads were also mined, or rumored to be mined to the extent that much-needed travel was deterred. Many areas have still not been re-inhabited by returning refugees for fear of the explosives that have maimed or killed more than 2,600 people in the South.
More than just controlled explosions
In 2007, the UN spent more than $62 million on demining in Sudan, with 70% going to the South. Christina Greene of UNMAO pointed out that this money was spent on much more than just digging out mines and detonating them. “[This] includes demining, mine risk education (MRE), victim assistance and the coordination of all these activities,” she said.
Contracts are given out for a nine-month season that avoids the worst of the rains. They are awarded according to cost and technical capabilities. Contracts vary from surveying to route clearance, to mechanical and manual clearance, as different machines and expertise are needed for different jobs.
“Landmine and explosive remnants of war contamination varies across southern Sudan,” Greene explained. “Some minefields have high concentrations of both anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. Other suspected minefields may only have one or two mines.”
Costs vary dramatically as well. “A manual detector costs $3,000 on average, while a large machine can cost $1.5 million. Manual clearance is a lot cheaper, but much more time consuming,” Greene said.
Some machines are better than others for certain jobs. Ronco’s MV-4 machine, for example, is designed to clear only anti-personnel mines from various types of terrain, explained the company’s chief of party, William Endley. Mines are detonated as the small, maneuverable and remote-controlled flail and roller mounted machine moves through the mined area.
“Mines and other explosive items are therefore detonated or destroyed by the impact of the chains and flails. These impact hammers are made from very high resistance steel which gives them a reasonable lifetime before they have to be replaced,” he said. Bigger machines would not be able to work on some terrains an MV-4 can access.
There are also environmental factors. Fast-working, heavy machinery that can tackle a large area quickly may not be easily brought to areas that lack roads or bridges.
A tough environment
Demining companies face many of the same challenges. The South is at least twice the size of Germany and the transport infrastructure is massively underdeveloped. “The logistics chain is huge — road, air and river. If you haven’t got contact in each place it can be very difficult,” Barnes said. Many places lack roads entirely. “Sometimes you’re making the road as you demine it,” she added.
In the region’s tiny private sector, the demining companies and NGOs are an important source of jobs. Private companies employed more than 400 national staff for the 2007-2008 demining season on UN contracts in South Sudan. NGOs employed more than 500 national staff.
However, many employees are ex-combatants who have spent most of their lives fighting and a “war-traumatized” workforce brings with it a whole host challenges, Barnes notes.
The peace deal is also fragile. International concern, already high, ratcheted up in mid-May when northern and southern Sudanese forces clashed in the oil-rich Abyei area. The possibility that war could break out again is very real, rendering demining useless as new mines are laid and unexploded ordinances litter the ground.
Ronco’s Sudan operation is its smallest — dwarfed by Afghanistan and Iraq projects — but the company is keen to settle down and grow. They have set up a camp in the South’s capital Juba. “We are also planning to develop a Sudanese demining capacity in the South for future projects. [But] given the current security situation, it is difficult for us to gauge the amount of work in the South or in Sudan as a whole.” Endley said.
Are NGOs better at humanitarian demining?
At Mile-38, a famous 3km-long battle ground in the North-South war where Khartoum’s forces stopped the southern rebels’ attack on Juba, keeping them at bay 38 miles from the town, there is a 25-strong woman demining team working for Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), one of the two biggest NGO demining projects.
This all-female team is the only one in the South and to many they are better than their male counterparts. Mile-38 project leader Lado Victor said that although women learn at the same speed as male deminers, in the end they are more consistent.
Opayi Mary, the team leader, is proud to be working on a project that she hopes will eventually benefit other children, if not her own. “My work is like that of a soldier,” she explained, “full of discipline.” According to her, the work is safe if you follow the rules.
Charles Frisby, head of NPA’s demining work, said work like developing the women’s team is the product of something NGOs have that commercial partners do not: extra time.
“Capacity-building is where NGOs can really stand out. Because donors are not applying intense pressure on the NGOs to achieve certain levels of productivity, the extra time can be given to national staff within a program,” Frisby said. He added that time and energy can also result in the host nation getting a sense of “ownership” over the clearance.
There may also be a shift as the work is changing. Between 2004 and 2007 there was much reliance on the commercial sector to clear and open primary roads. Now the emphasis is changing to the clearance of land for agriculture, return and resettlement and infrastructure projects. “NGOs that have built up sustainable programs are now well placed to take the lead in this work,” Frisby said.
“A private company works on a specific task with limited time duration. NGOs tend to have a longer term outlook and bilateral funds, in addition to grants from the UN,” added Greene. “Many NGOs also have a long term strategy for capacity development and nationalization so that they will not be dependent on international staff.”
Barnes noted communities benefit whether the deminers are profit or non-profit. “Wherever there is a demining team the health and hygiene in the village will improve. Medics usually do nothing during the whole contract, so they end up treating malaria and delivering babies,” she said.
Before joining TDI, she worked with the UN for 10 years and has a deep understanding of mine risk education and victim assistance, as well as ballistics from her time in the Australian army. She thinks there is no significant difference between in the capacities of the commercial companies and the non-profit outfits, saying “Both commercial and NGOs doing humanitarian mine action have to be multi-faceted if they want to succeed.”
Barnes estimated modest profit margins at 10-15%. This is partly because the South is such a hard place to work. But there is another important aspect to the work for both kinds of deminers — an enormous sense of satisfaction at having cleared land, opening up access and possibilities.
Competition for contracts may also arise locally soon. This year, Sudan Integrated Mine Action Service (SIMAS) was the first national NGO to be accredited in southern Sudan. SIMAS has already cleared a site for a brick factory and school in Rokon, as well as portions of Rejaf East and Mongolla. This is an important step for the UN, who by 2011 will shift coordination work to the government.
“When the UN passes the job over to the government they will be the people demining the roads,” Leonie said.
Endley noted that: “as development of roads and other infrastructure in Sudan progresses, we expect there to be an increase in activity for private contractors, much like in Afghanistan over the past four years,” he said.
Private contractors also hope other businesses will develop into new opportunities if peace holds.
Greene noted that private companies’ market outlook is changing in the South. “As new commercial ventures enter southern Sudan, especially those investing in mineral and natural resources, there will be an increasing need for mine action support.”
