Technicians search for land mines in Mozambique

October 3, 1999
Web posted at: 2:32 p.m. EDT (1832 GMT)

(CNN) -- The civil war in Mozambique has been over for years, but the recovery is just beginning. Tens of thousands of unexploded land mines lie beneath the fields of the southeast African country, and the nation can't afford to remove them.

In an effort to help, the United Nations has launched a grass-roots, "adopt-a-minefield" campaign to pay for land-mine removal. It costs as much as $4,000 to remove just one mine, but less than 50 cents to plant one in the ground.

Although the 15-year civil war ended in 1992, millions of refugees still can't return to their homes because of the land mines.

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CNN's Stacey Wilkins reports on the U.N. campaign to solicit private aid to clear land mines in Mozambique. Windows Media 28K 80K

A group in Atlanta, Georgia, has pledged to raise the money needed to clear them away from one Mozambique village.

"We are really joining a compassionate international community that has been trying to reconstruct the world without war, where people can live together in some degree of peace and harmony," one group member said.

It will take more than three months and $40,000 to clear the village of mines so residents of Aldeia 25 Jenho can return to their homes.

Many refugees can't go home because they fear land mines left over from the civil war

The village's Portuguese name means the 25th of June, a date that is Independence Day in Mozambique, explained one group member. The group felt it would be symbolic to de-mine this particular village because that would give the residents freedom of movement.

New technology is making it easier to locate and remove land mines.

For instance, a German de-mining device is designed to collect shrapnel from land-mine detonations, and a South Carolina group is developing a new way to find plastic land mines that are almost impossible to detect by current means.

The technique uses naturally occurring micro-organisms that cause the ground to glow in areas where mines are buried.

Both methods could greatly speed up the pace of locating land mines, now located using dogs and metal detectors.

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