Armenia Mines

Armenia Mines



March 2007 - The village of 
Aygehovit on Armenia's north-eastern border with Azerbaijan is 
home to 3,400 people and blessed with wheat fields, green 
pastures and orchards. The trouble is that because of mines 
sowed in the Karabakh conflict that ended in 1994, many of 
them are inaccessible. 
"I have a pear orchard of seven thousand square metres on the 
border," said local farmer Vachagan Simonian. "Every year this 
orchard could bring in a crop of around seven thousand tonnes 
and I could sell it for around two thousand dollars - but I 
can’t." 
"People cannot till their land, they have no income, which is 
why they have to leave to work in Russia," said Aharon 
Asilbekian, deputy head of the village administration. 
During the hostilities, the lands and mountains between 
Aygehovit and an Azerbaijani village on the other side of the 
border were repeatedly mined. There are still mines on around 
450 hectares of land, roughly half of the village’s plots and 
gardens. 
Mined areas are to be found in five of Armenia's ten regions 
bordering Azerbaijan. As a result, large tracts of otherwise 
fertile farming land are lying idle. Seven people have been 
blown up after accidentally triggering mines since 1994, four 
of whom died. 
Children are often the innocent victims of landmines. 
"It happened seven years ago," Tornik Eganian told IWPR. "I 
was herding cows near the border. I knew the place well, as 
I'd been there many times before. I had never suspected that 
there could be landmines there. Then, all of a sudden there 
was an explosion, throwing me two or three metres back. And 
then I saw that one of my legs was missing." 
Nowadays Eganian works as a watchman for a salary of $3.50 a 
month and receives just $3 more in disability benefit. Twice a 
year he goes to Yerevan to get a new artificial limb and 
special shoes, free of charge. 
"No one takes care of a person, who's been disabled as a 
result of a landmine explosion, except for his family," said 
Jemma Hasratian, coordinator of Armenia's national committee 
for the prohibition of antipersonnel mines. "The state has no 
programme to support the victims, to give them jobs and higher 
benefits." 
"Now there's a sign on the territory, where I lost my leg, 
warning villagers against going there," said Tornik. "If there 
is a peace settlement, it will be very difficult to work on 
the territories of our village. The entire place is covered in 
landmines. It's very dangerous." 
Asilbekian said life was hard for the villagers, because they 
could not use the lands - but accepted that it was virtually 
impossible to have the area de-mined. 
"We understand that so long as there's a threat of war, we 
cannot have the landmines removed," he said. 
"We've avoided disturbing the mined territories for military 
purposes, but there are also mined areas that lie far from the 
borders," Colonel Araik Movsesian, head of the humanitarian 
mine-clearing centre, told IWPR. "We are going to clear these 
territories of landmines gradually." 
During the Karabakh conflict, a number of villages in the 
border regions changed hands several times, alternately coming 
under control of the Armenian and Azerbaijani sides. Between 
1991 and 1994, the areas were mined first by volunteer units 
and later soldiers from both sides, who rarely drew maps with 
the coordinates of the explosives, which makes things much 
harder for local people. 
"Very often landmines were planted by people, who were not 
specialists, which makes it difficult to establish where 
exactly the landmines are and how far they are from one 
other," said Armen Grigorian, coordinator of the humanitarian 
mine-clearing programme. "The defence ministry provided us 
with maps, but that wasn't enough." 
A study carried out as part of the programme in 2005 revealed 
that there are around 300,000 square metres of mined 
territories in Armenia, which is nearly one per cent of the 
entire country. 
"This is quite a lot for such a small mountainous country as 
Armenia, especially if we consider that landmines are most 
often planted on roads, including those leading to water 
sources, and bridges," said Grigorian. 
Grigorian's centre, which is supported by the United Nations 
Development Programme, UNDP, is working on a new strategic 
programme of action for the period up until 2010. 
"We intend to clear all the territories of no military 
significance, that is 127,000 square metres," he went on. "To 
do this, we need big financial investments - around $38 
million." 
Some 100,000 landmines remain in Armenia, a legacy of the 
conflict with neighbor Azerbaijan.
An estimated 69,000 residents in 60 villages in Armenia are 
afflicted by the problem. 
"This year, we have cleared almost entirely the territory of 
the village Shurnukh in the Syunik region [in southern 
Armenia]," said Movsisian. "Before they withdrew from the 
village, the Azerbaijanis randomly mined arable lands, gardens 
and some of the forests. We got the job fully done in the 
village and cleared 215,000 square metres. Locals can now 
cultivate their land without fear." 
The village had suffered from mine explosions every year. 
In the summer of 2000, Andranik Harutyunian found a round 
object in a field and pulled on the ring attached to it. The 
explosion left the boy an invalid. He still has a mine 
splinter stuck in his thigh. His family's monthly income is no 
more than $60, and they can barely afford visits to doctors in 
Yerevan, 280 kilometres away. 
Since 1994, Armenia has recorded 398 cases of people blown up 
by mines. In about a third of them, people were killed, with 
16 deaths recorded in the last two years. 
"The number of victims has been going down with time, as 
people know where there may be landmines, though accidents are 
not totally avoidable," said Grigorian. 
Signs saying "Danger! Landmines!" have been put up in almost 
all dangerous areas, but in some places they have been taken 
down. "Villagers simply take down metal objects and use them 
for spades or axes," he said. "And it's impossible to stop 
them doing this." 
"If a cow strays into a mine-laden field, the herder will 
follow it, thinking [mistakenly] that once the animal has not 
been blown up, he will be safe too," said Jemma Asratian. 
"There's a lot of work to do," Colonel Movsisian told IWPR. 
"With efforts continuing at this rate, it will take ninety 
more years to destroy all landmines. We need more money to 
speed up the work." 
Grigorian agrees, "If we continue at this rate, we will need a 
thousand years to clear the whole of Armenia of landmines." 
 

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