Egypt's landmines are old and hard to locate in The Devil's Garden
Egypt, Politics, 9/10/1997

Countries are edging towards signing an international treaty banning anti-personnel land mines in December, but this initiative brings up new problems to be solved.

Egypt's problem stems from the fact that its land mines are old and hard to locate and were designed for use against tanks, whereas international criticism is generally focused on anti-personnel mines. According to the ministry of defense, mines have hampered human and economic development and have killed and injured thousands of civilians.

The western desert, scene of one of the major second world war battles--El Alamine--was littered with 20 million mines by the armies.

Later, Egypt and Israel combined to dump more than 6 million mines in the Sinai desert and the region of the Gulf of Suez during the wars in 1967 and 1973.

Many of those mines are booby-trapped. The nomadic people refer to waste tracks of desert minefields as "The Devil's Garden."

The military analysts said that storms have increased the depth at which many land mines are buried by eight meters, thus ruling out the use of normal mine-detection methods.

The trigger mechanisms on many of the weapons have corroded. Mines that were intended to be set off by the hefty bulk of a tank may be detonated by weight of a baby. And some explode by themselves. Besides nomadic casualties, victims have included soldiers and off-the-beaten-track tourists.

Seven million mines have been cleared from the western desert in the past 15 years and three million from the Sinai desert. That leaves at least 20 million others.

But Egypt has set the year 2006 as the target for finally ridding its sands of land mines, but it is anxious not to left alone in paying for and carrying out this huge task.

While cost of dumping a mine ranges from $5 to $30, clearance costs $300 to $400. In the 1980s, the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Germany contributed about $20 million for training and equipment, in addition to satellite photography to determine the extent of the problem and help locate minefields.

Foreign donations have now dried up, however, and since 1990, Egypt has spent $70 million on de-mining. The government estimates that another $200 million is needed to finish the task.

The establishment has been criticized for taking too long to deal with the problem, but Cairo says it was unable to start tackling the menace until it made peace with Israel.

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