2001: UAE teams help clear landmines

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2001: UAE teams help to clear landmines

DUBAI // Clearing landmines would have been hard enough without the winter downpours, 40°C-plus summers and rocky terrains of southern Lebanon.

That was the challenge the international community faced in 2001. Israel had ended its two-decade occupation of the region a year earlier but left behind hundreds of thousands of mines.

That year the UAE bolstered UN and Lebanese demining efforts with Operation Emirates Solidarity, devoting US$50million to clear 58,000 mines from 5 million square metres by 2004.

"The clear and sustained commitment of the UAE to set and achieve realistic goals in a set time frame" proved vital, said Chris Clark, then head of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre in southern Lebanon, writing in 2004 in the Journal of ERW and Mine Action.

The UAE contracted the firms MineTech and Bactec to clear designated areas - some so dense with mines that they had to be cleared by hand, the MineTech project manager Max Dyck wrote in an article for the journal in 2003.

Heavy rains muddied fields, slowing work. Temperatures ranged from freezing to the high 40s.

Emirati de-miners gained experience by working alongside their counterparts - training that proved useful after Israel reinvaded Lebanon in 2006. UAE teams returned to clear mines and cluster bombs, working through 2009.

* Carol Huang