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Clearing the ground for post-conflict reconstruction

Apr 13,2019 - Last updated at Apr 13,2019

By Giorgio Chiovelli, Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

LONDON — This year marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. Since the treaty entered into force, armed conflicts in Africa and elsewhere have steadily receded and democratisation, coupled with international monitoring, has led to a reduction in the use of landmines and other improvised explosive devices (IEDs) worldwide. At the same time, inspiring individuals and organisations have continued to navigate difficult environments to assist victims and clear minefields.

But that progress is now at risk. According to the Landmine Monitor 2018, the use of landmines/IEDs is rising at an alarming pace, as are fatalities and injuries from these devices. Most of the casualties are in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria, Myanmar and Libya, where rebel militias, government forces and extremist groups such as Daesh have laid new minefields. Because of past and ongoing contamination, the explosive remnants of war continue to affect the lives of millions of people, particularly civilians and children, in around 50 countries.

As the international community focuses primarily on limiting the use of landmines, preventing deaths and assisting the injured, much less attention goes to how these devices threaten post-conflict recovery efforts. The estimated 1 million IEDs deployed in Yemen and thousands of similar devices in Syria narrow considerably the path to peace and reconstruction in these countries.

Complicating matters further, clearance operations are slow, relying on imperfect detection methods and incomplete information. Many minefields were created years or even decades ago, and may have been moved by rockslides, floods or other natural causes.

Demining suffers from coordination problems, as the process is fragmented among various nongovernmental organisations and UN agencies. Governments’ weak post-conflict state capacity makes planning and coordination even harder. The high cost of clearing mines often leads to donor fatigue. Given these challenges, how should demining efforts proceed?

For the past few years, we have studied the impact of landmine clearance in Mozambique, the only country to have progressed from being “heavily contaminated” (in 1992) to “landmine free” (as of 2015). Between 1977 and 1992, Mozambique suffered from a civil war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead from violence, malnutrition and hunger. More than 4 million of the country’s roughly 14 million people were displaced.

According to a 1992 Human Rights Watch report, parts of Mozambique had been “reduced to a stone age condition” and would have to be rebuilt “from scratch”. Thousands of minefields scattered throughout the country, however, made reconstruction challenging. Government troops had used mines to ring-fence villages, towns and basic infrastructure, while RENAMO, a militant group backed by Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, had used them extensively in its strategy of terror. There were even older minefields left from the country’s 1964-1974 war of independence, when both independence fighters, FRELIMO, and the Portuguese military used them for various reasons. Militias, thugs and even commercial companies used landmines for military purposes, protection and terror.

While early post-war assessments suggested that there were as many as 1 million landmines strewn across Mozambique in 1992, our data uncovered around a quarter-of-a-million devices across 8,000 hazardous areas. Yet, whatever the precise number, it takes only a few mines to terrorise civilians and curtail economic activity.

In our study, we tracked how the evolution of local economic activity in Mozambican localities, reflected in satellite images of night-time light density, responded to mine clearance operations between 1992 and 2015. We found that economic activity picked up modestly upon full clearance, implying that demining does indeed facilitate development. More important, we determined that demining results in larger relative gains when it specifically targets roads and railroads, as well as villages that host agricultural markets.

Demining key areas associated with transportation networks leads to large increases in aggregate economic activity because it has positive spillovers even in areas that were never contaminated. Counterfactual policy simulations suggest that Mozambique’s highly fragmented demining process probably resulted in sizable losses compared to what could have been achieved with a more coordinated effort targeting the central nodes of the country’s limited transportation network

Much like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every civil war is destructive in its own way, implying a need for caution when extrapolating research findings from any single conflict study. Nonetheless, our research points to some general lessons for the international community as it plans for the reconstruction of Yemen, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan and continues demining efforts in Colombia, Cambodia and many African countries.

First, those leading demining efforts should take a panoramic view to identify spatial interconnections and areas hosting transportation infrastructure and local and regional marketplaces. To be sure, prioritisation is complicated by other considerations, including the need to facilitate the return of refugees, maintain peace, distribute aid and so forth; nevertheless, considering the economic potential of clearance in key areas would help ensure long-term success.

Second, Mozambique’s experience holds a lesson for those in the international community who are hesitant to expand the Mine Ban Treaty to cover anti-tank (anti-vehicle) landmines, which are still deemed legal, owing to their supposed “strategic importance”. As our findings show, by threatening intra-regional flows of goods, people and ideas, anti-vehicle landmines threaten economic development and a post-conflict recovery.

Sadly, International Mine Awareness Day has never been more relevant, given the continued use of these deadly devices in conflicts around the world. In addition to helping the victims of mines, the international community urgently needs to step up its clearance efforts. The process demands a strategic, holistic, and coordinated approach to ensure that demining leads to sustainable economic development and lasting peace.

 

Giorgio Chiovelli is a research fellow at the London Business School. Stelios Michalopoulos is associate professor of economics at Brown University. Elias Papaioannou is professor of economics and academic director of the Wheeler Institute of Business and Development at the London Business School. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2019. www.project-syndicate.org

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