Five Reasons You Should Donate to Remove Landmines from Artsakh
By Maral Firkatian Wozniak
ONE Armenia
- Your donation will help keep local women employed.
Every donation to Remove Landmines from Artsakh will in part provide thesalaries, tools and insurance needed to employ a team of deminers to work on minefield L-40 for ONE year. Many of the deminers are women who do not shy away from the prospect of difficult and, indeed, dangerous tasks. They are happy to be engaged in any work that benefits their community. HALO trains them, provides them with the proper tools and safety equipment. The deminers are able to support themselves and their familiesfrom the income they earn.
Landmines are especially dangerous because they are hidden, so while villagers may or may not know the general area where landmines exist (a minefield) they cannot know exactly where they are. This means that large expanses of land are entirely unusable. They cannot plant crops on the land around them and they cannot allow their animals to graze freely. For manypeople living in Artsakh, farming is their main form of income and landmines are prohibiting them from increasing their production beyond the bare minimum.
3. No real development can take place until the land is cleared.
Several remote villages in Artstakh, including Meghvadzor, are underdeveloped due to the presence of landmines. Large portions of the population have left for this reason and the families that do remain struggle to survive without electricity. So long as there are landmines scattered about the landscape, there will be no investment in developing the infrastructure for a proper town. Electricity will not be run to the village, new schools will not be built and roads will not be repaired or even paved in the first place. There is no guarantee that once the land is cleared the local municipality will then immediately take the necessary steps to develop the region. However, it is certain that clearing the land is the first step that needs to be taken before any other development can take place. If the land is safe, then families will be more likely to stay and will be empowered to advocate for themselves. HALO has already facilitated the development of other villagesthrough mine clearance.
4. One third of the civilian casualties that take place in Artsakh are children.
Antipersonnel landmines (the most prevalent in Artsakh) are designed to not necessarily kill civilians, but wound them. This is a chilling and contemptible strategy of war which is often employed as a way to terrorize the local population. While an antipersonnel mine may only maim an adult (and often their wounds are life threatening), it will kill a child. People living in Artsakh have suffered the loss of their family members for years, and as a result are living in fear.
5. If you don’t, no one else will.
Funding is a major issue for mine clearance in the Lachin Corridor. The HALO Trust is the only organization working to clear mines in all of Artsakh and for much of the work they have completed there has been funding provided by USAID and other governmental organizations. However, for areas lying outside of the borders of the former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (as it was recognized during the Soviet Union), there is no such funding. Foreign governments are not willing to invest in the clearance of this land.
So, quite literally, the only funding for this work needs to come from individuals from around the world who are willing to donate whatever they can to create a safe environment for people in Artsakh.
