Mines Litter War-Torn Somalia City : Civil war: Anti-personnel devices, planted by both sides in the fight for a separate state, have killed or wounded dozens of civilians in recent months.

The Italian aid worker was worried about appearing silly when she asked the mine disposal experts to check her garden.

But a short while later, “I realized I was being perfectly sensible when they found six anti-personnel mines,” she said.

Mines are almost as common as litter in Hargeisa, the war-shattered capital of northern Somalia, but not as visible.

“It’s dangerous to walk in Hargeisa because no one really knows where the mines are,” said Edward Robinson, a mine disposal expert with the British firm Rimfire. “This is probably one of the most mined towns in the world.”

Mines have killed or wounded dozens of civilians in the last nine months. The rate is now slowing to just a few a month, but in February several people were killed or hurt every day.

Somali National Movement (SNM) guerrillas took control in northern Somalia in January, ousting the forces of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre after a decade of war.

In May, the SNM declared independence for the north, naming it Somaliland and reverting to pre-1960 colonial borders when Somalia was divided between British Somaliland and the Italian-ruled center and south.

Hargeisa was virtually destroyed by the fighting. Most houses have no roofs and their walls are marked with bullet holes.

All but a few of the city’s 400,000 residents fled west to refugee camps in Ethiopia when the fighting in northern Somalia intensified from 1988 onward.

As the refugees trickled home after the war ended, they kept walking over the mines.

SNM fighters started a clearing campaign but they lacked expertise. Five were killed and nine injured in the space of a few months, said Abdullahi Behi, who used to plant mines for the SNM and is now the group’s mine-clearing chief.

Rimfire was contracted by the European Community to help, and since August has trained a team of nearly 150 Somalis.

“It looks dangerous but it’s a bit of a sought-after job as the workers get paid in food and cigarettes--which is good by Hargeisa standards,” said Robinson, adding that one of the main improvements has been marking off properly cleared areas and working more systematically.

He displays a selection of mines in his back garden, ranging from neat little plastic discs which are hard to detect to primitive-looking wooden boxes.

They were planted by both sides in the war and came from all over the world--including the Soviet Union, Britain, the United States, Pakistan, Italy and Egypt.

Every morning, groups of SNM mine disposal experts in flak jackets and helmets with protective visors select a new street to clear.

They move slowly forward in a line, scratching under the dirt surface with metal spikes, less sophisticated than metal detectors but sometimes more efficient.

Before long, a shout goes up. An anti-personnel mine has been found buried in the dust. Someone blows a whistle to warn passers-by to stand clear.

An old man carrying water in containers on the back of a donkey is persuaded, after a shouting match, that the street is not safe and that he cannot pass.

The mine is detonated from a distance. A plume of dust rises, some rubble falls from a nearby house and a whistle blows again to sound the all-clear.

Robinson says about 5,000 mines have been found and detonated since August.

His team also hunts unexploded shells and grenades which are all over the city. Grenades--which children pick up and play with, sometimes pulling out the pin--are especially dangerous.

Abdullahi says there are half a million mines throughout Somaliland. He says 60% of Hargeisa has now been cleared, but he figures that there are still 50,000 mines to find in the city.

Robinson says such figures should be treated with caution. “No one really knows, and I also doubt that 60% of the city is safe.”

In October three people were killed and three were injured by mines in Hargeisa.

One of them was 9-year-old Jamal Bashir, who lost his right foot and his right hand when he stepped on a mine while tending goats on the outskirts of the city.

The young Muslim, who is recovering in Hargeisa hospital, says his accident was not so much bad luck as “God’s will.”