Land Mines: Latest ‘Weapon of Terror’

On the crest of a mountain overlooking the green fields of his homeland, Besir Haliti’s blood drained into the snow.

The 14-year-old Kosovo Albanian already had suffered enough of war: Serbs burning homes around his town, the flight of family and friends, a 20-hour trek through mountains to refuge in Macedonia.

But with safety in sight, one more moment of savagery awaited. As Besir fled from Macedonian soldiers trying to block his entry into their country, he stepped on a land mine in the border area. The blast hurled him through the thin mountain air. A fellow refugee and three soldiers also were injured.

Lying on his back, bleeding badly and initially unable to move, Besir thought he would die.

“I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t hear,” Besir said as he lay in a hospital bed in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, recovering from the blast that occurred last month. The mine fragments shattered his leg, fractured his skull and ripped a 5-inch gash across his abdomen. “I thought I would lose all of the blood from my body.”

The scars that now jag across Besir’s 110-pound frame are a sign of one of the increasing dangers facing refugees heading for Macedonia and Albania, according to U.N. officials and humanitarian groups: land mines.

With Yugoslavia’s border guards periodically restricting departures of refugees and its soldiers burying mines in anticipation of a ground invasion, U.N. officials fear that more refugees may trigger the weapons as they flee Kosovo through illegal, unmarked border crossings.

Already, at least a dozen refugees have been killed in mine blasts, according to Macedonian figures and news reports.

U.N. officials said they are expecting the toll to mount.

“We know that substantial numbers of refugees are coming across unofficial crossings,” said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A land-mine incident “could very well happen again.”

Some of those fighting to ban land mines worldwide allege that Yugoslav troops are using them not only to defend against invasion but to channel refugees toward the borders with Albania and Macedonia and to stop refugees from returning to Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

Marissa Vitagliano, coordinator for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said the group has received reports that Yugoslav military units have forced refugees to lay the mines.

“The Serbian army is using mines as a weapon of terror,” Vitagliano said. “They don’t have any military purpose. They’re being used to control refugees.”

Ironically, the new concerns over mines in the Kosovo conflict come at a time that should be a moment of triumph for the movement against the weapons. The international treaty to ban the use and production of land mines took effect March 1, though neither the United States nor Yugoslavia has signed the pact.

By not signing the treaty, the U.S. has robbed itself of the moral authority to speak out on Yugoslavia’s use of land mines in Kosovo, Vitagliano said.

“It’s harder for us to condemn another country for something that we ourselves haven’t done,” Vitagliano said.

Long before the allied bombing began March 24, Yugoslav soldiers had begun mining the borders that separate their country from Macedonia and Albania, according to NATO and Macedonian police.

The Yugoslavs planted both antipersonnel mines, which are designed to maim and injure, and more powerful antitank mines, whose fragments can pierce thick layers of metal. Yugoslavia is one of the world’s major producers of land mines.

After the NATO bombings began, the Yugoslavs stepped up their use of the weapons, officials said.

“We’ve seen footage of them actually laying the mines. You’d be naive not to expect it,” said Sandy Blyth, spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors military activity in Yugoslavia.

The first serious incident involving the weapons took place April 18 just north of the Albanian border town of Morine, when a carload of refugees strayed from the road and hit a mine, killing five and injuring several others.

The most serious blast so far took place April 28, when a group of about 35 refugees from villages just inside Kosovo tried to cross at a remote outpost three miles north of Blace, one of Macedonia’s main border stations.

Mahmudije Hajdarovic said Yugoslav soldiers told them to go down a road that ran through a no man’s land and then across the border. The group was in the middle of the neutral zone, she said, when she heard an enormous blast.

In the blast and its aftermath, seven people died, including two young boys and a 7-year-old girl, according to Hajdarovic. Four people, including her two sons, were injured. Macedonian government figures cite five to six deaths and seven injuries in the incident.

“I saw a huge light and my ears were ringing,” said Hajdarovic, 55, a retired hospital worker. “People were screaming and crying, especially the kids.”

Her 18-year-old son was carrying her 3-year-old son, Liridon, in his arms in front of her. Fragments from the blast cut through the older boy’s hand and into her younger son’s back.

At Skopje hospital recently, a nurse held up an X-ray to show the damage. Lodged between Liridon’s hip bone and his lowest rib were two chunks, one a quarter-inch long, another an inch.

Hajdarovic said Liridon is often terrified. As she pointed to the scar on the boy’s back, he began to cry.

Despite the dangers of the mines, there is little anyone can do.

Blyth, the OSCE spokesman, said “civilized” countries mark their minefields with signs of a skull and crossbones as a warning. Observers have seen no such signs posted by the Yugoslav army, he said.

The mines will pose a danger far into the future. If a U.N. or NATO peacekeeping force enters Yugoslavia, one of the conditions probably will be that all minefields are marked and identified, Blyth said.

Based on previous experience with Yugoslav forces laying mines during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, activists said they expect many civilian casualties from unknown or ill-marked minefields.

“There are still people [in Bosnia] being killed by land mines,” said Vitagliano, the anti-mine activist. “It’s going to be difficult for the refugees or peacekeeping forces to go” into Kosovo.