Afternoon is boom time in Quang Tri, Vietnam. Fifty years since the war here ended, and they’re still getting rid of America’s mess. Frags, flechettes, Bouncing Bettys and cluster bombs are scattered unexploded across the country, ready for a farmer to run them over or a child to pick them up. ‘Deminers’ work with metal detectors to scan bits of land in the morning, and after lunch they destroy whatever munitions they find. I’ve come to Vietnam to see how Ukraine will clear its landmines – a third of the country is already contaminated with the explosives and the Foreign Office has just issued a six-million-pound contract for British deminers to help.
Demining takes so long because its mostly done manually. There are dogs and giant rats that can sniff out explosives, and armoured vans that force bombs to go off under their weight. But nothing can replace the human deminer. The animals aren’t reliable, and the vehicles break down. Demining operations are always split into sites, and in Quang Tri I visit ‘CHA 0831’. The team walk down thin rows of land in the heat, waiting for their detector to make a screechy buzz. Today, the deminers only find a 40mm grenade – they wire it with TNT and send the whole thing up. From a hundred metres away, I just hear a thud.
The Vietnamese had to beg America for years to tell them where its military had bombed and mined. In the nineties they got the charts in the form of red dots on a map. Fourteen cluster bombs here, three planes of rockets there. Deminers in Ukraine will have an even harder time. Russia is never going to hand over its wartime records, and many of their minefields won’t have been documented anyway. Some mines will have been hastily laid when their soldiers were on the retreat.
Russia’s defensive boundary, from Kharkiv to Mariupol, the most heavily mined area of the battlefield, won’t be accessible either until the war ends. Photos from Ukraine show brutish, Soviet, anti-tank explosives shaped like saucepans alongside modern versions with seismic sensors that spit guided warheads into the air and zap their target from above. These conventional mines are buried, or left on roads, but Russia also uses missile systems to quickly deploy other kinds of landmines. PFM-1s, or butterfly mines, are plastic with a body and two wings. They’re smaller than your hand but would blow your legs off. Soldiers place them inside a rocket and shoot them into the distance. The projectile explodes mid-flight and the mines disperse, twirling from the sky like sycamore seeds. Russia can send out 200 butterflies in just 20 seconds.
Azerbaijan is three years into demining after a recent conflict with Armenia. I went there in May to see a country that’s just starting the clean-up process. In the nineties, Armenia overran the Nagorno-Karabakh region, in Azerbaijan’s West, and they rigged the whole place with mines. The land has been claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan for centuries. Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 after a six-week war, and it’s now trying to demine the land.
The Azerbaijani government has decided that it can’t destroy every mine. It’s clearing villages and roads instead, and leaving the rest until later. I drove along the border with Iran, next to a proposed railway that Azerbaijan calls the ‘Zangezur corridor’. War had left just bony trees and stone, tank belts by the road, and abandoned sniper positions built from rubble. Armed police checked your passport when you entered, and red triangle signs warned when you were next to a minefield. Azerbaijan hopes the rail route, joining their country to Turkey, will bring money and people back to the area. For now, just a few other cars and trucks drove along my dusty trail.
Azerbaijan’s mine clearing agency showed me around a minefield in Horadiz, near the Iranian border. Their team had found 270 mines, and were only halfway through clearing the site. Men in white protective gear worked in silence so they could hear their detectors, and an ambulance waited nearby. The Armenians had handed over maps of where they laid mines, but the Azerbaijanis said they were only occasionally accurate. The deminers had found weird landmine set-ups, unexplainably similar to those sometimes spotted in Ukraine. Soldiers had purposely stacked mines on top of each other, so victims would step on one mine and set off the second below. They’d be pulped, not maimed.
We went to Aghdam outside the Nagorno-Karabakh region – a village now largely clear of mines. It was on the frontline of the conflict in the nineties, and its reconstruction is run by Emin Huseynov, a presidential appointee who is executing what Azerbaijan calls its ‘Great Return’. He’s ex World Bank, ex International Monetary Fund, ex United Nations, ex Harvard. He wore a monogrammed white shirt and spoke with an American accent.
The mines in Aghdam were laid in a ‘chaotic and unsystematic’ way, Huseynov told me. After clearing the city, his team had built a conference centre for hosting visitors, and a company had begun constructing a hotel complex, but that (and the mosque) was the sum of Aghdam. Multicoloured flags hailed its reopening, but no one lived there. It was still a wasteland. During the conflict, people moved to the capital, Baku, and it was proving hard to persuade them to come back. The progress of Huseynov’s plans were tracked on a massive spreadsheet. He said he was speaking to Ukrainians about their own reconstruction, but wouldn’t say who.
The war in Ukraine might end this year. Ukraine might take back Crimea, join the EU and become a Nato member. It’ll come up with its own ‘Great Return’, and Zelensky will be a hero. But nothing will slow Ukraine’s reconstruction more than old mines and munitions. Some people won’t ever return to their homes, and some farmers won’t risk their lives to work in their fields. Agricultural exports used to make up 40 per cent of the economy, but they won’t anymore. It will take decades to dispose of all the unspent munitions in Ukraine. It will be a cursed minefield for decades.
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