Seventeen-year-old Adimir Kruso from Visegrad (the town near the border with Serbia) spent the whole war as a refugee in Gorazde, but then, in 1994, he came upon an unexploded detonator, fetched it back home, played with it.... and then it burst. All the staff of the ill-equipped hospital in surrounded Gorazde was able to do was to amputate his arm under the elbow. If he had been lucky enough to be accepted in some better-equipped hospital, his arm might have been saved.

Almir Salkunic is a similar one: he was wandering with a group of friends around some destroyed houses near Sarajevo when he stepped on the "pate". They saved his foot by means of transplanting the skin from his back, but the wound doesn't want to heal even after three years of medical therapy.

Kemal Kapetanovic, also 17, who found a rifle-grenade in Sarajevo district Dobrinja in 1996 and tried to dismantle it. He went through seven surgical operations, which left his hand severely deformed, but nevertheless in one piece. Did he know that playing with mines can be lethal? "You can't put old heads upon young shoulders," Kemal muttered into his chin while the nurse was massaging his extremity.

The humanitarian organisations that try to achieve their "humanitarian" norms clear the mines only three meters around the house. Such is the case of the Serbian village Brvnik near Orasje in the North-Eastern part of Bosnia. "We are happy there's no shooting anymore," the villagers Mila Micic and Ana Skanovic answer the question how is it possible to live in the middle of the minefield. It has been three years since they returned to their houses still surrounded by landmines, but they still don't dare to do any farming.

However, it is only this year that they started working on their fields at the other end of Bosnia, in the Muslim village Pijesci, between Mostar and Capljina. The Jazvin family came back to their village ethnically cleansed by Bosnian Croats from Herzegovina three years ago. Standing near the destroyed family house, Camila says that she is not afraid of mines, although it is just a couple of hundreds meters away that the signs "Mines!" clearly show the village is still contaminated with landmines. In the meantime, her husband who spent nine months in a Croatian concentration camp is quietly sitting cross-legged in a hut that was intended for meat drying and where the family spent the winter. The air of optimism one can sense among these people who survived inhuman horrors of war is amazing.

Danijel Kruska, the Serbian deminer who stepped on the "pate" while demining the minefield near Trebinje in December 1997, was not so lucky. He had his leg amputated just below the knee. "He was shortened by 8 inches," says Nebojsa Loncarevic, the MAC officer of the Republic of Srbska, trying to introduce some black humour into the gloomy atmosphere in the UN jeep while we were speeding on the furrowed roads towards Derventa. The ghastly landscape consisted of completely destroyed Croatian houses, "cleansed" by Serbian warriors who were creating a safe corridor between Banja Luka and Serbia in 1992. As a great majority of all today's Bosnian deminers, Kruska and Loncarevic were members of special task forces that originally laid mines. To make the irony even greater, Kruska stepped on "his own" mine, the mine that was laid by his compatriots during the war. Kruska, whose war task was also to drop the water mines into the Sava river, was paid 100,000 German marks for his lost leg.

Deminers in Bosnia have to stab around two thousand times at an angle of fifteen degrees in a square meter of the soil. They are obliged to work as if the earth was saturated only by the smallest mines possible, as it is for example the "gorazdanka" (the local mine produced in a town of Gorazde) containing only four grams of the explosive and measuring only two inches in width. When the mine is detected, it is brought to a safe place where it is blown up. When this is too dangerous, however, the mine is destroyed on the spot. More than 80 percent of all the mines that lie in the Bosnian soil are antipersonnel ones, the others being antichar. A great majority of them came from the old Yugoslav military factories, but some were brought there from all over the world or manufactured in local workshops. The latter were named after their production sites: thus the Muslims designed above mentioned "gorazdanke", while the Croats constructed "capljinke", which got their name after Capljina, the town in Herzegovina. However, for each of them, deminers found a proper pet name. Thus the smallest round-shaped one is called the "pate" because it looks like locally popular tin cans of liver- pates and is activated when stepped on; similarly, "sardines" look like sardine-tins and belong to the same type of mines. The most dangerous ones are "promdzije" (the name comes from the official Yugoslav Army code name PROM) that first leap in the air and then explode at the breast-height, ejecting up to 2,500 metal splinters in the radius of 360 degrees. The bullet-proof vest is of no help here, while the "pate", at the very best, only blows up the victim's foot.

First, they have to clear the ground with secateurs, then they search it with metal detectors. The latter may be efficient tools, but rather useless in the grounds rich with natural minerals or in the territories where the heavy battles left shrapnel scattered all over.

When the mine is detected, it is brought to a safe place where it is blown up.

The worst situation is where many different military forces exchanged their places and where the minefields of some are literally interwoven with those of the others. Let alone all the mines laid by amateurs, the villagers protecting their villages, their houses. These mines are the most difficult to dig out, too. "The primitive and improvised devices where you don't know what explosive was used or what kind of activation system they have are the most dangerous for the deminers' safety," says Samir Becirovic, whose demining team is employed by the Norwegian NGO Norsk Folkehjelp Sanitet (NFS).

Nebojsa Ceric - SobaDuring the war this respected Bosnian artist from Sarajevo was a soldier on the front lines near Sarajevo and layed mines. As the lines moved, so did the mines and he, among others, moved them. If you stayed in Sarajevo it was impossible to let things go, I had to act. Ussualy the mines were moved during the night as the enemy was only a house or two away." He actually steped on a mine, but fortunately nothing happened.

As it is amazing to see tenacity of seventy-year-old Croat shepherd Mirko Papac from the village of Gornja Duboka, located on the border between "Croatian" and "Serbian" Herzegovina. Everyday he takes his hundred odd sheep to the pasture among the minefields which, scattered across the Herzegovina karst region, were once separating two armies. When eighteen of his sheep were literally torn to pieces by one single blast of landmines, he decided to take care of mines by himself. In three years since he returned to his destroyed farm, he discovered more than two hundred mines. When he finds a mine, he digs it out, and covers with a pile of rocks in order to prevent any additional victims among his sheep. "And now, kids, watch out. Step only on the rocks! There are still mines in the grass!" he shouted at one point with a thunderous voice that echoed in the wilderness of Herzegovina karst, while he was guiding us from one pile of his unexploded trophies to another; before that we were not at all aware we were literally walking across the minefields. Comercial company Ronco training center near Mostar .

Commercial as well as humanitarian, non-governmental organisations fight to get access to these funds. NGO's say commercial companies' pressures for greater productivity geopardise deminers' safety. "Deminers are forced to achieve the norms since these companies are paid according to how many square meters they clear," suggests Per-Olof Aström from NFS, but he admits his company doesn't have any financial problems because it is directly sponsored by the Norwegian government. But the commercial firms strike back. "Humanitarians have spent three times more money, cleared three times less of the territory, and had three times more victims among deminers," Primorac from the American owned Ronco company replies to NGOs' accusations.

"Dogs have 80-percent reliability," says Jozo Primorac, a Croat who was hired by the American commercial company Ronco to work with dogs in Buna, the pre-war tourist resort near Mostar. "That's why every inch of the minefield should be sniffed up by two dogs." But comparing to not more than 30 square metres of the ground that can be checked in one working day by a human being, the dogs who can sniff out 500 to 1,000 square meters are far more efficient. "All the orders for dogs are in Dutch, because the world's best dog schools for explosive searching are in Holland," adds Clarke Young, an American dog-training expert, whose demining job led him from Pakistan, Mozambique, Rwanda and brought him to Bosnia in 1997. He speaks well of dog trainers who are, as all the other deminers, recruited from among the locals, noting that the most difficult task was to adapt eleven shepherds of various pedigrees, who were in the meantime yelping out of cramped-up kennels, to local conditions and to local mines. For a dog, mine searching is a kind of a game where for every mine or an explosive body it finds - and brings it to trainer's attention by calmly sitting next to it and waiving its tail - it is awarded a rubber ball, which during the exhausting training became something similar as heroin is for the drug addict. However, a dog only finds the mine, while it is a human being who has to dig it out and destroy it. Or as the British officer Powell put it: "A dog is good for detecting mines, but it won't dig it and eat it."

"It's absurd that the demining technology is still the same as it was 60 years ago. If you compare it to the development of the military industry, it is frustrating and very sad," says Jernej Cimpersek, the director of the International Trust Fund for Demining and Mine Victims Assistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. And while observing deminers in bullet-proof vests, with heavy helmets on their heads, either in a standing position or on their knees, who slowly, inch by inch, pierce the soil in front of them with metal sticks, these 2,300 square kilometres of mine-polluted Bosnia seem to offer a steady job for more than one generation of Bosnians.

map of Sarajevo region - red dot is minefield, green is clearance

map of Bosnia - red dot is minefield, green is clearance

"If we are not going to deal with children's education now, all these brand new houses will be demolished by these very same children in twenty years," Nadzida Sljivo, the primary school teacher and the director of the NGO "Be my friend" based in Sarajevo, comments upon the sad fact that all the money goes to rebuilding houses, and it always runs short for the education of children. NGOs have never managed to get finances for activities such as warning children against landmines or helping the mine victims among children. Their program "Help children to survive the peace" suffered a similar fate. Now she instructs the children in the class to stand clear of dangerous explosive devices, but there is less than one class hour dedicated to this program, and the schools don't even have enough educative picture-books to distribute them among pupils. "It is true that the International Red Cross made a good TV spot about this, but many refugees don't even know where they are going to spend the night, let alone watch TV," says Sljivo. She adds that it is the returning refugees who are in greatest danger: they have no experience with the war and not a slightest idea what landmines look like. Another problem is of methodological nature: how to present the landmines to the children not using too technological approach that could be quite dangerous in some sense? "Even if you tell children that mines are dangerous and lethal devices, sometimes curiosity gain the upper hand. The child wants to see where the fuse we were talking about is. The best way is to say: don't you ever touch that thing!"