The facts are horrifying: a million odd mines are still buried under the earth of this unfortunate and hardly existing country by the name of Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to known facts, there are 2,300 square kilometres, out of the country's 53,000-square-kilometre territory, contaminated with landmines. This is the equivalent of a square with a 48-kilometre-long side densely covered with mines. However, normal life is much more difficult with these insidious killing devices buried all over the country, and especially dense in areas where the division lines between what the West cynically called "warring factions" took place. The aftermath is even more horrifying: from the time the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed till March 1, 1999 - when the Ottawa convention on banning the antipersonnel landmines was put in effect - 290 people were killed and 950 wounded by landmines: among them only an insignificant number of those who were not civilians.

"The landmine is a perfect soldier. You don't need to pay it, it doesn't need food or sleep. It is a professional killer," says Sandy Powell, the officer of the British Army who was sent to Banja Luka to advise the Republic of Srbska MAC (Mine Action Centre). "Mines are soldiers who can be on guard for years, they don't need any replacement, and they just hang about in the soil killing regardless of the victim's race, nationality or religion," adds Sredo Vucanovic, the director of this centre, whose task is to demine 49 percents of the Bosnian territory, as much as it was carved out for the Serbian "entity" after the fait accompli, after the Dayton Agreement was signed. Around 120 deminers work for this centre, although another 5,000 of them could find enough work to do, according to Vucanovic.

The demining work takes a lot of time and demands enormous concentration on the part of deminers. Although the world's military industry is the first to implement all the modern technological innovations, the deminers' work has not changed substantially since WW1. "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.

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. 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. When this is too dangerous, however, the mine is destroyed on the spot.

It is true that in the demining process the humans can be helped by machines, ranging in size from a small car to remade tanks or huge excavators, but they are scarce in Bosnia since they are expensive and they are of no use in the steep slopes or marshy areas. Even in perfect conditions, they eliminate or activate only a good half of the landmines. Their task must be completed by manual sweeping, but deminers are at least spared of backbreaking clearing of fields. Specially trained dogs are more efficient than machines. "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."

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.

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. The demining organisations insure their labour force, while the other mine victims are completely unprotected. "In the country so destroyed as Bosnia, the civilian war victims are not being taken care of. The social security is on its beam-ends, and the victims are mainly left to the good will of the foreign humanitarian organisations," is a terse explanation of Ahdin Orahovac, the director of the federal MAC, which has its offices in the ex-Yugoslav Army military barracks in Sarajevo's downtown.

Similar to the confusing nature of the political and administrative system in Bosnia, which unites two separate "entities", as the Dayton peace agreement named two states (the Croato-Muslim federation and the Republic of Srpska) in one state, the organisation structure of the head demining organisation is also chaotic. MAC of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a mere connecting medium, while the "entity" MACs, the federal and the Serbian one, are fully accountable only to their respected governments. "We deal only with the first and the last parts of our job: first, we collect the information and set the standards for work, and second, we elaborate the statistics of the finished work," states clearly Zoran Grujic, assistant director of information at the BiH MAC, the national organisation that was established last summer. But the situation is still better than before when there was only UN MAC, the organisation under the patronage of the United Nations, which neither Muslims nor Croats or Serbs trusted. The additional problem was created by the Dayton agreement demanding from all the armies to turn over the records of all the minefields in one week and to dig out all the mines in 40 days. "This caused more harm than benefit. The armies were handing in only the fragmentary records since they were forced to turn them over in a great hurry. That's why all these records are now classified as incomplete," says Grujic, adding that their major task is now to convince all the Bosnian deminers that they are part of the same team; which is not an easy task. "The army of the Republic of Srbska did not leave any map about the landmines laid around Gorazde. We also got some fake information, so we have to be very careful with every record on minefields," complains Orahovac, the director of the Croato-Muslim part of the MAC. The best explanation for this was offered by Loncarevic, the Serbian demining officer, while he was showing how his team of deminers was clearing the grounds for the new road near Derventa: "The only problem is that nobody won this war. It is like in fist-fighting: you better be afraid of a guy you only punched on the ear since he is going to wait for you in a darkness. But if you knock out his teeth, he will remember you forever." That's why there are no records about the minefields in the places that are still considered to be strategic by the former "warring factions".

To make things worse, lots of landmines were never recorded because various units laid them hastily, while they fled in rout. But 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).

The other huge problem that Bosnian deminers are facing is lack of money, which was once distributed only via United Nations, only recently joined by the Slovenian International Fund which has a strong financial support from United States and EU. 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.

However, it is not only deminers who are weighed down with the lack of money. "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!"

What is of no real help with children in the age when they look into every nook and cranny and when the forbidden fruits are the sweetest. The sad evidence can be found in the Medicine Humanitarian Society in Sarajevo, where young victims of mines and other explosive devices gather daily for rehabilitation therapies. Their average age is about seventeen, and almost all of them suffered from these perfidious killing machines when the war was already over and they were no longer forced to hide in cellars. 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. As was the case with 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 story of a seventeen-year-old 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. The Serbian boy of the same age who lost both arms doesn't even want to talk about his tragedy. "Not a single one has a proper prosthesis. They are very expensive, so they cannot afford them. These youngsters depend on mercy of the international humanitarian organisations. And prostheses made and freely distributed by a local organisation are poor in quality," the nurse Sanita Murga sums up the problems of these teenagers who are supposed to get a new prosthesis once a year at this age. Mervyn E. Rees, a therapist from England who comes every now and then to help his colleagues from Sarajevo, was even more bitter: "When Bosnia was on the front pages, money was not a problem. Now, when we would really need it, it's gone." The prosthetic devices are not for free and even the cheapest prosthetists as Bozo Surlan from Banja Luka - called by his patient, the above mentioned Serbian deminer Kruska, "the best in the Balkans" - charge about 1,500 German marks for the under-knee prosthesis. For some Bosnians that could easily mean up to ten monthly salaries.

Bosnians are beginning to learn how to live with landmines; even though this is more than difficult for some who are urged to return to their homes in the middle of the minefields. In some cases, 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. 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.

And the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina are bound to walk in the middle of minefields for a long time. British demining expert Sandy Powell, who went through Kuwait, a large part of Africa and Cambodia, ranks Bosnia between Cambodia and Kuwait: "In Cambodia, there was no real money and we were forced to work in a very difficult terrain - what means a life-time job for a deminer. In Kuwait, there was abundance of funds and the dessert offered an easy demining task. In Bosnia, we have technology and trained people, but we need more money." However, he is an optimist when it comes to predictions: he thinks they can clear Bosnia of mines in ten years. Orahovac, the director of the Croato-Muslim part of the MAC, doesn't share his optimism. He talks about some 30 years Bosnia will need to get to the standards of the rest of Europe, where some explosive devices from WW2 are still found from time to time. While Vucanovic, the director of the Serbian MAC, says: "If we are to get as much money as we do, a hundred years will not be enough to get rid of the mines in Bosnia."