Fulfilling its obligations under the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, the U.K. has removed the last explosive remnants of war from the Falkland Islands, nearly 40 years after the end of the Falklands War. What were the challenges involved and, as clearance was safely conducted ahead of schedule, what lessons learned can be shared with the humanitarian mine action community?
Submit your article to The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction by June 1: http://bit.ly/3tNYQdp.
Officials say that more than 1,000 unexploded bombs left over from the war still litter the site.
Bomb disposal experts destroyed 130 cluster bombs and a grenade in Vietnam's central province of Quang Ngai on Saturday, but said hundreds still remain hidden in the former battlefield.
The bombs were found on the slopes of a mountain and were detonated in controlled explosions after the area had been evacuated.
Officials said more than 1,000 unexploded cluster bombs remain on the 30-hectare mountainside.
The other day, while casually browsing for interesting geospatial datasets (as you do), I came across an enticing trove of map-worthy material: the U.S. Department of Defense’s recently released Theater History of Operations data, a comprehensive database of historical U.S. bombing missions from World War I through the Vietnam War. As a kid, I was fascinated with military aviation—I read the “Encyclopedia of 20th Century Air Warfare” cover to cover nine times, and built two dozen scale airplane models, hanging them from my ceiling with fishing line—and so I was naturally eager to take a crack at the data.
I decided to begin by mapping the Vietnam War dataset—the largest of the bunch, by some distance. After downloading the Vietnam War dataset as a CSV (which tipped the scales at a hefty 1.6GB), I brought it into R for some basic cleanup and analyses. Specifically, I standardized the dates, which had been entered inconsistently; I removed unwanted records, including non-combat missions and missions with invalid target coordinates; and I aggregated the number of bombing and ground assault missions per month, to visualize in a column chart. The original dataset contained about 4.6 million unique missions; I managed to whittle this down to about 3.1 million missions. Much better!
Next, I brought my refined dataset into QGIS (avert thine eyes, my Esri colleagues! I have to run ArcGIS Pro in a VM on my MacBook, and it kept choking on the layer) along with some reference layers from Natural Earth, and applied some simple styling. Each mission is represented by a single, nearly transparent point, so that isolated missions are hardly visible, while areas of intensive saturation bombing are nearly opaque. Finally, I brought the map into Illustrator, where I added the chart of monthly missions and the annotations.
Two years after ISIL ceded territory in Iraq, these courageous women are clearing mines on their journey back home.
“We are helping people — clearing land for the farmers, making the country safe for people to come back. Most people are badly affected by the war. Our family lost our home. We had to run and lost everything,” says 24-year-old Sabreen. She is one of the 700-plus Iraqis employed by the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), whose mission is to locate and destroy land mines, cluster munitions, and unexploded bombs in war zones. With operations on four continents, MAG recruits and trains local people, particularly women, to work with special equipment and mine-detecting dogs to clear their land. This teaches women a marketable skill and enables them to enter the workforce and earn a living.
Says MAG’s chief executive, Jane Cocking, “Land mines and unexploded bombs often affect the most marginalized groups in a country recovering from conflict. When you recruit people from those groups, they are able to play an integral part in freeing their communities from the fear of land mines as well as financially providing a better life for their families.”
Decades of conflict have made Iraq one of the worst land-mine-affected countries in the world, and the problem only worsened when ISIL seized territory there in 2014. MAG has 55 deminers in northern Iraq’s Tal Afar region, which was an important strategic route for ISIL, as it lies between Syria to the west and Mosul to the east. Sabreen is among the Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds who are working together to clear the land in al-‘Ayadiya, the last town to be liberated by the Iraqi security forces and coalition groups about two years ago. Many of the locals are subsistence farmers and cannot start growing food again until their land is secure.
Following a study published in the journal Current Biology, 'Cross-Cultural Sex Differences in Post-Conflict Affiliation following Sports Matches', Prof Robert Deaner from Grand Valley State University who wasn't involved in the work said: "That men are more likely to reconcile after a conflict supports other studies showing that male-male relationships are generally different than female-female relationships. A woman's relationship with another woman is often gravely damaged if one woman achieves greater status than the other or somehow outdoes her. Men, by contrast, seem to better tolerate these kinds of ups and downs, which may be why men seem better than women at maintaining large same-sex social networks." See here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36969103
El Gobierno liquidará y suprimirá el Incoder por ineficaz, y creará dos nuevas instituciones en su reemplazo. ¿Por qué dicha transformación ha sido tan silenciosa?
“... la noche del pasado jueves 3 de diciembre... el Gobierno les entregó un borrador preliminar del decreto que dará vía libre a la nueva Autoridad Nacional de Tierras (ANT). Esto sucedió prácticamente ad portas de que el Ministerio de Agricultura firme este y otro decreto que creará una segunda institución llamada Agencia Nacional de Desarrollo Rural. Varios funcionarios del alto gobierno aseguran que los decretos quedarán firmados entre este lunes o martes 8 de diciembre, ya que el mismo Presidente hizo pública la decisión hace solo unos días. La preocupación de los indígenas no se limita únicamente a que no concertaron con ellos. Es el trasfondo de qué y para qué están hechas estas instituciones. El por qué manejan con tanto sigilo los decretos puede estar asociado a que la ANT y la Agencia están pensadas como las directoras de una ‘orquesta’ de instrumentos que el Gobierno ha ido aprobando de a poco y que a juicio de varias organizaciones sociales, permitirá “la legalización de la acumulación de tierras”. Es decir, tierras que les pertenecían, les fueron arrebatadas durante el conflicto armado y terminaron compradas y explotadas por agroindustrias nacionales y extranjeras.”
Anthony Haughey
From project-’Undisputed Territory’
1999
I want to finish this blog by using a piece of post-conflict photography and I chose this photo in paticular as it potrays Northern Ireland in it’s post conflict era.
The framing of the shot has been smartly utilised by the photographer with the man made dirt pile almost overshadowing the whole scene with the chaotic pile of shotgun shells in the foreground. These factors are almost like a commentary on the Northern Irish conflict in which they show the litter of war that the country had experienced for over 25 years will be hard to overcome and the dirtpile acting as the large obstacle that will need to be overcome to move onward to peace. You can see how the shotgun shells can also be seen in the background this shows how the violence of that conflict was not subject to just one area but spread out throughout the country.
The colours of the photo are also significant and one can not help to see the contrast between the red,white and blue which clearly symbolises the British and the green grass of the Irish at times clashing with these colours,this factor shows the 2 ‘sides’ of the confict and that it may still be a point of conflict even after the conflict.
For me personally it is a very poignant photo. While the photo was created in 1999 when the conflict was offically over, looking at it almost 16 years later it is still very relevant as we are still dealing with the same issues and unfortunately the issue of nationality is still a point of conflict within certain communities.
The symbolism,framing and the brutal truth of the photo are just some of the reasons why it is one of my favourite photos to be produced about Northern Ireland’s post-conflict era.
