War Work and the Birth of Mine Action
By 1999 the war in Kosovo was raging on our borders. Yugoslav forces were fighting the Kosovo Liberation Army across the border, villages were burning, and streams of families were fleeing into northern Albania with what they could carry. Our own border districts took heavy shelling, cluster munitions landed on our side of the line, and large areas of land were densely mined.
Landmines Without Maps
The mine fields were laid in a hurry by many soldiers and irregulars, and almost none of it was mapped. Under the Partnership for Peace and with a humanitarian mission, NATO helped us build the capacity to find and clear unexploded ordnance, to mark danger, to train our people, and to make the ground safe again for civilians who simply wanted to go home. The problem grew faster than we could manage it. In the north the villages were emptied by shelling and fear, houses burned, power lines lay down like black ropes, roads were cratered by bombs and blocked by red danger signs. Our job was to return people to their homes, not just to move metal from soil.
Allies, Mentors, and the Pressure of Command
In July 2000 a helicopter set down a group from the United States who were already helping in Bosnia and Croatia. One of them was another incredible friend and mentor to me, Murf McCloy, he was a Vietnam vet and built like a doorframe. He walked with me through the fields and said, do not worry, Beni, we will help you solve this problem. They brought dogs trained to smell mines and they brought a company to put machines in the fields. They sent a machine called Armtrack to work the ground where our men could not go. USA brought RONCO teams from Bosnia who had learned the slow discipline of this work.
I was a major by then and promoted to Head of Mine Action. Friends from the alliance began to call me the man who surfs minefields, because of the way I moved across the land after studying it. It was dangerous work, but my team and I were getting good at it. A British friend sent me posters of surfers to hang in the office, and we laughed with pride. The stress of the work, however, did take a toll on me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. There was a time when my number was the number everyone called when a child found something shiny in the grass or when a farmer heard a click under his heel or when a doctor needed to report a kind of wound, he had never seen. The sound of that ring went into my bones. It made me sharp, it made me tired, it made me look at the door when no one was there. Even now my phone is only ever on vibrate.
When Clearance Was Not Enough
We cleared a heavily bombed village near the border. We invited donors and officials from the alliance to show them how our work was progressing, clearing landmines and unexploded ordnance. They congratulated us, and as we were taking team photos, a composer who came with us from Tirana walked over and said, you have not finished anything, look at the houses, look at the roads, how can people live in a place with no roof and no road, this village is destroyed. He was right. We learned that clearance is only the first step in humanitarian mine action. That night I invited him to play the songs composed by him in my hometown, to the visiting team. He told his story, and he played, and they stood and recognized him as an artist of our country. That is also mine action, to give a man back his music.
Mine Action Is Also Politics
In 2001 I went on a course in Slovenia, a program for people who run mine action centers. The head of the course was a woman called Janey from UK Cranfield University, and she ran the room with that mix of fear and love that makes you learn. We sat around a round table without flags, Serbs near Croats near Bosnians near me, an Albanian. We smoked together outside while the old wars tried to find us. One night a Croatian friend brought a Serbian officer to my room, and we drank Albanian cognac “Scanderbeg” and spoke plainly. Ominously, he said he recognized me from his binoculars as they tracked me near the border, under fire, while I was clearing land. I said I had seen him too. We decided to ignore the past long enough to try to build a safer future.
Shortly after that course a new round of donation money from the United States was distributed. They gave more to Serbia than to us, and I burned inside, but Murph sat me down and explained why. He taught me that mine action is also politics. If we open a door to the Serbs, we will get maps and information that will help save our people. He was right, even if it tasted bad on my tongue. I learned many lessons in those years as a young leader of Albania’s mine action program.