SOMALILAND:LANDMINE CLEARANCE IN SOMALILAND AND SOMALIA

Subject: Africa: Conventional Weapons Destruction and Landmine
Clearance in Somalia

Africa: Conventional Weapons Destruction and Landmine Clearance in Somalia
Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:56:55 -0500

Conventional Weapons Destruction and Landmine Clearance in Somalia

The Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement in the U. S. Department of
State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has launched a $1.4
million conventional weapons destruction program, which will also
include the clearance of landmines and explosive remnants of war
throughout heavily affected areas of northern Somalia.
This initiative is being carried out through grants to MAG America
(http://www.maginternational.org/usa/about/) and The HALO Trust
(http://www.halotrust.org/). MAG will destroy stockpiles of
conventional weapons collected from three military camps in Puntland,
a region with 2.4 million people located in northern Somalia. The
grant will also fund the continued deployment of a MAG explosive
ordnance disposal (EOD) team tasked with identifying and destroying
new stockpiles of munitions. Additionally, MAG will provide training
to develop local EOD capacity.

The grant to The HALO Trust will reinforce landmine clearance
operations in Somaliland. With over 440 local Somali staff, HALO Trust
is already the largest humanitarian demining organization in that
region. Specifically, the grant will support HALO Trust manual
demining teams which are equipped with state-of-the-art Handheld
Standoff Mine Detection System (HSTAMIDS) mine detectors, developed by
the U.S. Department of Defense's Humanitarian Demining Research &
Development Program.

Decades of conflict in Somalia continue to threaten political and
economic stability in the Horn of Africa region. Weapons caches,
landmines, and explosive remnants of war endanger the populace and
provide a steady supply of arms to terrorists and insurgents. These
grants will improve the situation by decreasing the impact of
landmines and explosive remnants of war while enabling enhanced
development and humanitarian relief programs throughout the
countryside.

Visit www.state.gov/t/pm/wra to learn more about the Office of Weapons
Removal and Abatement's conventional weapons destruction programs,
including its humanitarian mine action efforts around the world.