3 Sarajevo Children Killed by Landmine

April 10, 2000)

Read Seattle Post-Intelligencer article in response to these senseless deaths 'Clinton's Cruel Decision On Land Mines Risks Too Many Lives'". See http://www.seattlep-i.com/opinion/tomcol6.shtml

Find out what you can do to urge the USA to BAN MINES TODAY

We have also two news articles about the incident included below:

• Nandotimes/AP
• Chicago Tribune/AP

http://www.nandotimes.com/global/story/0,1024,500191589-500258984-501331310-0,00.html

Land mine kills 3 children in Bosnia Copyright © 2000 Nando
Media Copyright © 2000 Associated Press

By ALEXANDAR S. DRAGICEVIC, Associated Press SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (April 11, 2000 12:40 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com)

- An explosion killed three children who strayed into a minefield, police said Tuesday. The victims included an 11-year-old girl who screamed for help for hours as would-be rescuers watched, too fearful to go after her. Police identified the victims as Ema Alic, 11, Goran Biscevic, 12, and Haris Balicevac, 12. The children died Monday after they ventured into a minefield outside the capital. Millions of land mines are strewn across Bosnia as a result of the 1992-95 Bosnia war. Mine explosions kill and injure dozens of people every month, and minefields make stretches of land unusable. Residents said the fact that the area was mined was common knowledge and signs warned of danger. Still, the field was not roped off, apparently because of lack of money. Eyewitnesses said Ema was still alive after the explosion and that she screamed for help for hours before falling still. Nenad Krestalica, who witnessed the explosion, said the force of the blast sent "the body of one child through the air." "I also heard the crying voice," said Krestalica, 67, still visibly upset a day after the deaths. "For two hours, the girl was showing signs of life, waved with her little hand and called for help. Then she went quiet."

His wife, Stana, 60, said she doing garden work when she heard the explosion. "We all started running. We heard a child's voice screaming for help," she told a reporter. "We called the police and they came, but nobody could approach the children." Residents gathered around the minefield but could only watch the tragedy a few hundred yards away. Police, NATO-led peacekeeping troops and a demining team arrived shortly after the blast. But it took more than two hours until a path to the children was demined, and by then, all were dead. The bodies were removed about six hours after the explosion.

http://www.chicago.tribune.com/version1/article/0,1575,ART- 44246,00.html

Chicago Tribune

Mines still render Bosnians helpless

By Alexandar S. Dragicevic
Associated Press
April 12, 2000

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Helpless to save her, NATO peacekeepers and townspeople watched from the edge of a minefield as a dying 11-year-old girl waved and pleaded for hours to be rescued. Ema Alic and two other youngsters died Monday after venturing into the minefield on the outskirts of the capital, the latest casualties of the Bosnian war that ended five years ago. "For two hours, the girl was showing signs of life, waved with her little hand and called for help. Then she went quiet," said eyewitness Nenad Krestalica, 67, who was still visibly upset Tuesday. His wife, Stana, said she was gardening when she heard the explosion. "We all started running. We heard a child's voice screaming for help," she said. "We called the police and they came, but nobody could approach the children." Police identified the other dead children as Goran Biscevic, 12, and Haris Balicevac, 12.

As the rescue team carried the bodies of the children from the minefield, Ema's father broke into tears, turned around and told his wife: "It's our child," other witnesses recalled. The woman fainted. The presence of the minefield was well-known and signs warned of danger, residents said. Still, the field was not taped off, apparently because of a lack of money. Residents gathered around the minefield after the explosion Monday, followed by Italian members of the NATO-led peacekeeping force, but they could only watch the tragedy a few hundred yards away. Although the experts worked quickly once on the scene, more than 2 1/2 hours elapsed between the time a demining team was notified and the time it reached the victims. By then, all three children were dead. "It didn't take us more than half an hour to demine a small path to get to the children," said Zoran Gagula, one of the deminers. "We skipped standard procedures, risked our lives and still, by the time we got to the children, they were dead." Standard demining procedures are slow, with experts sometimes taking as much as an hour per square yard to minimize risk, prodding each inch of terrain for explosive devices. NATO experts arrived after a team from Norwegian People's Aid and therefore let that squad do the demining, said a NATO spokesman, Maj. Paul Hubbard. "They really did it as quickly as they could," Hubbard said. Andja Elek, 60, said she saw the children walking earlier and warned them not to play there because of the mines, "but they obviously didn't listen to me." "The girl was able to lift her head a few times and call for help," she said.

Dozens of people are killed and injured every month in explosions of some of the thousands of land mines strewn across Bosnia-Herzegovina. Minefields render large areas along the former front line unusable. It could take decades before Bosnia is rid of the deadly, hidden weapons. The World Bank is financing the demining effort in Sarajevo. Yet there and elsewhere in the country money is scarce as the war recedes in people's memories and the impulse to support the humanitarian effort-generally financed by non- governmental organizations-fades. The field in which the three children died Monday was among the 77 areas around Sarajevo scheduled for demining but where work has been held up for lack of funds. Jusuf Jasarevic, the chief of the regional demining center in Sarajevo, said 500 demining experts are idle in Bosnia because there is no money to pay them. "Some 1,818 minefields have been registered only around Sarajevo," he said. "But the public pays attention to the problem only when a tragedy like this occurs." Worldwide, it is estimated that 26,000 people are killed or maimed by land mines each year. In the war zones of the former Yugoslavia, the problem is acute. Bosnia is estimated to have between 600,000 and 1 million land mines within 115 square miles of land. In Kosovo, as many as 1 million mines occupy 2,000 minefields planted by Yugoslav forces and the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army during the conflict there.

The toll in death and suffering inflicted on civilian populations, particularly children, made the global effort to ban land mines one of the favorite causes of Britain's Princess Diana, who visited Bosnia as part of that campaign in 1997. That year, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts. To date, 137 nations have signed a global treaty to ban mines, though not all have ratified it. The United States has opposed the treaty, principally citing the need for mines in the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea. On Tuesday, friends and neighbors paid their respects at the houses of the latest young land mine victims in Bosnia, and death notices for Ema Alic and Goran Biscevic were posted by relatives at the school they attended. Goran's included a photo of him smiling above this text: "Not believing ourselves, we are informing all good people that in his 12th year and in a children's game, Goran Biscevic died as a victim of a crazy war of adults."