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Regional workshop on weapons pollution opens

Autor: half
SPLIT, May 24 (Hina) - Participants in the fourth regional workshop on weapons pollution warned in Split on Thursday that lack of money was the main problem in demining and removal of leftover weapons, saying it was necessary to develop cooperation among the region's countries so as to draw European Union funds intended for that purpose.

Croatian Mine Action Centre head Zdravko Modrusan said 410 square kilometres of mine-infested area in Croatia had been cleared so far and that another 731 remained.

The national mine action plan envisages removing all leftover mines in Croatia by 2019, which will require about EUR 500 million, he said.

Modrusan said 24 per cent of the 731 square kilometres of mine-infested area was farmland and that it would be cleared by 2015.

He said 134 people were killed by leftover mines since the end of the war in Croatia, adding that no child was killed since 2004 thanks to education programmes.

He said 74 square kilometres of mine-infested area in Croatia was along the border with Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, and that demining could be stepped up by jointly applying for EU funds.

The head of Bosnia's Mine Action Centre, Dusan Gavran, said it was estimated that there were still about 200,000 live mines in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 1,340 square kilometres, which was 2.6 per cent of the country's territory.

He said "the population has a large amount of weapons because as much as 80 per cent of mines and explosive devices in the former Yugoslavia was manufactured in Bosnia and Herzegovina."

Gavran said another danger to the countries in the region were the insufficiently secured weapons warehouses, where fires or lightning could cause a disaster.

The Albanian Red Cross coordinator for education on threats from leftover weapons, Marcela Papa, said Albania still had huge weapon warehouses left over from communism and the two world wars.

She said there was a national strategy to destroy 25,000 weapons in the warehouses by the end of 2013, adding that another problem in Albania was that 560,000 weapons were stolen from the warehouses when they were opened in 1997 and the warehouses buried in the hills. She said those warehouses were being traced and that the US and German governments were helping clear the warehouses.

The manager of the Croatia Without Mines foundation, Djurdja Adlesic, said Croatian mine removal instructors visited Libya late last year and that seven Libyans would soon come to Croatia to learn about Croatia's demining experience.

She said a Croatian delegation recently visited Azerbaijan and agreed to cooperate with its bomb squad for joint operations in third countries.

(Hina) ha

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