Danger Lurks Below the Surface in Mozambique

MAPUTO, Mozambique — As flood waters claimed more victims Thursday in this poor southern African country, land-mine experts warned of an explosive menace underfoot that has been mostly ignored in the panic to save lives.

The rain and floods of the past month have submerged thousands of mines in worst-hit Gaza province, where the Limpopo and Save rivers have spilled across vast stretches of land. Mozambique is one of the most heavily mined places on Earth, the legacy of a lengthy civil war in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Although there have been no reported explosions, mine-clearance officials say it is highly likely that some of the deadly devices have been inadvertently detonated by the hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees and by the sheer force of the driving flood waters.

Moreover, hundreds of the buried weapons are believed to have been swept from the positions that humanitarian groups had painstakingly plotted on maps over the last few years. Portions of the flood plain considered safe only a month ago are once again potential death traps.

“It is really dangerous right now because our maps are not accurate anymore,” said Nicolas Blais, mine coordinator for Handicap International, one of half a dozen organizations that clear mines in Mozambique. “People don’t have a chance to see what is under their feet because of the water.”

Rescue teams from South Africa, Malawi and Mozambique working to save thousands of stranded residents have been just plain lucky not to have tripped a mine, according to officials with the U.N. Accelerated Demining Project. Varying estimates put the number of land mines in the country, which is slightly bigger than Texas, between 400,000 and 2 million.

With an army of additional rescuers on its way--President Clinton has promised up to 900 U.S. troops, and Britain and other European countries are also sending teams--the risks of a deadly accident are mounting, the officials say. Those working from boats face the greatest peril because the craft can run aground and the temptation is great for rescuers to wade into shallow water to assist the weary.

“The Limpopo is considered a high-risk area,” said Florencio Chongo, who works for the U.N. agency. “These rescue teams need to be warned that this situation is dangerous for everyone.”

Blais spent much of Thursday updating land-mine maps of Inhambane province, a coastal region neighboring Gaza where Handicap International does most of its work. The Mozambican government agency that coordinates mine clearance has requested the latest known whereabouts of mines so that the information can be distributed to rescue teams and humanitarian workers, who are also pouring into the country in droves.

The maps won’t help people who stumble upon mines that have been uprooted by the floods, but officials say they hope to prevent accidents in unaffected dry areas that are attracting thousands of the newly homeless. Because much of the Mozambican civil war was fought in rural areas, there are land mines in the most unlikely of remote places.

The United Nations has already begun organizing mine-awareness teams that will be sent to refugee camps over the next week or so with news of the heightened dangers. Officials say it is crucial to reach displaced people, as well as those trying to help them, before the great trek back home begins.

“The greatest danger is just not knowing where the mines are,” said Gerhard Zank, the Mozambique representative of the Halo Trust, a British de-mining agency. “In the past, mines have been washed downstream in heavy rains, but we never had flooding on this massive scale before. We just don’t know what the effect will be.”

Chongo’s U.N. office, at the rear of a construction warehouse on the outskirts of Maputo, the capital, is papered with land-mine maps and activity sheets designating where the 300 or so U.N. mine clearers should be deployed. Bright red stars are affixed to the maps along the Limpopo River, indicating that work has been suspended and crews evacuated from the submerged minefields.

Chongo said schedules posted on the walls have been scrapped, replaced by an ever-changing timetable scribbled across a large white board next to his desk. The board shows that the new perils posed by the floods will leave minefields in Gaza province abandoned until July. Only then, well beyond the end of the rainy season, are roads expected to be passable and overgrown vegetation thinned enough for crews to resume work removing the mines.

Even that timetable, however, is subject to change. Chongo and almost everyone in this rain-weary country are watching with trepidation the movement of another tropical cyclone over the nearby island of Madagascar. Weather forecasters are uncertain how much force the storm will lose by the time it reaches the Mozambique Channel, possibly this weekend.

It was back-to-back tropical weather systems, including Cyclone Eline, that set off the massive flooding across southern Africa last month. Thousands of people are feared to have died.

Steve Quinn of the South African Weather Bureau said cyclones at this time of year are too unpredictable to make reliable forecasts more than a day or so in advance. He refused to predict whether Mozambique has another thrashing on the way.

Chongo said he is hoping for the best, but he has not yet copied his new schedule from the white board into his computer.

“From what we are hearing,” he said, “we may have to do this all over again.”