Written after a visit to Guinea-Bissau, March 2007
A different, shorter version of this article was published in The Guardian, 18 August 2007

When you disembark from the Friday afternoon Air Portugal flight at Oswaldo Vieira airport in Bissau (the only direct flight of the week from Europe), a flood of sensations sweeps over you. The heat, first of all, is what will strike any European. It’s mid-March when I arrive, five o’clock in the afternoon, and the temperature is in the high thirties. A few dozen metres on the cracked and baking tarmac bring you straight into the arrivals area, where chaos is king: passengers crowd four-deep around a dilapidated carousel which needs to be at least ten times bigger to cope with the huge and often bizarre items of luggage squeezed onto it. With the paranoia of the rookie traveller unused to such scenes, I’m worried about the possibility of theft. But strong, helpful hands pass my bags back through the throng in reponse to my yelps of recognition. Travel-weary and already heat-exhausted, I surrender myself to the benign pandemonium of colours, bodies and voices.

Bissau is the capital of Guinea Bissau in West Africa, and ‘benign pandemonium’ is what characterises the whole city. It’s certainly what awaits you outside the airport. As the taxi (or, in my privileged case, a UN car) pushes its way through the mass of bodies outside, it’s hard to absorb anything except the most blurry, generalised impressions. What do you see? You probably won’t take much notice of the petrol station a few hundred yards beyond the airport; or the scrap of wasteland behind it; or the half dozen children playing there among the litter and debris. You would have to look very hard indeed to notice the bulky metal cylindrical object lying in the middle of their improvised playground. And you’d have to be an expert to identify it exactly. Although it is, in point of fact, a Soviet 122mm High Explosive/Fragmentation rocket.

Steve Ballinger, a British ex-serviceman tasked with the job of advising one of Guinea Bissau’s two mine-clearing organisations, tells me that the rocket is unlikely to go off even if the children touch it. It would take quite a severe blow, he reckons, like somebody bashing it with a sledgehammer. Still, he doesn’t seem to think it’s a very healthy situation.

***

Where is Guinea Bissau, exactly, and why is it full of unexploded bombs? This tiny wedge of land, sandwiched between Senegal and Guinea Conarky, was colonised in the sixteenth century, and only broke away from Portuguese control in 1973 after a struggle for independence which lasted for twelve years. This war was fought on land and in the air, and left the country littered with dangerous explosives. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the presidency of Joao Bernardo Vieira brought a measure of stability to Guinea Bissau, but nothing in the way of development or prosperity. He was overthrown in 1999, after a short, brutal civil war fought mainly on the streets of Bissau itself. Ever since then, the capital has been a hazardous place, with the civilian population – especially children – at risk from fatal accidents involving grenades, landmines and other items of weaponry. In 2006 Bissau was officially declared ‘mine free’, but items of unexploded ordnance continue to be found. Meanwhile the rest of the county is still heavily contaminated. Work on clearing the most important roads and rural areas has barely started.

As a terminally retiring and little-travelled novelist, whose wildest idea of adventure might involve a trip to an as yet untested branch of Ryman’s, I should probably explain how I came to be looking for unexploded bombs in one of West Africa’s most unvisited corners. For the last year or two, I’ve been on the board of trustees of a charitable NGO which is engaged in mine-clearance in Guinea Bissau. Cleared Ground Demining is run by my sister-in-law, Cassandra McKeown, and Steve Ballinger is her husband. When they asked me to become a trustee, I simply thought that assisting with the work of a mine-clearing charity sounded like a nice, right-on sort of thing to do. It would look good on my CV, and I didn’t think too hard about what it would involve.

At first, anyway, all it seemed to involve was sitting in lots of meetings. But there was also a mass of information to absorb: shocking information, most of it, about the many different kinds of “explosive remnants of war” which continue to litter the surface of the earth. ERW, I learned, is the blanket term for the murderous detritus left behind after any armed conflict – including landmines, but by no means confined to them. There are also cluster bombs, for instance. Everybody is familiar with the concept of cluster bombs, these days, but did you know that many of the ones scattered by the Americans in Cambodia in the past looked exactly like baseballs, and nobody seemed to mind that this encouraged children to pick them up and play with them? Another statistic that amazed me was that it costs, on average, between $3 to $30 to manufacture a mine, and something like $1000 to remove one. Talk about cost-inefficiency.

It seemed that the more I found out about all of this, the more I still had to learn. There were so many things about which I was simply clueless. How do you locate an unexploded bomb in the first place? How do you remove it safely, once you’ve found it? How do you destroy it? If I was going to understand any of these processes, I thought it might be a good idea to observe the work at first-hand. So that was how I found myself flying to Guinea Bissau in mid-March, a reluctant first-time visitor to Africa. Although not quite a solitary one, thankfully, because the photographer Caroline Irby had agreed to come along with me, to make a record of my trip. And perhaps to look after me when the going got tough.

***

It’s hard for anywhere to astound us, these days. Driving from the airport to the centre of Bissau, Caroline (who has spent a lot of time in West Africa) asks me what my first impressions are. I have to admit that it all seems very familiar – I’ve seen too much footage of West Africa in movies and on TV. And because I’d been forewarned that Guinea Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world (the fifth poorest according to the latest Human Development Index), what I see from the air-conditioned car doesn’t shock me: crumbling buildings, frantically noisy and colourful street markets selling cheap imported goods, main roads pitted with potholes the size of moon craters. What does surprise me, though, this evening and as I settle in over the next couple of days, is the mood of the place. The people are incredibly laid-back and relaxed; the atmosphere is unthreatening; the vendors pushing their wares on the streets never hassle you aggressively. And perhaps this, too, is part of Guinea Bissau’s problem: as well as being a small, forgotten country, it also seems very accepting of its own predicament. I can see that it would be hard work trying to get things moving here, to get anything changed.

The first place we visit which doesn’t seem almost too relaxed for its own good is the LUTCAM office, first thing on Monday morning. LUTCAM stands for Lutamos Todos Contra As Minas, and this is one of the two national mine action NGOs in Guinea Bissau. Its director is N’Tum Na Tusse, a member of the Balanta ethnic group and a veteran of the civil war, who talks us proudly through two walls-full of photographs recording the history of his organisation. The pictures show his team – which is now about 100-strong, and seems to include just as many women as men – receiving specialist training in Mozambique and, in more recent shots, being drilled by Steve in preparation for clearing the area called Paiol de Bra, in the south-west of Bissau, which was found to be particularly densely contaminated with UXOs.

Paiol de Bra is where we’re taken next. It lies close to some of the more populated areas of Bissau, and is bang up against the main bus station. Much of the fighting in the civil war of 1998-99 took place here. Today it looks hot and unwelcoming, but not much like a killing field. Our UN vehicle throws up clouds of red dust as it takes us along the road to the site, and we are continually thrown from side to side, as always, by those hellish potholes. We reach the control point and park beneath the welcome shade of a cashew tree. There is a certain amount of standing around to do, at first, and I take advantage of the lull to take a photograph of Cecilia, the chief paramedic whose job is to wait at the control point on constant standby in case of accidents. Like everyone I’ve met in Guinea Bissau, she’s pleased to have her photograph taken. Steve is proud to boast that none of their paramedics has been required in an emergency situation since operations began at Paiol de Bra. (Two of them, however, have themselves recently died of AIDS.)

Caroline and I find this emphasis on safety welcome. We’re escorted towards the site by Mark Fitzpatrick, the only additional Technical Advisor Cleared Ground can afford to employ at the moment. Mark, thirty years old and recently returned from Iraq, has a gentleness and a wry sense of humour that belie his military background. ‘This is the most dangerous thing you’ll be doing all morning,’ he tells us, as we cross the busy road. Nonetheless, I experience a little shiver of apprehension as we pass beyond the red-painted stakes which mark the beginning of the contaminated area.

What we now find ourselves faced with, essentially, is a large expanse of scrub, measuring some 400,000 square metres. Before LUTCAM and Cleared Ground started clearing it, this area was covered with ERW: they have found Soviet and Portuguese handgrenades, recoil-less projectiles, sub-munitions, rockets, cluster bomb units, limpet landmines, booby trap devices, anti-tank landmines, fragmentation aircraft bombs, high explosive mortars, illuminating mortars, napalm bombs and … well, the list could (and does) go on.

The method of finding these devices is simple enough. The land is cordoned off into boxes, 50 metres square, and then each member of the team cuts their way through these patches, methodically, using a machete and a pair of garden shears. (Later, I will interview two of the LUTCAM workers, and ask them the obvious question: “Do you think your work is dangerous?” To which I will receive, in both cases, the equally obvious reply: “Yes. Very dangerous.”)

The work is demanding – as well as dangerous – and the heat is intense. By midday, it will have risen to 46 degrees Celsius. As the rainy season (which kicks off in June) comes closer, the humidity also becomes more oppressive. These Battle Area Clearance Searchers, as they are known, work from 7.30 in the morning till 3.30 in the afternoon, in 30-minute sessions with ten-minute rest breaks in between. For this they receive about $250 a month. (Meanwhile the drivers of UN cars, who ferry people to the site every day, receive about five times that amount for work which is neither demanding nor dangerous.) And yet all of the workers that I interviewed said that the job was worthwhile. Many of the women had previously been teachers; the men had often been in the military. All of them said that they were doing what they did now “for Guinea Bissau”.

Once an item of UXO has been discovered, it’s time to call in one of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Technicians, who will come and excavate the item – typically using nothing more hi-tech than a garden trowel. Once it’s been excavated, a decision has to be made as to whether it can be demolished in situ, or  rendered safe to move; and if the latter, it’s then carried – on a sort of improvised hessian stretcher – to one of the half-dozen pits which have been dug to store the weapons before they’re taken away for final destruction. The pits have to be guarded day and night, because any metal object has value in Guinea Bissau, and people have been known to steal these weapons for scrap. And of course, they have also been known, not infrequently, to injure or kill themselves in the attempt.

***

The next day, then, we’re driven out to Cleared Ground’s central demolition site at Rosun, about 50 kilometres north-east of Bissau itself.

The road there is long, dusty, narrow and – by Guinea Bissau standards – fast. The forest stretching out on either side looks thin and dry at this time of year: bush fires are a constant problem. Occasional villages spring up, a cluster of roughly-thatched dwellings, women gathered around a well with their washing, brightly-clothed children scrambling around in the dust. In many of these villages, the most imposing building is the local mosque: Guinea Bissau is now about 50% Muslim. Also, everywhere you look there are enormous termite mounds, some of them about six foot high, warped into strange sculptural shapes, like something Gaudi might have dreamed up in his nightmares. I’m told they are as solid as concrete and don’t even wash away during the rainy season.

We turn off the road and proceed up a dirt track. After a few hundred yards, several members of the LUTCAM team are waiting for us in the shade, as is Steve. He tells us that he and his team cut this track through the bush, by hand, just a few months ago, encountering black mambas, green mambas, yellow mambas and boa constrictors along the way. He knows that I’m a confirmed ophidiophobe, and there is a slightly sadistic gleam in his eyes as he speaks. With my eyes on the ground (or should that be up towards the trees – where do the little horrors live?) and the heat pushing the mid-40s again, the six-hundred metre walk to inspect the demolition pits becomes something of an ordeal. Once there, we look solemnly at these piles of rusting, decayed but still deadly relics of past conflict.

I’m to be rewarded for my bravery with a treat, apparently: there are 76 kilogrammes of old Soviet explosives to be destroyed in the first pit today, and I get to push the button. For this purpose we retreat to the firing point shelter, and I am handed a yellow box with a couple of buttons on it, connected by half a kilometre of firing cable to the detonator in the pit. The firing point shelter consists of three walls of sandbags, and a wooden roof, beneath which Caroline and I crouch down gingerly. Arachnophobia kicks in, now, as we notice that we’re surrounded by a number of spiders’ webs in the shape of funnels, and we can’t help wondering what this means.

My demolition works smoothly enough, although the sweat on my fingers as I handle the detonating device means that I get an electric shock. When Caroline tries it with the second pit, though, she is not answered with the same distant, satisfying ‘boom’, and no cloud of dust mushrooms above the trees, scattering fragments of shrapnel. The explosion has failed. This means that Steve has to don his protective kit, walk back into the pit and start tinkering around with the live explosives to see what went wrong with them.

‘Not the end of the world,’ he tells us, cheerfully, as he prepares for this task. We watch his receding figure, marching resolutely back into the forest, and don’t feel quite so sure.

***

The problem, it turns out, was with the TNT. Cleared Ground and LUTCAM initiate their explosions with 56-year-old bricks of Soviet TNT, and they’re pretty unreliable. They need to invest in some up-to-date plastic explosives; but they’re expensive, and difficult to import into the country.

Steve (who survived his second visit to the demolition pits) tells us this the next day, as we pull into the military compound at Bombadinca, about fifty kilometres’ bumpy driving further west. He and N’Tum have been asked to come and look at a stockpile of weapons which the Guinea Bissau army has pledged to destroy, with LUTCAM’s assistance. It’s stored in a warehouse, near the centre of the village, part of an anonymous sprawl of buildings which also happens to include the local school. Children are playing happily about twenty yards from the warehouse door.

We step out of the midday glare and into some welcome gloom. It takes a few moments for our eyes to adjust, and then shapes start to disclose themselves. There are piles of crates everywhere, and in the corner, something which I at first took to be a quaint agricultural touch – a horse-drawn tractor, or something – but which turns out to be a large anti-aircraft gun. Steve and the army officers are already moving among the crates, opening them up and inspecting the contents.

This is a different order of weaponry to anything we’ve seen so far. We’ve grown used to seeing rusty old rockets and hand grenades stacked up in demolition pits. This stuff, by comparison, seems sparkly and new. There are Chinese, Russian and Portuguese weapons: high-explosive, smoke and illuminating mortars, rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades, as well as hundreds of thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition.

These items have actually been here for more than thirty years, probably left over from the closing stages of the War of Independence. The wooden crates in which they’re stored are rotting: the ones at the bottom of the stacks look as though they might collapse any minute. There are also concerns about the onset of the rainy season, and the possibility of a lightning strike which could easily set the whole stockpile ablaze. Compounding the problem, of course, is the proximity of this warehouse to the school buildings. It’s a strange feeling, to be walking among all these explosives, listening to the quiet, urgent voices of the men itemising and discussing them, and hearing how those voices merge with the background noises of children laughing and playing in the sunshine outside, just a few yards away. Do they have any idea what the warehouse contains? Whose idea was it, anyway, to put up a school right next to a weapons dump? Nobody seems to remember which came first.

Caroline wants to take some photographs of the children playing, and in the time it takes to find her shot, our hosts from the army start to get edgy. It seems they are expecting a visit from one of the most senior figures in Guinea Bissau’s armed forces – a man whose name, incidentally, I never heard spoken without a measure of awe, and indeed fear – and for some reason or other, it’s not considered wise for him to find us here.

‘But I thought he was the one who wanted these weapons destroyed in the first place?’ I say to Steve a few minutes later, as we hot-foot it out of town in one of the UN cars. He nods, and seems just as puzzled by the situation as I am. But here, in a sense, you have Guinea Bissau in a nutshell. Nobody is quite sure who is on whose side; allegiances are infinitely flexible, and therefore infinitely untrustworthy. During my visit, I saw former enemies from the civil war working together to clear landmines – which of course is a heartwarming thought – but I still had the sense that old enmities have been put to one side rather than forgotten.

There is clearly no longer any appetite for violent protest among the people of Guinea Bissau; but at the same time, the situation there feels unstable. The civil war of 1998-99 unseated President Vieira: he went into exile in Portugal for a few years, returned in 2005 and, lo and behold, somehow managed to get himself re-elected. Now his renewed presidency seems to be accepted rather than supported by the people. At the beginning of March, all the major parties signed up to a ‘pact of political stability’, but its value remains questionable. The most recent events have not been encouraging. In January, the former head of the navy, Mohamed Lamine Sanhá, was assassinated. His death led to fighting between protestors and security forces, leaving one dead and several injured, and also provoked former Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Júnior to seek refuge in the UN compound in Bissau, claiming that his life was in danger. He remained under UN protection for seventeen days, until the government could be persuaded to drop their arrest warrant against him. Meanwhile, years of low-level political corruption, combined with the labyrinths of unpoliced mangrove swamp which make up the coastline, are turning Guinea Bissau into a magnet for drug traffickers. The effects are already becoming visible, and you’re starting to see flashier and flashier cars weaving their way between those potholes in the capital city.

The pandemonium which prevails at the airport, in other words, is also to be found in the circles of power; but here it is not so benign. Instead, it has a paralysing effect; no-one ever feels that the time is right for decisive action, and so nothing gets done. We saw distressing examples of this when we made a visit to the Simoa Mendes hospital in Bissau one morning. It’s a bleak place at the best of times: underfunded, short of doctors (none of whom have been paid for about four months anyway) and crippled by the power shortages which randomly close down the city’s electricity supply. We met one landmine victim, Maimuna Djaues, who is still waiting for a prosthetic limb to be fitted almost eight years after she lost her leg while fetching water for her family in a suburb of Bissau. She had been living there only a few weeks, having moved to the capital from nearby Bolama when a ceasefire was declared in the civil war. But the rebels had planted landmines around the local wells, and when she went to fetch water, a mine exploded and shattered her leg. Wilson Mendonça, a good-looking twenty-four-year-old, had a similar story to tell. He had been playing football with friends, ran off the pitch to retrieve the ball, and stepped on a mine. Like Maimuna, he has been waiting almost a decade for a prosthetic replacement. In the meantime, his passion for football has faded. ‘Now I play chequers,’ he told us flatly, with what may or may not have been a half-smile. But his spirit is unbroken, and he is hoping to train as a doctor. Which is a good thing: Guinea Bissau needs them.

I left this diffident, little-known country with a strong sense that – like anybody else who wants to get things moving in Guinea Bissau – my brother- and sister-in-law have a steep mountain to climb. Money is extremely tight, even for basic items of equipment such as safety boots. (One female LUTCAM worker has been searching for UXOs at the Paiol de Bra site while wearing ballet shoes.) Donors are understandably wary of seeing large sums of money disappearing either into government coffers or into a bureaucratic black hole. So far Cleared Ground’s work in Guinea Bissau has been funded almost entirely by the Norwegian government, with appeals to other bodies – including the UK – falling on deaf ears. But there is urgent work to be done. Bissau itself may have been declared mine free, but the wretched state of the country’s internal communications cannot be addressed until new roads are built, and construction companies are still being frightened off by the knowledge that there are bombs everywhere. New mines have been laid, too, only last year by Senegalese rebels based in the Casamance area to the north. One of them killed twenty-six Guineans on a public bus.

Can a country faced with so many seemingly intractable problems ever really develop?

To one UN employee who is about to leave the place, I put the question, “What do you think Guinea Bissau will be like if you come back here in ten years’ time?” Without hesitation, she answered: “Exactly the same.” And yes, I can see that it’s a frustrating place. When you arrive here to set up an NGO, order a set of company rubber stamps from the stationers’, and find that every stamp has been inscribed with the words ‘Cleared Gourd Demining’, it’s hard not to resort to impotent, exasperated laughter. But I remind myself of how much this country has had to endure: four hundred years of woeful Portuguese colonial rule, followed by a bitter war of independence, and thirty years of instability punctuated by bloody conflict. Considering what they’ve grown used to, I’m amazed that the people of Guinea Bissau are still as robust, cheerful and generous as they appear to be. Although it’s the very last thing I thought I’d be saying, I look forward to the day when I might go back.

To find out more about the work of Cleared Ground Demining, visit www.clearedground.org

© Jonathan Coe 2007

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