Children reap Kosovo's spring harvest

Legacy of war - As the snow melts, more young lives are shattered by the thousands of cluster bombs which Nato left behind

Kosovo's bleak winter has finally begun to lift, giving way to a tremulous spring. And in the last three weeks, three children have been killed and 13 seriously injured after they accidentally detonated some of the thousands of unexploded Nato cluster-bombs strewn about the woods, hills and villages.

"Everyone recognises that with the advent of spring there is an increased danger of incidents involving mines and unexploded ordnance," says Leonie Barnes, chief information officer at the United Nations' mine action co-ordination centre (Macc) in Pristina, the outfit that organises all mine-clearing and mine-awareness activities throughout Kosovo.

Above the public swimming pool at the Grmija recreation ground, west of Pristina, the snow is melting, revealing a car park littered with syringes, tangles of hastily discarded underwear, empty bottles of Montenegrin red wine, and dozens of used condoms. Next to one puddle lie six shiny brass cartridge cases, ejected from a 9mm automatic handgun. But as the daytime temperatures start to rise, more is being brought to the surface than the detritus of nocturnal lust.

"During the air-war, the hills around Grmija had concentrations of Serbian troops dug in," says a Macc official. "And there were 22 recorded Nato cluster-bomb strikes on this area alone." The swimming pool and picnic area, as well as the woods in Grmija, are being made safe by battle area clearance teams from Bac-Tec, a British organisation which employs former Army and Navy bomb disposal experts.

Twenty-two cluster-bomb strikes means 22 aerially launched bomb canisters, each containing 147 bomblets. Each of the 3,234 bomblets dropped on Grmija would normally explode on contact with the ground, in the air, or with a tank or armoured vehicle, depending on how it is fused. But there is a 10 per cent failure rate, which means that more than 300 bomblets, each the size of a baked-bean tin, capable of killing anybody within 15 metres, probably lie in the undergrowth.

"People in Kosovo haven't been able to see their fields since last year," says Dr Merkur Dobroshi, in the orthopaedic ward of Pristina University Hospital. "They haven't been able to move about, and now it's spring, and they will go out and discover what is waiting for them."

Lying in the beds in front of him, badly injured and disfigured, are Albert Bagraktari, aged 10, and his cousin, fromKlina, in central Kosovo. "At first I thought that there had been a power-surge and the TV had blown up," says Albert's mother as her son paws in agony at the bandages covering his eyes. "Then I realised it was the children, who had been playing with something."

The only person who knows exactly what they were playing with is in the hospital's intensive care unit. Gasmend, aged 11, was holding the device when it exploded, and doctors are trying to save his arms and legs.

Ms Barnes, of Macc, who was an ammunition technical officer in the Australian Army for 10 years, and later worked on mine clearance in Bosnia and Mozambique, said: "The problem now is the movement of the population over the countryside. People are impatient, they want to go out and see their fields, go to the forest to collect firewood.

"They don't see sometimes that they may have to wait another year before it is safe, before we've cleared."

Although Macc knows thelocation of more than 300 Nato cluster-bomb strike areas, involving some 3,000 cluster-bombs, the failure rate of 10 per cent means there are thousands of unexploded bomblets in a province half the size of Wales, as well as anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, booby-traps and other devices.

The population of Kosovo is lucky, however. So well co-ordinated is the mine-clearance operation, so ample the donor funding for demining organisations, and so well recorded the Serb minefields and Nato bomb-sites, that Ms Barnes sees an end to the problem.

"We could feasibly clear Kosovo in two to three years," she says. And by the end of this year, she hopes it will be possible for the people of Grmija to venture out for their walks and picnics without the risk of stepping on the legacy of last year's war.