Japanese Demining Machine Delivered

23 May 2011

Moamba — The Japanese government on Monday delivered to Mozambique a mechanical demining machine, manufactured by the Hitachi company, and valued at more than a million US dollars.

The formal delivery of this machine, intended to speed up the Mozambican mine clearance programme, took place in Moamba district, about 60 kilometres north-west of Maputo.

The 32 tonne machine is fully armoured. It cuts through the bush, clears hidden minefields, and destroys all the explosive devices it finds. Thanks to a strong magnetic field it can clear up all fragments of metal left by mines and other devices.

14 sappers from the Mozambican government’s National Demining Institute (IND) and from three non-governmental organisations (the Halo Trust, Apopo, and Handicap International) have been trained, in a 30 day course, to operate the machine.

Deputy Foreign Minister Henrique Banze said that the delivery of the machine is an important landmark in the history of demining in Mozambique. It is the first piece of mechanical demining equipment that is being directly administered by the Mozambican authorities.

“Apart from constituting a new challenge, acquisition of this machine represents added responsibilities, particularly as regards our capacity to ensure rapid clearance of the many minefields that still exist in the country”, said Banze.

This one machine alone, he added, should lift the productivity of the demining programme by 40 per cent. This should give the government a good change of reaching its target to complete mine clearance by 2014, under the international treaty on the banning of anti-personnel land mines.

Under the terms of the treaty, Mozambique should have completed demining by 2009. This deadline proved impossible, and so the government asked for, and was granted, an extension to 2014.

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