31st March: HALO Trust Board Member Mrs Cindy McCain visits Kosova
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Mrs McCain took 4 days out from her husband, Senator John McCain’s, Presidential campaign tour to visit HALO in Kosova during March.
She has previously visited HALO’s humanitarian clearance operations in Angola, Sri Lanka, Mozambique and Cambodia.
During the visit to Kosova she reviewed minefields and cluster bomb strikes that HALO will clear over the next few years. She also met with the communities that these minefields and cluster strikes still impact.
Mrs McCain concluded her visit by meeting with Kosova’s President and Prime Minister. Both fully endorsed HALO’s resumption of mines and cluster bomb clearance in Kosova.
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Mrs McCain meets with schoolchildren near Junic.
The playground of the school requires further clearance to remove the threat of unexploded NATO cluster munitions. |
After investigating a mined area close to this community
Mrs McCain makes time to share a joke with Admir Berisha
(HALO’s acting Programme Manager) and locals |
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| Mrs McCain congratulates Prime Minister Hashim Thaci on Kosova’s independence and discusses HALO’s future clearance in Kosova |
Mrs McCain and President Fatmir Sejdiu publicly encourage the UN to endorse HALO’s resumption of mines and cluster bomb clearance as soon as possible |
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News update: Cluster bomb accident at Goles, Kosova
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Directly following Mrs McCain’s visit to Kosova one man was killed and a further three seriously injured on one of the sites she reviewed.
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All women demining section formed in Somaliland
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| HALO has operated in Somaliland since 1999 and currently employs 440 local staff.
During a routine minefield visit, a senior manager was approached by a group of women seeking jobs with HALO.
After first briefing and receiving approval from local authorities, HALO decided to invite the women to join its
intensive training programme. The trainees successfully completed the course, thus creating Somaliland’s first female demining section.
Since September, the seven-woman section has been deployed to minefields and is proving to be an excellent addition to HALO’s operation in Somaliland.
HALO is closely monitoring their progress and is subsequently planning to hire additional sections if funding levels permit.
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HALO completes work in Northern Mozambique
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| After 13 years of work in northern Mozambique, HALO has closed its doors there.
In an area approximately the size of California, there are simply no more known
minefields requiring clearance. The region will officially be declared ‘Mine Impact
Free’ in early 2008.
An estimated 170,000 mines were laid in Mozambique during its fight for independence (1964-1975) and throughout the
civil war that followed. All factions used mines to defend provincial and district towns, roads, airstrips, key bridges,
power supply infrastructure and military posts. Although the civil war ended in the early nineties, landmines and unexploded
ordnance (UXO) continued to claim lives and hinder development there.
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| Since launching its northern Mozambique programme in 1994, 2,587 acres of land were demined and returned to local
communities. Over 100,000 landmines and 22,000 items of UXO were destroyed in the process. HALO would not have been
able to achieve these results without the generosity of its donors—particularly the British, American, Dutch, Irish,
Japanese and Swiss governments—who jointly provided $30 million in support. “I’ve been privileged to observe firsthand
the positive impact that HALO’s dedicated work has had on the day-to-day lives of people in the north.
This is a great success story and the United States is proud to have been a part of it,” says Deborah Netland,
Programme Manager at the US Department of State’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement (PM/WRA). |
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Each white stick indicates where HALO located a landmine.
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| Now that the work is completed in the north, HALO has been asked to lend its assistance in south and central Mozambique,
where progress has been slower. A survey to determine the extent of the remaining mines threat there was completed in October 2007,
and workplans are now being developed to tackle these 487 minefields.
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Fundraising Achievement - The HALO South Pole Expedition
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| On 21 January 2004, Alex Blyth, then a Trustee of The HALO Trust, and Ray Middleton,
a senior pilot with Cathay Pacific, reached the South Pole after a 730 mile trek from the coast of Antarctica.
They raised over $200,000 for The HALO Trust.
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International awards received
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| 1998 The European Commission's First
European Festival of Solidarity (Barcelona) - Major post-conflict labour
reconstruction category, Winner.
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| 2002
LEW KOPELEW PRIZE (Cologne) - for peace and human rights 2001, Winner.
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AFGHANISTAN