Lindava is a village located in the mountains north of Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast. It is estimated that 300 anti-personnel mines were laid there during the 1992-93 armed conflict in Abkhazia. These compounded damage from heavy fighting in the area, which saw homes and farmland razed and forced most of the village’s population to flee.
Today, these mines pose a threat to the remaining 128 residents of Lindava and the approximately 1,400 residents of nearby Abzhakva preventing them from using the land to grow food and raise livestock. With support from Norway, HALO began work to clear this area in September 2022.
Alexandra (“Sasha”) and Esma both joined The HALO Trust’s Abkhazia programme in July 2018 and received training to conduct battle area clearance (BAC) at the site of the Primorsky ammunition store explosions. Both women quickly proved themselves as skilled operators, with Esma attaining the position of Team Leader. Thanks to the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway, the programme was able to retain Sasha and Esma on staff after clearance operations at Primorsky successfully concluded and train them in manual mine clearance.
More physically arduous than BAC, manual mine clearance was in the past assumed to be a job for men, but Esma and Sasha took to the work and soon disproved this stereotype. “From the very beginning, I was interested in working for HALO. I really wanted to be a deminer. It’s an opportunity to prove yourself, to overcome fears. This is a job that a woman can do,” says Sasha. For Esma, manual clearance is “hard and demanding work that requires a lot of responsibility”, but “the main thing is always to follow the rules” and so stay safe.
Within the first two weeks of operations at Lindava, both Esma and Sasha successfully applied their new skills by locating one anti-personnel mine each. Esma and Sasha’s success paved the way for the programme to hire two new women deminers, Zaira and Amra, as part of a second manual demining team at Lindava.
Amra acknowledges that demining is far from easy—the teams face difficult access conditions and intermittent torrential rains that complicate operations—but maintains that their hard work is in service of an important cause. For Zaira, working for HALO is “an opportunity for me to prove to myself and those around me that a woman can also be a deminer and earn a living”. Since joining the team, she notices “admiration in the eyes of people I know” and feels that she has gained a new level of respect in her community.
The two demining teams are on track to complete clearance of the contaminated area by late December 2022. Thanks to Norway’s support of their life-saving work, the women and men of the HALO Abkhazia programme are making the land at Lindava safe for use by the local population in the new year.
HALO's work in Lindava is funded by the Government of Norway
