Monday, June 21, 1999 Published at 14:21 GMT 15:21 UK
'Widespread' use of landmines
K-For soldiers are joining NGOs in locating mine-fields
By Simon Conway of the Halo Trust, a UK non-governmental organisation specialising in clearing the debris of war.
In the villages of central Kosovo, bordering the wooded hill-sides of the Glogovac region, we have been asking questions for 10 straight hours.
It is becoming clear that, in this area, there has been widespread and indiscriminate laying of mines by Serb forces - mines intended to injure people returning to their homes.
We have been contracted by the UK Government to conduct a nationwide survey of the mine problem in Kosovo.
We have come up a steep gully to a small hamlet with red-clay tile roofs.
The villagers here have only been back in their homes for two days, and the people's faces have a pinched, hollowed-out look from living rough in the Cicativa mountains.
We arrived in the province with the leading elements of the British army, but K-For patrols have not pushed this far yet: we are the first "liberators" the villagers have seen.
People emerge from the burned shells of their houses - old men in felt pillbox hats clap their arms around us.
Intelligence shared with K-For
They show us the farm buildings used by the Serb militia as a base.
North of the building, cattle have been injured by anti-personnel mines. In the steep valley to the east we find two PMA3s and a PMA2 - mines made in the munitions factories of the former Yugoslavia.
The information will be fed into the Halo database and made available to K-For, as well as other humanitarian organisations working in the area, and the fledgling Kosovo Mine Action Centre.
Mine-clearance is a methodical, time-consuming process.
It is vital to build up a picture of the extent of the problem, so that clearance tasks can be prioritised, the worst areas targeted first.
Accidents help locate mine-fields
Then we move on to the next village, and more questions.
We find an ambush site, where Adem Advuli - returning to a wooded copse where he had hidden his tractor from the Serb police - stepped on a mine, losing his leg.
His uncle, Nazmi, spotted another mine, and threw stones at it until it exploded.
Many returning refugees have, sadly, triggered land-mines.
It is an uncomfortable truth that in the absence of clearly-marked mine-field maps, accidents provide the earliest intelligence.
Investigating what was a Yugoslav army position close to the village of St Cikatovo, we uncover a mass grave.
The corpses of men, women and children have been dumped in trenches and hastily covered. Body parts are visible.
Behind the trenches, we find fragmentation mines initiated by trip-wire: a trap for anyone investigating the graves.
A role for the KLA ?
While we are still investigating, soldiers from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) appear and disarm the mines.
But we are concerned that they may not have cleared them all.
We have heard reports of villagers returning to homes "cleared" by the KLA and setting off missed mines.
The KLA, however, are enthusiastic about sharing information with us.
Given the right training and management, these soon-to-be demilitarised guerrillas could form the nucleus of an indigenous mine-clearance capacity.
Our next task is to check the premises of the Kosovo Albanian national newspaper, Koha Ditore, for booby-traps.
Then it's on to the British Embassy.
There is much more work to be done in Glogovac; after that, we move on to the next region.