The Singapore-based Explomo Technical Services Pte. Ltd. won an open bid last year to carry out the demining operations covering an area of 101,350 square meters in Mashan. Under the contract, the company will clear landmines from six minefields spanning 224,900 square meters on Kinmen this year, while the Republic of China Army’s demining team will clear 21 fields encompassing a total area of about 389,900 square meters.
A representative of Explomo said that traffic controls would be in place during the early morning hours and late afternoon for the first month of the operations. He added that any graves in the vicinity would be clearly marked to warn potential visitors and that none of the burial places would be disturbed during the work.
Explomo first began demining operations on the island in July 2006 after being hired by the Kinmen Water Co. It is still contracted by the Ministry of National Defense to help train the army’s demining team and to conduct clearance operations, including removing unexploded ordnance left over from intense shelling between ROC and mainland forces from the 1950s until the 1970s.
Official estimates put the number of landmines laid on Kinmen during the height of hostilities between the two sides in the late 1950s at more than 70,000. The ROC military placed the mines as part of efforts to deter an invasion because of the island’s proximity to the mainland. The county government has reported that some 80 percent of Kinmen’s coastlines were mined.
Sporadic demining efforts have taken place in Kinmen since the mid-1990s, when the MND began contracting foreign commercial demining companies to undertake surveys and clearance, mainly in response to local development needs. To speed up work, the army’s demining team was formed in mid-2006 and began trial operations in Kinmen in October of the same year. The team now has over 100 staff, recruited from the army’s Corps of Engineers and its Military Academy.
The Antipersonnel Landmines Regulations Act, which came into effect in June 2006, requires the MND to disclose all minefields and to complete clearance of all mines on ROC territory within seven years.
The army’s demining work on Kinmen is being carried out in two stages. In the first phase, between 2007 and 2008, landmines were removed from an area covering some 1,320,000 square meters. It is anticipated that the island will be cleared off all mines by the end of the second stage in 2011.
Write to Jean Yueh at yueh@mail.gio.gov.tw