While planning my upcoming “Except Hungary”1 cycling trip I did some research on land mines, since I might find myself passing through areas mined during the Yugoslav wars of the 90’s.

Croatia is one of the world’s worst affected countries when it comes to land mines, right up there with Angola and Cambodia. In the Croatian War of Independence, a grand total of about 3M anti-personnel mines have been laid in border areas — both sides were stretched on personnel, and Croatia happens to have very long borders (it has quite an unusual shape). About 100K mines have yet to be cleaned up — a rather costly business (at $300-$3K a pop (no pun intended), according to the Red Cross). Perhaps bees will come and help out.

Of course I’m not the first to wonder about the perils of traveling through such regions. Shallow googling (or duck-duck-go-ing as I tend to do nowadays) does not yield any comprehensive information on the location of the mined areas. It mostly boils down to “don’t go off the beaten track” and “tourist areas are safe”, “ask the locals”, “look for signs”, “nah. most of them are up north in cow country now why would you want to visit our cows, go visit our beaches instead”.

My land usage patterns are often quite different from those of other tourists. I camp out in a small tent in the fields. My usual method of finding a suitable spot to pitch said tent is to scoot up some dirt tracks and stroll into those fields willy-nilly. At dusk.
From a health perspective, this mode of habitation-seeking is incompatible with mine fields.


Luckily, the CROMAC (Croatian Mine Action Centre) offers a web-based GIS application showing, in detail, all areas suspected to be mined. An overview of how the GISing of military maps, aerial photography and other sources of information comes about is provided in this presentation.
It appears many mine fields (~60%) are in forests (or: some forests are on mine fields), possibly because these have had the lowest priority in de-mining operations and/or because abandoned fields tend to become forested.

As for Serbia, I won’t be passing through the locations mentioned on the “Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor” report. There’s talk of mine fields near the Kosovo border but the Kroatian border appears to be fully demined on the Serbian side. Unexploded cluster bomblets from the NATO bombardments are not found north of Beograd.

So now I’m coloring mined regions on the map of Croatia which I will take with me on my bicycle journey. It’s a solemn activity, and a weird thing to do — marking up mine fields is not a standard part of the holiday planning process. These mines were laid twenty years ago. I was still in primary school then. I remember watching weekly reports on “school-TV weekjournaal” and discussing them in class. There was a refugee girl from Bosnia2 in our class, I think her name was Çenka.

And it never occured to me that contaminating an area with land mines can have nonlocal effects. From the country report on Croatia by the “Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor”:
“Another priority is suspected mine contamination along canals and river banks, which has prevented maintenance and resulted in flooding of ploughed land, particularly along the border with Hungary. In addition to canals, parts of the banks of the Kupa river in Sisak-Moslavina county, the Sava river in Brod-Posavina and Vukovar-Srijem counties, and the Drava river in Osijek-Baranja county are inaccessible due to mine contamination. Protection from flood is also impossible.”
Mining riverbanks is a terrible idea for another reason, too: in autumn and spring torrents, mines can wash away and end up god knows where.
On the bright side, there hasn’t been a casualty caused by a land mine in Croatia since 2006 (except for a 2009 incident with demining personnel — brave people). And the Drava/Danube rivers running wild east of Osijek are bound to offer an undisturbed wetland habitat for avifauna. I see ecotourism opportunities.


1) Not that I dislike Hungary. I spent a wonderful time there back in 2001. But I do dislike cycling on endless plains, so I am trying to avoid the area known as the Great Hungarian Plain (the “Puszta”).

2) In the Bosnian war another 3M mines were laid, often in a haphazard way which makes clearing them an even harder task. The excellent pitch-dark comedy/drama/tragedy “No Man’s Land” revolves around a Bosnian trench, three soldiers, a land mine, and a UNPROFOR/media travesty.


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