The good news is that today we are more than ever before close to finalizing a peace deal. We fully restored our territorial integrity and sovereignty and today we have already started to make steady progress on delimitation of our state border with Armenia. The bad news is that all this huge reconstruction and rehabilitation effort as well as our plans to bring hundreds of thousands of displaced people back to their homes are seriously hampered by enormous mine challenge our country is facing,” said Representative of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan on special assignments Elchin Amirbayov as he addressed the 3rd International Conference on Mine Action on “Mitigating Environmental Impact of Landmines: Resource Mobilization for Safe and Green Future” in Baku.
“Azerbaijan is sadly among the top 5 most heavily mine-contaminated countries in the world with 1.5 million landmines planted across 12% of national territory. Landmines pose severe human security risk even after war. Unfortunately, even after the ceasefire was reached in November 2020, Armenia has created new mined zones of a total length of 500 km. Only in the course of these last three and a half years 361 Azerbaijanis, among them children and women, have become mine victims as a result of more than 200 incidents. Sadly, these figures are on the rise almost every week and continuous refusal by Armenia to provide us with accurate information on locations with planted mines is exacerbating the challenge,” Elchin Amirbayov noted.
“The scope of the mine problem is so huge that it is estimated to take decades to complete the process. We are proud to have a professional and efficient national mine action agency, ANAMA, which is today better equipped and staffed than some years ago and it is doing a great job. We are also proud to have the first group of female deminers who recently joined our common effort. But unfortunately, current level of foreign assistance in mine action is highly insufficient constituting less than 10% of the total allocated amount. We hope that this conference will contribute to increased participation of our international partners in sharing the burden of the mine challenge in Azerbaijan,” he added.
