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Croatia declared free of landmines after 31 years
- toomuchtodo 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minefields_in_Croatia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minefields_in_Croatia
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bobmcnamara 9mo agoOof, only 90% survival rate for deminers.
- smokeyfish 9mo agoDrones can help these days
- lukan 9mo agoCan drones sniff explosives? I think that would be very expensive, they can have metal detectors, and mark suspicious sites for someone (or something, like a different digging drone) else to check. But rats can sniff explosives and do so succesfully. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magawa
- ultratalk 9mo ago> He spent a number of weeks mentoring 20 newly-recruited rats How does that work for a rat? Sounds interesting.
- lukan 9mo agoI don't know how it works for rats, but I assume it is like with dogs. If you have already a trained dog, you make the same exercises with the trained and the untrained dog, so the untrained dog can just watch what the trained dog does and imitate it.
- TiredOfLife 9mo agoThe flying ones can use thermal cameras. The mines and surrounding areas change temperature differently. Then the ground ones do the actual demining.
- lukan 9mo agoBut this only works for mines not or only lightly covered by earth I assume? There has been lots of rain falling from the sky, moving earth, since the mines were laid.
- twocommits 9mo ago[flagged]
- ra 9mo agoI stayed near Dubrovnik in the summer of 2005. There was a wildfire burning on on the hills behind us. The fire traversed the hillside, and every hour or two a landmine would explode. This was ten years after the war.
- segmondy 9mo ago10 years is a long time, but 10 years after a war is not a long time. Damages to building still remains, mines and plenty of unexploded ordinances will remain, and psychological scars are still very strong.
- sensanaty 9mo agoYep, the city center in Belgrade still has dilapidated, bombed buildings, 26 years after the bombs fell.
- pmontra 9mo agoWe had some buildings like that in the center of Milan. I think that the last one has been restored in the late 90s.
- 1718627440 9mo agoIn German cities bomb evacuation still happens several times per year. That's >80 years after. War sucks.
- 9mo ago
- gregjw 9mo agoI wonder when/if places like vietnam will ever achieve this. Hell, Australia still has WW2 mines.
- riffraff 9mo agoIs that actual land mines or generic lost explosives and unexploded bombs? Cause the latter is pretty common in Europe too, but I'm surprised you have actually minefields which haven't been cleared up in Australia.
- Animats 9mo agoFrance still has WWI unexploded ordnance, and keep-out areas are still being de-mined. This has been going on for a century now. About 900 tons of explosives are removed each year. Completion in 700 years at the current rate.[1] [1] https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-red-zone-land-still-abandoned.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-red-zone-la...
- scns 9mo agoThat is mind blowing, no pun intended.
- MattGaiser 9mo agoI imagine a lot has to do with motivation. Canada has UXO that it doesn't clean up as land is abundant.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThis feels like a perfect use case for AI.
- matkoniecz 8mo agohow AI would help?
- adamnemecek 8mo ago
- locusofself 9mo agoI had the good fortune of going to Croatia (as an American) for work about 10 years ago, and I milked that trip hard. What a beautiful country. Dubrovnik, Split, Hvar Island, it was pretty magical.
- yieldcrv 9mo agoConflict zones are the most beautiful places They make me immediately go “oh I get it”
- testdelacc1 9mo agoWhat a strange and sweeping comment. There’s a conflict going on in Darfur. Does Darfur make you go “oh I get it”?
- KingMob 9mo agoI visited Vientiane in Laos a couple years ago. One of the more depressing places to visit there is the COPE Center. It's a group that provides prosthetics to people who have lost body parts due to landmines left over from the Vietnam War. Even decades later, there are areas in Laos that have so many unexploded bomblets, it's dangerous to do stuff there, or even build.
- andrewflnr 9mo agoI wonder how long it will take in Ukraine. Actually at the rate we're going, there will still be active minefield defenses for most of our lifespans.
- stevekemp 9mo agoPoland withdrew from the Ottawa Convention last month, with the aim of being able to lay anti-personnel mines along its eastern border. Whether it does or not is an open-question, and while I understand it of course, the idea we're increasing the use of mines is a sad day. They're so indiscriminate and will no doubt cause injuries far into the future.
- dopa42365 9mo agoThere's no border wall, just a typical bike road next to a small fence. So no, unless Poland is planning to blow up their own civilians, they won't mine their own country lol.
- Xylakant 9mo agoMy wife’s part of the Family has a house with view of the border to Belarusia. It used to be a small fence just in front of a wood, but that’s long past. It’s truly a wall now.
- postepowanieadm 9mo agoNo one is going to build minefields, too populated area, too many wild animals. It's mostly about automatic mining - https://www.hsw.pl/produkty/pojazd-minowania-narzutowego-baobab-k/ https://www.hsw.pl/produkty/pojazd-minowania-narzutowego-bao...
- nolist_policy 9mo ago> The BAOBAB-K Mine Laying Vehicle allows the laying of minefields of various sizes, mine densities, and self-clearance times. The self-clearing is interesting and I hindsight auch an obvious thing to implement.
- gethly 9mo agoMeanwhile.... Poland.
- TiredOfLife 9mo agoPoland and other countries that just abandoned the mine treaty border russia and belarus. You know, the country that launched and the country that allowed its land to launch largest war in europe since WW2.
- klez 9mo agoYes. But the what's the point of a convention about weapons that you only observe during peacetime and abandon as soon as war is at your gates? I mean, I get it, I would be scared shitless too if I had Russia at my border. I'm not saying that Poland is bad for doing this (but I'm not saying it's good either). It's more of a general observation about this kind of treaties: (relatively) easy to get into during peacetime, hard to uphold when shit hits the fan.
- rwyinuse 9mo agoFrom my point of view as a Finn, the convention is indeed pointless as long as Russia doesn't obey it. No point avoiding land mines in our Eastern border in case of a war, when Russia will mine any territory they capture anyway. Besides, our mines are much more likely to be marked correctly to maps, and probably will have a function that deactivates them after certain time.
- matkoniecz 9mo ago> Yes. But the what's the point of a convention about weapons that you only observe during peacetime and abandon as soon as war is at your gates? You should ask people who supported or invented this convention. I never supported it and would support exit from it also before 2014 or 2022. More cynical answer is that in time of peace refusing to sign up gives you bad PR so you sign up and in case of war you exit it (Finland, Poland, Baltics just did it) or ignore altogether (as Ukraine did). But it just weakens commitment to other conventions and PR hit would not be so bad, so I consider it as a mistake. but signing up to it while Russia has not even pretended to do so was absurd.
- HelloUsername 9mo agoHow do they know? (Serious question)
- ulrikrasmussen 9mo agoSomething I have really wondered is, why aren't there stronger incentives to build mines with a mechanism that disables them after a certain time has passed? There must be tactical and strategical reasons which are regarded more important, but surely the party using them for defending their own land ought to have an interest in not having to deal with this threat for decades after the war has ended, and an aggressor who wishes to take over an area should have the same incentives. Or are the reasons technical, that it is simply too difficult to develop a reliable mechanism for disabling them?
- TiredOfLife 9mo agoThat is exactly how modern mines work
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ultratalk 9mo agoI'm guessing it's the latter, because you have to keep the mine-disabling mechanisms working and powered up through possible adverse weather and environmental conditions for long enough that the conflict has a fair chance of having ended.
- themaninthedark 8mo agoIf you wanted to design something fail safe, the best way would be to make the powered up state the danger state. So when the power fails, the device is inactive.
- eitland 9mo agoThere is always the option to use battery (some modern mines use this),for example RAAMS. The problem is of the enemy know you use only mines that work for max n hours or m days they just wait for n + 1 hours or m + 1 days. There is a lot more to say about this, but there are probably people way more qualified than be here to explain it.
- elAhmo 9mo agoPlacing landmines is probably among the shittiest and most vile things someone can do. Knowing that ten, twenty, maybe 50 years after a conflict ends a completely innocent and unrelated person, maybe even not born at the time you did it, might die or get permanently disabled is a sick move. Place where I grew up is still full of landmines (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and some of the people who placed those mines are government officials today, loved by EU because of their natural resources.
- yason 9mo agoAgreed. Also I think that if you live next to a warmongering country you certainly care more about making a military invasion the shittiest and the most vile thing for the aggressor that you can think of and landmines are cheap and effective there. I think it's a sufficient trade off that landmines self-disable themselves in, say, 5 years or so. If the war continues you'll keep planting more and when it ends you'll just wait a few years and go collect them.
- expedition32 9mo agoYou don't just collect landmines though. The Germans in WW2 had maps which they handed over to the allies but it still killed hundreds of people clearing the landmines. Eventually they decided to use German POWs.
- Chyzwar 9mo agoIn conflict between equals, landmines are the only practical way to restrict the mobility of the enemy. That's why 20% of Ukraine is contaminated by mines. If you were official and your choices would be losing and more people dying or placing more landmines that can be cleared over 20 years, what would you do?
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoThey can’t and haven’t
- wesselbindt 9mo ago
- pjmlp 9mo agoI did some off road travelling in Croatia about 15 years ago, thanks GPS driving us into some farming roads. Only when I got out of it, I realised how stupid idea that was to keep following the GPS, on some country side villages the markings of the war were still visible, with abandoned buildings full of bullet holes. Naturally having mines still around was a possibility that I completly forgot about.
- input_sh 9mo agoBullet hole areas != land mine areas. Think of it this way: bullet holes are where the fighting took place, while front lines have fluctuated. You don't want to mine an area that your soldiers might want to advance through. Land mines are placed when front lines have stabilised (like they are right now in Ukraine) to prevent the other side from advancing through. You only do that once your side has no intention of advancing further. As such, land mines were usually properly documented and clearly marked as such after the war with giant skulls and red tapes, usually with some combo of words "PAZI MINE" ("beware, mines"). So while there are still rural areas that are littered with bullet holes, that does not mean those same areas were full of mines. It's also highly unlikely for a mine to be on any road, especially if it looks fairly well-maintained. You can take a road going through the minefield just fine, but you should never be one of those urban explorers that intentionally strays off of the road to look at the ruins on the side of that road.
- pjmlp 9mo agoMight be the case, however one cannot assert 100% guarantee.
- input_sh 9mo agoWhat you can do is look at the casualty rate per year and see how it went from hundreds in the 90s post-war period, to dozens throughout 2000s, to 0-1 in recent years and calculate your likelihood. Here's that chart for Bosnia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mines_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina#Land_mine_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mines_in_Bosnia_and_Herze... I lived along former front lines my entire life, I spotted some unexploded ones with my own eyes a long time ago, I'm not dead yet. That said, I am more equipped to handle such situations than you are, as I was taught how to do that since my first days in school. I firmly believe that outsiders are frequently overreacting these days, which is completely understandable, but that doesn't mean it is rational. Your odds of winning a lottery are infinitely higher than dying to a landmine in the few days you spend here. You can increase them by doing something stupid like avoiding those markings, but besides that you'll be fine.
- senko 9mo agoJust this week I talked to a person doing tree pruning/forestry, they were negotiating a job in a rural area in Croatia (wider Karlovac area). The particular patch of land is still suspected to contain mines, although "in theory" they were all cleared out. The client didn't want to pay for the minesweeeping tech team to ensure safety, the workers didn't want to wade into a forest that might still be mined. I suspect this is not an isolated case. It's far from over.
- cucumber3732842 9mo agoIDK man. On one hand it might be a real risk. On the other hand nobody except the timber industry is cutting down a random tree in the middle of the woods. If you're trimming trees on a power line cut or at the edge of a clearing you're working somewhere that has already been gone over with men and machine to make that cut or clearing. So it might be one of those "basically no chance but due to rules... blah blah licensed professionals... blah blah insurance.... blah blah" where even though everyone knows it's fine the guy who has to do the work can't just go do the work without paying someone else to take the liability, etc, etc. But then again, it's Croatia. They're not rich enough to afford that kind of dysfunction. Turtles all the way down.
- senko 9mo agoYeah this was a few trees at the edge of the forest leaning over some houses, needed clearing. "Should be fine", but they're not keen on taking the (personal, physical) risk. Thing is, you can't narrow it down to some acceptable level of risk. Mines are by definition stealthy, the only way to reduce the risk is to eliminate it by combing over everything, which is extremely hard, tedious, expensive, etc.
- gregopet 8mo agoOur firefighters collaborate with Croatian aerial firefighters (our neighbouring country). They say there is often pressure from politicians to drop water on wildfires in mined areas, however this is still dangerous to the planes as they have to go real low (a mine could explode spontaneously in their flight path) and after a few near misses they've adopted a policy: if it's not worth demining it's not worth saving from fire either. Guess they will have more work now
- hyperman1 9mo agoI live near part of the WW1 trenches. Most mines, bombs, etc. have been removed for decades now. Still, there are patches where the ground is so polluted with e.g. lead that nothing would grow. We tend to use that ground for companies and industrial things, but no worries, its completely safe for your health, citizen.
- Keyframe 9mo agoAs a Croatian, I'm really glad to hear these type of news. However, also as a Croatian, I don't quite buy the news. I'm sure great progress was made but it's never going to reach 100%; It's just the nature of these damn things in combination with our geography and where the frontlines were.
- spookie 9mo agoHell you still find explosives from WW2 all over. It really is difficult.
- Keyframe 9mo agoIndeed. With landmines from 90's at least general areas are known, there's signage and if you're not being stupid by venturing way past signage it's all really safe to be around.
- CorrectHorseBat 9mo agoWW2? We're still finding explosives from WW1 in Belgium
- 10729287 9mo agoNo kink shaming but meanwhile in France : https://www.midilibre.fr/2026/02/01/il-debarque-aux-urgences-avec-un-obus-de-la-premiere-guerre-mondiale-coince-dans-lanus-les-demineurs-interviennent-13201221.php https://www.midilibre.fr/2026/02/01/il-debarque-aux-urgences...
- black_puppydog 9mo agoIt's also worth pointing out that the front lines in WWI didn't come anywhere close to Toulouse. XD
- zabzonk 9mo agoTrue that. I used to work in the Netherlands, and sometimes it seemed like every other week the rail network was disrupted by a newly-discovered unexploded bomb, left over from the plastering the Allied air forces gave the Dutch railways.
- saidnooneever 9mo agojust intime to place new ones for WW3
- bandrami 9mo agoHuge and great news. Sri Lanka is hoping to get certification later this year too.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoIs it wise to issue such a declaration? Its great that they've gotten rid of so many, but shouldn't people still exercise caution on untrod ground?
- starkshift 9mo agogood news!
- aed 9mo agoIf anyone is looking for a good book on this topic, Aftermath: The Remnants of War is a good one: https://a.co/d/05fqBBK5 https://a.co/d/05fqBBK5 They apparently also made a documentary about it, but I’ve never watched it.
- teleforce 8mo agoGenuine question, why is it very difficult even with our 21st century technology to accurately detect landmines for the purpose of destroying them after the war? In order to be effective landmines need to be very close to the land surface thus should be easier enough to detect. Researcher in Japan has succesfully detect using low power radar sub-surface bamboo shoots since they are more expensive than bamboo shoots that are already grown over land surface. For safe and fast detection mechanism close to the ground aerial UAV can be deploy to scan the the suspected land mine area. Something is missing and don't add up here, perhaps someone can help explain the situations?
- kgwxd 8mo agoWay to jinx it.