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OAS TO BEGIN DEMINING OPERATIONS IN SURINAME

  December 1, 2004

The Organization of American States (OAS) will support demining and the destruction of unexploded ordnance in Suriname, under a new agreement with that country’s government. Suriname’s Minister of Defense, Ronald Assen, and the Director of the OAS national office in Suriname, Kingsley Layne, signed the agreement in Paramaribo on November 30.

The demining operations, which will receive financial support from the government of Canada, will begin during the first few months of next year. The mission will be made up of a platoon of Honduran soldiers, who will work with the Surinamese Army to clear landmines in the Stolkersijver area, in the interior of the country. It is the last zone where there are known to be buried mines, remnants of Suriname’s internal conflict of the 1980s.

The demining activities will be coordinated by the OAS through its Mine Action Program supervised by the Inter-American Defense Board.

This is the second time the OAS and Suriname have worked together in anti-landmine activities. In 1992, the country’s Peace Accord included demining operations coordinated by a special OAS mission and supported by the governments of Brazil and Guyana, which contributed military experts and demining equipment.

Suriname signed the worldwide treaty against landmines – the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on Their Destruction, more commonly known as the Ottawa Convention – on December 4, 1997, and ratified it on May 23, 2002.

The country destroyed its last 146 stockpiled mines in February of this year, at the Bos Bivak military base.

Reference: E-220/04