Political Minefields: The Struggle Against Automated Killing by Matthew Breay Bolton

Author:Matthew Breay Bolton [Bolton, Matthew Breay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology & Engineering, General, Military, Peace, Political Science, History, Geopolitics, Military Science, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9780755618507
Google: AwbnDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49672241
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2020-07-23T12:24:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Red roads

Everywhere war, Sudan and South Sudan

UN peacekeepers began deploying throughout South Sudan after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which laid the foundations for its later independence from Sudan in 2011. As they moved, peacekeeping troops worried about the rumours of pervasive landmine contamination. To offer guidance in avoiding mines, especially on the roads they began to patrol, the peacekeepers established a Mine Action Office (UNMAO). Before this, mine action donors had largely ignored Sudan. But from 2003 to 2010, annual international contributions for mine action in Sudan (including both north and south) expanded from about $10 million to almost $83 million, making it the second largest programme in the world, after Afghanistan.1

Surrounded by computer equipment and cables in his office in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, UNMAO’s director Jim Pansegrouw told me that the focus on roads ‘worked out very, very well’, because the ‘major routes that humanitarians want open are the major routes that the [peacekeeping] mission wants open as well’. UNMAO developed a Road Threat Map, colour-coding highways based on an assessment of landmine risk. Where there were reports of mine contamination, roads were rendered red, cleared roads were green and roads that, following survey, appeared mine-free were coded yellow. ‘I always err to the conservative side,’ said Pansegrouw, explaining why so many roads were initially deemed ‘red’. Officially, UN regulations proscribed travel on red roads.2 While sensible, many of ‘the uninitiated’, as a UNMAO official described them, misunderstood this system. To a layperson, the Road Threat Map – especially in its early editions – suggested that significant lengths of South Sudan’s roads could kill you.

But a ‘red road’ was not necessarily mined; it just had not been confirmed as mine-free. Suspicion of landmine contamination in a very small section could lead to hundreds of kilometres of a road being labelled red. These routes were not necessarily the ones most likely to be mined. Rather, many were located in marginal and ‘inaccessible’ locations that were difficult to verify. They were the ‘unknown’ and ‘unsurveyed’ places beyond the expanding reach of the peacekeepers, beyond the boundaries of the international community’s authority. ‘There are vast areas in Sudan which we don’t know anything about’, Pansegrouw told a press conference in late 2005. ‘We have not visited [or] made an assessment of the whole of Sudan.’3 Though they were irritated if I suggested it, mine action agencies also benefited from depicting an extensive mine threat – it helped their fundraising.

While designating wide swaths of territory as red was inaccurate, it served as a powerful symbol of the feeling of insecurity that pervaded post-CPA South Sudan. Trust was low and the exact boundaries of risk were unclear. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) – South Sudanese rebels fighting for autonomy from the oppressive northern regime – committed ‘widespread and persistent’ human rights violations, including ‘summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and the theft of food’, use of landmines and ‘diverting relief’ provided by humanitarian agencies.4 Some 20,000 child soldiers served in the SPLA’s ranks.

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