DUSHANBE, March 28, Asia-Plus — Unexploded air bomb with a 250-kilogram cartridge was discovered and destroyed by demining team of the “OMON” Special Operations of the Ministry of Interior in the Romit Gorge, some 40 kilometers east of Dushanbe, on March 27.
A reliable source in the Tajik power-wielding structures has told Asia-Plus that it is already fifth unexploded air bomb discovered in the republic over the past several years. “The previous air bomb with a 500-kilogram cartridge was discovered in the same area at the end of the last week,” the source said.
These unexploded air bombs are a legacy of the country”s disastrous civil war in the Nineties.
According to information from Tajikistan’s Mine Action Cell (TMAC), some 710 unexploded ordnances (UXOs) and more than 1,360 anti-personnel landmines have been cleared in Tajikistan in the area of 183 square kilometers since 2004.
It remains to clear 128 mine-strewn areas in a total area of 45 million square kilometers, the TMAC source says.
Most of the mines in Tajikistan were laid during the republic”s five-year civil war that ended in 1997, but they can also be found along its borders with neighboring Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
In 2000, Tajikistan joined the Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use of Anti-Personnel Mines and pledged to ban the planting and stockpiling of such explosive devices on its territory. Tajikistan is expected to destroy all anti-personnel landmines and clear its territory of them by 1 April 2010. The government has already destroyed all mine stockpiles that it had since Soviet times.
