My lungs feel like they're about to burst. At an altitude of 2,000 metres (6,500 feet), and in the heat and humidity of Burundi's remote Bubanza province, I'm trekking up a steep, loose dirt path, carrying all my camera equipment.

Ahead of me is a Burundian de-mining team, carrying more equipment and already exhausted after hours of work in the searing heat, wearing heavy helmets and blast-proof jackets.

Though Burundi's last remaining armed rebel group, the FNL, finally returned to the capital Bujumbura to sign a peace treaty in June, the war's legacy remains. Anti-personnel mines and unexploded ordnance still make travel and farming in Burundi's rugged landscape a deadly risk.

The team with me, from Swiss Foundation for Mine Action (FSD), are hoping to complete an ambitious mission in September and declared Burundi the first conflict zone in the world completely free of all known landmines and unexploded ordnance.

But before they can make the announcement they need to follow up every suspicious find in the country, and that's why we end up here, in a tiny bean field clinging to the mountains of Bubanza, searching the soil for signs of an unexploded rocket.

The challenges have so far been immense. True, Burundi is a small country, but difficult terrain and stormy weather make operations on the ground very difficult. Accurate data is hard to come by, and the U.N. coordinating team recently under-calculated the size of many of the clearance tasks by a factor of 10.

The national government - still reeling from a 13-year civil war, and with its parliament paralysed since February - is also ill-equipped to support the mission.

Zlatko Gegic, programme manager for FSD in Burundi, is trying to be realistic.

"I have a feeling that mine action is at the very bottom of the list of priorities of the national authorities," he tells me. "What they don't see is the significance of this achievement."

On the other hand, the Burundians on the FSD team - all but two of the team members are local people - clearly see the symbolic importance of their mission.

I ask Ange Gabriel Ndayirukiye, a de-miner and interpreter with FSD, why he joined the team.

"Because I want to help my brothers and sisters in Burundi," he says with pride. "It's very important if they declare Burundi free from mines and UXO (unexploded ordnance), because it helps us to develop our country."

ABUSES HINDER RECONCILIATION

With an end to the armed conflict and the September declaration in sight, the country should be concentrating on unity and reconciliation. But there are other concerns as Burundi's government stands accused of repeated human rights violations.

In the flurry of political activity following the first peace treaty of 2006, the International Crisis Group found human rights abuses were actually increasing for the first time since the end of the brutal conflict that killed at least 300,000.

Jeremie Ngendakumana is president of CNDD/FDD, the country's ruling party. His dismissal in January of Alice Nzomukunda, vice president of the Assembly, plunged parliament into chaos, and it has been suspended ever since. Yet he still refuses to explain why she was dismissed.

"I think that it is not necessary (to explain)," he told me. "We have many reasons we do not want to say... When you are not a member of CNDD/FDD it is not necessary to know why this person has been removed."

It was the kind of answer that has prompted Transparency International to rank Burundi 131st in the world for corruption, awarding it only 2.5 points out of a possible 10.

Nzomukunda was much more straight with her answer. She believes she was removed from the party because "their policy was the opposite of what they had promised the people... There is total injustice. I could never stand this impunity, and I spoke out against it regularly... But in the CNDD/FDD they said that they were in power, so we had no right to criticise that power."

The security forces themselves are accused of the bulk of abuses. "Cases of torture and ill-treatment by the Burundian National Police, the National Defence Force and the Intelligence Services were regularly reported by local human rights organisations," writes Amnesty International in their latest global report.

At the offices of APRODH, one of the country's few human rights organisations, I met Rachide Burikukiye, a 32-year-old from Ngozi who has been in prison for four years for allegedly refusing to cooperate with police on a murder investigation. He was on one of his rare trips to the hospital, accompanied by an armed guard.

He said that while under arrest, he was tied up with electrical cord and beaten so severely that both his arms are paralysed. After four years, he has still not been tried for any crime.

"It's terrible," he told me. "To eat they must give me food. To take off my shoes, they have to help me... I want to ask the government to try the men who made me like this, to make them pay for what they have done to me."

Datus Nyandwe, spokesman for the Minister of Public Security, declined to respond to my questions about police brutality and prisoner abuse.

Until recently, the ongoing civil war was blamed for much of the police and military violence. The hope now is that June's peace treaty will pave the way for not only a reform of the judicial system, but a formal reconciliation process.

In this respect, the de-mining mission has already achieved something incredible. Quietly, and behind the scenes, FSD has united Tutsis and Hutus, former armed rebels and former national army soldiers, fighters and civilians in the same team.

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