Officially landmines are a thing of the past. Three years ago an international convention appeared to signal their demise as weapons of war. The convention came into force of March 1, 1999. The events described here by Colin Murphy, a Concern worker in Angola, occurred in November last year.

KUITO, Angola - The rains have come at last. My car drives the woman to the hospital, and the rains drive me inside.

In Berta’s tiny front room, on the outskirts of Kuito, I sit at the back of a small crowd and watch as the assembled women slowly take my colleagues through their stories and circumstances. The water hammers down on the iron-sheeting roof, drowning out a conversation that I can’t understand anyway. But I know what is being said because I’ve heard it many times before.

Earlier that week I had noted down a phrase I had also heard many times before: "Os nove meses," – "The Nine Months."

It is the answer to a simple and oft-repeated question I and my colleagues ask: "When did ‘it’ happen?"

‘It’ is the empty flap of a dress where a woman’s leg used to be; ‘it’ is the piece of hard plastic showing in place of a foot; ‘it’ can mean the loss of a leg, sometimes both legs. And it can also mean death.

"It happened during the nine months," they say, impassively, and my colleagues and I just nod.

The nine months they refer to passed between January and September of 1993, in Kuito, southwestern Angola. Those nine months were a defining period in the lives of these women: left them incomplete, missing limbs and family members, left them dependent on the goodwill of others.

Those nine months also came to define Kuito. A prolonged siege by opposition UNITA forces left the city exhausted and almost destroyed. Inside, the besieged population was dissipated by hunger, injury and death. A second three-month siege in 1998 obliterated the progress made in rebuilding.

In the five year lull between the onslaughts, Concern had abandoned emergency feeding and nutrition care, in favour of rehabilitation and development work. The second attempt to bomb and starve the city into submission saw us go back to basics: emergency airlifts of food and medicine, mass aid distributions in the ravaged city and ragged barrio-camps.

VEGETABLE PATCHES

Women would venture towards and beyond the front line in search of food. Even to get to their houses and small vegetable patches in the barrios, they would have to cross it.

Their stories tell of reaching the house safely, and then stepping on a mine on their way back to the shelters in the city; of never making it to the house; of stepping on mines buried in the loose dirt of the paths. These are the stories that I have heard many times before.

In Berta’s house, the conversation continues. Berta, too, is an amputee. She entered a Concern rehabilitation project in 1994 and thrived, despite the project being suspended with the onset of the second siege. As we restart our work with women amputees, Berta acts as an informal liaison between Concern and the women in her barrio.

I take advantage of being squeezed into her house, beside her, to ask her about ‘the accident’. But it is not any accident during the Nine Months we talk of. This new accident happened just before we got here for the meeting, just before the rain started.

We had arrived 20 minutes late for the meeting with the amputee women. We were to meet them, visit their houses, and interview them. Later, Concern would start basic income-support activities with each of them, as we did previously with Berta. This, at least, would give them a chance to earn their own living, to lessen their dependency and sense of helplessness.

This was to be the second of three group interviews this week, bringing to more than 60 the number of amputee women registered in our programme. Had we been on time for the meeting, we would have heard the explosion.

Arriving at Berta’s, we were met with the news that a woman had stepped on a mine and had been killed. The news was delivered matter-of-factly, a matter of record.

Besides, the last thing you do after a mine ‘accident’ is rush foolishly to the scene – for obvious reasons. As I walked back to the car to radio for support, I was conscious of not overreacting, running, or showing panic. And then someone ran after me: the woman was alive -- could we take her to the hospital?

A few minutes later, they came into view. A group of men running with a heavy weight in a large, dirty square of material, strung between them. I ran to Berta’s house to explain that we were leaving and then discovered the car had left without me.

Alegre, the Concern driver had broken the rules. For security reasons, Concern staff cannot be left alone, without transport, in isolated barrios.

WOMAN STARTED SCREAMING

He explained later that the woman had started screaming and he thought she was going to die in the car. He was the one who cleaned her blood off the back seat later.

Ironically, the military effectiveness of landmines is much-disputed nowdays. In the context of the sprawling, undisciplined and chaotic in Angola, the mining of roads and open areas will often not be documented, or the documentation is lost, rendering the mines an equal threat to the force that laid them as to the enemy. A twist of modern warfare.

But the efficacy of the mine as a weapon of civilian terror is easily demonstrated. Take a casual walk around Kuito town: women with one leg walk to the market on crutches, babies on their backs, their goods wrapped in a cloth on their heads; men with one leg or no legs sat astride shoeshine boxes in the market, striving to supplement their meagre, erratic ex-combatant pensions with the few kwanzas they can charge for shining the shoes of the higher ranking officials that patronise them. A whole population and city literally crippled.

Back in Berta’s house, I try to understand what has happened. These bairros aren’t supposed to be mined -- that’s what allows us work here. The mine was recent, Berta tells me. Newly-laid. How did she know? There’d been three accidents in the last 24 hours, she explained.

UNITA had entered the barrio the previous night, past sleeping soldiers at checkpoints, and laid ‘fresh’ anti-personnel mines on paths and in gardens, places they knew civilians would frequent.

A woman had set off a mine with her hoe, working her vegetable patch. A youth stepped on a mine down by the river.

And this latest victim had stepped on a mine while carrying water back from the river. It had been carefully placed on one of the small paths that serve as the ‘thoroughfares’ of the bairro.

Berta explains this matter-of factly, as if indulging my foreign ignorance. She thinks that was the last of the ‘recent’ mines. One way or another, it won’t affect her daily routine. "E a guerra," she says, almost inaudibly: "It’s the war."

The other women – these earlier victims – continue relating their stories to my colleagues. Outside, the rain is easing. I listen for the car. I don’t like being here, isolated. I worry more about the context of this incident, and its implications for my work and safety, than about the woman my car has just taken to hospital. Around me, the other women remain absolutely composed. They have learned to be indifferent, I think.

I ask Berta if she knows the injured woman.

"E a minha tia," she says softly. I almost don’t catch it: "She’s my aunt."

Berta’s aunt died the next day. In Kuito hospital she had been forced to wait for treatment, as another landmine injury was attended to in the hospital’s only operating theatre. The protracted delay proved too much for her.