In Sri Lanka, Demining is an ‘Endless and Dangerous’ Process

In Nimal Karunthilake’s view, demining is “an endless and dangerous process” in Sri Lanka, where decades of civil war left behind unexploded ordnance (UXO) in many parts of the country. He should know, too: In 2018, he lost his left hand and three fingers on his right when one such unexploded ordnance blew up during a demining operation. The accident devastated him, and he struggled with suicidal thoughts for a time. It was only thanks to help from his colleagues and family that he returned to what began as a short-term job in 2009 but has now become his life mission. 

Today, Karunathilake serves as the officer in charge of completion surveys at the National Mine Action Centre (NMAC) for the Kilinochchi District in northern Sri Lanka. There, the demining teams rise as early as two in the morning, travel grueling distances, and work in the country’s remote tropical forests. The sweltering heat, he explains, only adds to the already constant risk of injury or death. 

“The work interested me because of the international exposure and the opportunity to understand different cultures,” he says. Although Kilonochchi is predominantly home to an ethnic Tamil population, Karunthilake himself is Sinhalese. Over the years, he has witnessed the evolution of demining in Sri Lanka as well as the growing challenges it now faces. 

The civil war began in 1983, pitting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the Sri Lankan military. Fighting raged on for decades until, in 2009, the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the LTTE rebels. By then, a quarter century of deadly violence had killed more than 100,000 people, including tens of thousands of civilians, according to the United Nations. 

The war ended, but deadly risks have persisted. An estimated 1.6 million landmines remained scattered across some 1,304 square kilometers (503 square miles) of land, most of it in the Tamil-majority north and east. Between 1985 and 2022, according to the Landmine and Cluster Munitions Monitor, landmines and explosive remnants killed at least 1,719 people, though the watchdog believes the true number is higher. 

Humanitarian demining officially began in 2002. Since then, the efforts to rid the country of unexploded ordnance have relied heavily on international support. Foreign funding has enabled the country to remove more than 2.5 million anti-personnel and anti-tank mines, small-arms ammunition, and UXOs. For economically stricken parts of the country where former LTTE combatants and women are often the sole breadwinners, demining has also created rare opportunities for steady employment. 

Naguleswary Nachchimuttu, for instance, was once an LTTE policewoman but today works as a field operations manager at the Mines Advisory Group (MAP) in the Vavuniya District. Her father and brother both died during the war, and she now lives with and financially supports her mother. Born in 1983, the same year the war started, she was displaced time and again and never had the opportunity to complete formal schooling. 

“My brother had a heroic death,” she says, lifting her sleeve to reveal an old bullet wound in her arm. The gunshot left lasting nerve damage, she explains, and after the war, demining was the only viable job she could find. 

Others describe even starker circumstances. One deminer tells me she was unable to feed her family before she found work removing unexploded ordnance. Though she is a mother of four, the precarity led her to attempt to take her own life. 

Forty-three years after the war first erupted, Sri Lanka now relies in large part on tourism. Beach bars, boutique hotels, and wildlife sanctuaries line much of its southern coastline. But travel north from Colombo along the A9 highway toward Jaffna, and a different reality emerges — one in which landmines continue to shape both the terrain and daily life. 

At first glance, you might struggle to spot signs of the old conflict. The crumbling remains of LTTE bunkers are hidden deep in overgrown forests, difficult to find and even harder to recognize. In many Tamil-majority districts, though, demining organizations have put up bright warning signs that mark the perimeters of uncleared minefields.

Like so many civilians during the civil war, Arul Seeli and her family often found themselves caught in the crossfire. In the early 2000s, they were displaced several times. Each time, they traveled by foot, digging bunkers along the way to shield themselves from airstrikes and gunfire. “We couldn’t stay in one place,” Seeli recalls. “We dug pits to sleep in. At night, there were no lights. Snakes and insects bit the children. We saw bodies on the road, but we had to keep moving.” 

They finally found a place in a camp for civilians the war had displaced. In 2010, the year after the war ended, Seeli’s family returned to its home village. The immediate surroundings had been deemed safe, but landmines still littered the area. During heavy rains in 2021, she followed her cattle out on her property and found a landmine. They later learned that seven unexploded ordnance were buried in the area. The Sri Lankan military and demining teams came and cleared the area behind their house. Seeli has since turned the land into a modest garden, hoping it will provide additional income. 

That experience is a common one. Seventeen years after the LTTE’s defeat, villagers in the region continue to discover unexploded ordnance while going about their daily routines — while gathering firewood, collecting honey, or farming. The threat shapes people’s lives. In the rural sprawl between Kilinochchi and Vavuniya, the presence of landmines has even impacted local access to healthcare. The main hospital cannot expand due to uncleared landmine fields nearby. 

In many countries, authorities forbid construction until minefields are cleared. In Sri Lanka, the opposite is often the case: Clinics and roads are built before the land has been deemed safe. Even when land is deemed safe, though, unexploded ordnance have at times been overlooked. Such was the case for Velu Mohanraj, who moved to their ancestral village after the war ended. 

The government had declared the area safe, he explained, but he stepped on a landmine one day while gathering firewood. “No one told us not to go further into the forest,” his wife recalls. “There were no signs.” 

The explosion erupted beneath his foot. He was hospitalized and treated, but fragments embedded in his leg led to an infection. After multiple surgeries, Mohanraj lost more of his leg than doctors had initially expected. His recovery took years. By then, his wife had become the sole breadwinner in the house. Today, he can no longer walk without help. On top of the chronic pain, he suffers from diabetes and kidney disease. Every week, he has to travel 40 kilometers (around 25 miles) to receive medical treatment. The family now depends on modest disability checks to get by. “If it had been his right leg,” his wife says, “they would have given us more. But it was his left.” 

Years of militarization, displacement, and landmine contamination have slowed development in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern regions. Even now, many residents are still waiting to return to their land. In a 2018 report submitted to the United Nations’ refugee agency, the Sri Lankan government estimated that more than 2,200 people remained in displacement camps in Jaffna. Meanwhile, large swaths of Tamil-owned land remain in the control of the country’s security forces. 

Landmines, according to MAG’s Ziggy Garewal, are only part of the problem. “This was the Tamil heartland,” she says. “The bulk of Sri Lanka’s political leadership comes from other communities, who are either distrustful or just didn’t see the value in investing here.” 

Investment, however, has become a key priority since the current government was elected in 2024. Unlike past governments, the current government has announced major infrastructure plans, development projects, and land releases aimed at boosting economic growth in the country’s beleaguered northern and eastern regions. 

Central to the plans is the expansion of agricultural zones under what is known as the Northern Coconut Triangle initiative. Backed by around 500 million Sri Lankan rupees (around $1.6 million), the program aims to use the distribution of high-yield saplings to create a sustainable coconut-based economy in the country’s north. 

The development plans include a new cricket stadium in Jaffna, infrastructure upgrades, and beach resorts near Elephant Pass, a region situated at the gateway of the Jaffna Peninsula. The plans represent a critical push for growth following a severe economic crisis that gripped the country from 2019 until 2024, hitting northern and eastern provinces especially hard. 

Demining organizations are now working even more closely with the government, stressing that public and international support for their work is essential for safe and lasting development. Nonetheless, many projects are moving “full steam ahead” without proper land clearance, according to MAG’s Garewal. In some cases, hospital renovations have taken place alongside demining at the same site. “That’s why we’re now trying to engage with authorities more directly.” 

For their part, villagers across the northeast have learned to live cautiously. In one village, a resident says a local boy recently avoided injury after lighting a fire in a rice paddy that caused an unexploded ordnance to blow up. “He was lucky,” he says. “You never know what’s beneath your feet.” 

Demining, of course, is a costly and complex process. Clearance teams have to work on tropical terrain while also protecting fragile ecosystems. Because fighting often occurred in forested areas, soil metal contamination sometimes disrupts electronic detectors, and demining teams have to manually excavate unexploded ordnance after clearing the vegetation. 

Strict environmental regulations, such as a government ban on removing large trees, force the demining crews to navigate dense forests, restricted to narrow working lanes. But deforestation isn’t the only challenge: In some cases, white phosphorus found in certain munitions has ignited upon contact with oxygen and left soil toxic for months, effectively ruining farmland and local livelihoods. 

The exact locations of mines adds another layer of uncertainty. The minefields the Sri Lankan military laid were typically well organized and documented, but LTTE fighters often buried mines at random. Gathering information about these sites is especially difficult in areas where, for many Tamils, contact with state institutions and the military has long carried risks. Tamil communities have routinely cited harassment, surveillance, and discrimination at the hands of the state. In 2023, the US State Department’s Human Rights Report on Sri Lanka confirmed that such problems remained deeply entrenched until recently. 

Garewal agrees that distrust between Tamil communities and the state has led to roadblocks in the demining process. “Until last year,” she says, “every few hundred yards, there were massive police checkpoints blocking that road from Colombo to Jaffna.” 

The result is that many residents have preferred to deal with NGOs rather than the military or police. Demining organizations have responded by establishing locally embedded community liaison teams to build trust and act as intermediaries between villages and government authorities. 

Further complicating the process, many communities have simply become accustomed to living alongside landmine-contaminated land, no longer viewing the unexploded ordnance as a threat so much as a fact of life. Some farmers have resisted clearance efforts, reluctant to disturb the fields they depend on for their survival. Others have turned to collecting and selling unexploded ordnance — “explosive harvesting,” in local parlance. Several people have died in the process. Younger generations, too, can struggle to understand the severity of the dangers. 

To raise awareness, mine risk education programs have been introduced in schools and villages, teaching residents how to identify explosive remnants and what steps they ought to take if they find one. These programs have already had an impact, but the risks remain. 

Nearly two decades after the war ended, after millions of dollars spent, only 22.16 square kilometers (8.5 square miles) of contaminated land remains. According to MAC, the demining efforts are nearing an end. In 2017, Sri Lanka joined the Mine Ban Treaty (known as the Ottawa Treaty) and pledged to become mine-free by 2028. Whether that goal can be met in time now depends almost entirely on international aid. 

In recent years, though, global focus has turned to conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, among other places where landmines are once again being laid. At the same time, the United Kingdom has withdrawn support, the United States is signaling further cuts to aid, and the European Union is now prioritizing defense spending over aid. As a result, humanitarian budgets are shrinking, and demining programs are now trying to find ways to make up for it.

The consequences are far-reaching. Demining organizations are struggling to hang onto skilled staff, and thanks to the lingering impact of the economic crisis, employees are leaving every day in search of better pay. In other cases, budget cuts mean organizations have had to lay off employees. At the same time, the remaining contaminated areas are scattered across less accessible parts of the north and east, making operations more complex and costly, and new hazardous sites are still being discovered.

Many demining experts now doubt Sri Lanka will clear the remaining landmines in time for the 2028 goal. “We think it’s going to be 2031,” Garewal explains. “But if funding drops every year, as it has recently, that could push us up to 2033 or even 2035.” 

MAG, her organization, has already suffered a 40% loss of its team since last year. “We simply can’t predict how long demining will take because we don’t know what funding will look like from one year to the next.” 

Amid such uncertainty, the risk of more accidents remains constant. For everyday people across the country, such accidents can shape their lives for decades to come. 

Victoria Jesuthasan Figurado knows how drastic the human impact can be. In December 1994, while she was 18, she ventured out to collect firewood not far from her village in northern Sri Lanka. Because the war had not yet reached her hometown, she had never heard the word landmine. She spotted what she believed was a jewelry box on the ground. When she tried to open it, it exploded. 

She woke up nine days later in the hospital, missing both of her hands. She asked her mother why she had let her live. In the months that followed, people came to visit her — not to help, she says, but to look. She was the first person in their village to be injured by a landmine. 

Overcome by grief, she later considered suicide. “If I had lost my limbs fighting for a cause,” she says, “maybe I could have accepted it. But this was meaningless.” 

Her outlook only changed when she visited a disability camp and saw others who had lost much more than she had. That was when she decided to live.