Funding fears for Lebanese de-mining

Rasha is her mother's biggest helper.

Seated on the floor of their tiny house in Marake, a village in southern Lebanon, the girl slouches over a bag of thyme placed in front of her.

Her thin, well-trained fingers move fast as she sorts the herbs, separating leaves from the stems.

For Rasha's family, thyme is the main source of income. Her father, Mohammad, harvests the wild herbs, while women sort, dry and sell them.

But Rasha hates the chore, and the memories it brings back.

She was 15 when, two years ago, she picked out a round shiny object from a bag of thyme her father had brought home. It exploded right in the room.

"I'd heard of cluster bombs, I had seen posters of them in school - but how could I imagine that something like that was possible?" she asks.

Her mother, Alia, looks away as Rasha pulls up her jeans and shows me the result of the explosion - her left leg is missing.

"I can't look at it," the woman sighs. "I cry every time I give her a bath. I am worried how it will affect her future." Over the last two years, the bombs have killed and injured hundreds across southern Lebanon.

After the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, the international community poured funds into clearing millions of cluster bombs that the Israeli army had dropped on the region.

Once on the ground, cluster bombs disperse into hundreds of bomblets or sub-munitions, making them even more dangerous and vicious than landmines.

'More difficult'

International efforts to ban cluster bombs gained new force after Israel's use of the weapons in 2006 and a new treaty banning the weapons was signed last year.

Major producers of cluster bombs such as the United States, China, Russia, Israel, Pakistan and India have rejected the pact and are refusing to sign it.

But now the international community is running out of funds to clear the mines. The combination of the global economic crisis and new conflicts elsewhere means that donor countries are no longer giving de-mining organisations in Lebanon the funds they need.

"It's more and more difficult for us to get the funds," says Claus Nelson, the head of the Lebanon operations for Danish Church Aid - one of the many demining organisations that work in Lebanon.

"The focus of the donors is now elsewhere, Lebanon is no longer in the news - and also there is less money to go around because of the global problems," he says.

The lack of money has recently forced Claus Nelson's organisation to cut down the number of teams in the field from five to two.

Some other organisations have been forced to pull out from South Lebanon altogether.

But while the de-mining groups complain about the lack of funds, some argue that the scale-down is justified.

No money

When de-mining operations in Lebanon began two years ago, more than 4,000 hectares of Lebanon's soil were contaminated.

Now, there are only 1,200 hectares left to de-mine - and even though this means tens of thousands of cluster bombs, munitions and mines, some believe that with so much of Lebanon cleared, the donors are right to channel the money elsewhere.

But Claus Nelson argues the donor countries should honour the commitments they have made.

"For us to be able to say that we have completed our job, we should not leave until all of Lebanon is cleared," Mr Nelson said.

The price of cutting costs is high. Taher, one of the de-miners, showed me a recently cleared field, marked by red ribbon.

Beyond it, he says, the area could still be full of cluster bombs, but they have been told to leave it - there is no money for clearance. What worries Taher, he says, is that there is a school nearby.

A loud explosion punctuates Taher's words and echoes through the rolling hills and olive groves of the valley.

A team of de-miners nearby have just demolished another batch of cluster bombs of the same kind that exploded in Rasha's bag of thyme.

An old farmer leans on his stick as he watched the smoke rise above the trees.

He tells me he can see his olive grove from the top of the hill but is unable to reach it because of the cluster bombs.

Two years on since the end of the war, cluster bombs still affect tens of thousands of lives in south Lebanon.

And as the global funds dry up, many here fear that they will continue to do so for a long time to come.