3Rd Global Mine Action Conference Concludes In Baku

(MENAFN- AzerNews) The 3rd International Conference on Mine Action themed“Mitigating Environmental Impact of Landmines: ResourceMobilization for Safe and Green Future” wrapped up Friday in Baku, Azernews reports.

In his closing remarks, Representative of the President of theRepublic of Azerbaijan on special assignments Elchin Amirbayovsaid:“The good news is that today we are more than ever beforeclose to finalizing a peace deal. We fully restored our territorialintegrity and sovereignty, and today we have already started tomake steady progress on delimitation of our state border withArmenia. The bad news is that all this huge reconstruction andrehabilitation effort as well as our plans to bring hundreds ofthousands of displaced people back to their homes are seriouslyhampered by enormous mine challenge our country is facing.”

“Azerbaijan is sadly among the top 5 most heavilymine-contaminated countries in the world with 1.5 million landminesplanted across 12% of national territory. Landmines pose severehuman security risk even after war,” Elchin Amirbayov noted.

“Unfortunately, even after the ceasefire was reached in November2020, Armenia has created new mined zones of a total length of 500km. Only in the course of these last three and a half years, 361Azerbaijanis, among them children and women, have become minevictims as a result of more than 200 incidents. Sadly, thesefigures are on the rise almost every week and continuous refusal byArmenia to provide us with accurate information on locations withplanted mines is exacerbating the challenge,” the Representative ofthe Azerbaijani President emphasized.

“The scope of the mine problem is so huge that it is estimatedto take decades to complete the process. We are proud to have aprofessional and efficient national mine action agency, ANAMA,which is today better equipped and staffed than some years ago andit is doing a great job. We are also proud to have the first groupof female deminers, who recently joined our common effort. Butunfortunately, current level of foreign assistance in mine actionis highly insufficient constituting less than 10% of the totalallocated amount. We hope that this conference will contribute toincreased participation of our international partners in sharingthe burden of the mine challenge in Azerbaijan,” he added.

Alexander Zuev, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Rule of Lawand Security Institutions in the Department of PeacekeepingOperations expressed his gratitude to the Azerbaijani governmentfor the decision to set the humanitarian demining as the 18thNational Sustainable Development Goal as he addressed the event ina video format.

The conference also featured the panel discussions themed“Building National Capacities for Sustainable EnvironmentalRehabilitation”,“Resource Mobilization for a Safe and Green Futureand Inclusive Transformation through Mine Action”, and“Policyintegration and Advocacy for a Green Sustainable Development”.

Then, the participants adopted the Declaration of theconference. The Declaration was read out by Steinar Essen, Globalmine action and development advisor, United Nations DevelopmentProgramme.

The participants then heard the closing remarks by Deputy Headof the Foreign Policy Affairs Department of the PresidentialAdministration Nusrat Suleymanov as he highlighted Azerbaijan'srich experience in mine clearance, global landmine threat, callingto raise the issues of climate change and landmine threat at theupcoming COP29 Conference.

Co-organized by the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action(ANAMA) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the 3rdInternational Conference on Mine Action aims to draw the world'sattention to the landmine problem facing Azerbaijan, strengthen theinternational partnership in the field of humanitarian demining,and discuss ways of mobilizing financial resources for mitigatingenvironmental impact of landmines and other explosive remnants ofwar.

The function drew together more than 300 representatives from 75countries – senior officials of a number of countries, theleadership of the UN headquarters, representatives of influentialinternational organizations, institutions operating in the field ofdemining, as well as representatives of the diplomatic corpsaccredited in Azerbaijan.

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