Seventeen years after the cessation of open conflict, the north of Sri Lanka still carries the physical memory of war in its soil like an unspent sentence.
Jaffna does not present itself as a postscript; it behaves more like an unfinished manuscript, repeatedly corrected by excavators, maps, and caution tape. I went back there and moved through villages where the horizon looks ordinary until it is interrupted by warning signs that effectively say the ground is not fully real yet.
The language of reconstruction is always polite in official documents, but the terrain itself is not polite. It refuses closure. It keeps the arithmetic of danger slightly unbalanced.
In that landscape, demining is not an abstract humanitarian category. It is a mechanical insistence on touch without consequence.
The HALO Trust
The work of the Hazardous Area Life-support Organization (HALO Trust) in Sri Lanka operates like a parallel administration of soil, one that must negotiate with logistical and bureaucratic complexity.
The numbers appear straightforward on paper. Land cleared to date – 28.83 sq km, released – 121.37 sq km, remaining – 7.71 sq km under HALO’s remit alone, with Jaffna contributing 0.54 sq km, Kilinochchi 0.72 sq km, and Mullaitivu 6.44 sq km. Yet each decimal hides a choreography of risk transfer, where a square metre becomes safe only after it has been interrogated like a reluctant witness.
The broader national figure is larger and more cumbersome: 169.24 sq km cleared, 238.40 sq km released, and 21.32 sq km still contaminated. These are not inert statistics; they are afterimages of a violence that refuses to fully decay.
The land does not forget, it only redistributes. A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis from operational briefings is pragmatic in tone but illustrates the complexity of demining. Strengths include long-standing staff, war zone experience, mechanical assets, and GIS capability. Challenges can include resistance to change and the time it can take to train less experienced support staff. The HALO team must also find inventive solutions to procurement delays.
HALO’s operations in SL
HALO’s work brings opportunity to Sri Lanka; the organisation is committed to the empowerment of women and 43% of its operational staff are female. Employment and training raise the skills levels and future job prospects for communities.
There are difficulties to overcome, restrictions on surveying some land, and delicate relationships to negotiate, but HALO enjoys respectful collaboration with partners in, for example, the Forest and Wildlife Departments.
Programme Manager in Sri Lanka Hannah Picton says the hard work is worthwhile. It’s about getting lethal landmines out of the ground, she explains. It’s painstaking work but her team are saving lives and restoring land for safe use and that’s a powerful motivation.
She points to a recent example. The congregation of a church on Puvaransanthivu Island in the Jaffna Lagoon were able to return to worship in safety after HALO experts cleared the area of mines laid during the civil war.
Reduced funding, however, has constrained operational capacity and continues to hinder the final push towards a mine-free country. The implication is stark; the end is visible, but not affordable at pace.
The machinery of completion also appears complex to the layperson. Picton describes the rigorous post-clearance architecture: each grama niladhari division must be surveyed, re-surveyed, verified through community engagement, and then formally declared mine-free only after ‘all reasonable effort’ has been documented. That phrase, ‘all reasonable effort,’ is an internationally recognised standard for demining. It implies that certainty is never absolute, only defensible.
Even safety must be litigated into existence. Once clearance is completed, post-clearance inspection becomes the final tribunal, where documentation is checked against ground reality by visiting officers who treat soil boundaries like legal arguments. Only then is the status shifted to ‘completed’.
A methodological approach
What struck me most was how much of this system depends on disciplined repetition.
Survey teams move into villages, not as visitors but as epistemic auditors. They interrogate memory through residents, cross-check reports from the Sri Lanka Army, align data from the Forest and Wildlife Departments, and translate anecdote into geospatial polygons. Absence must be demonstrated repeatedly, not assumed. Even when communities have farmed land for years, the land is not automatically safe; it must be proven safe retroactively, as if safety itself is under suspicion.
One of HALO Sri Lanka’s long-serving operators, Kaneswaran Pirashanthan, explains the somewhat complex structure of demining in Sri Lanka. There are, he says, several organisations including HALO, Mines Advisory Group (MAG), Delvon Assistance for Social Harmony (DASH), and Skavita Humanitarian Assistance and Relief Project (SHARP), which work alongside Sri Lanka Army brigades, all coordinated by the National Mine Action Centre.
Funding comes from multiple states – the US, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, and Japan – which can create a complicated financial geography. But demining tasks are always prioritised and made safe accordingly.
Everything must be reported upward: weekly clearance data, donor-specific reporting cycles, monthly or quarterly submissions depending on funding architecture, and annual action plans that require ministerial signatures.
He describes the survey-to-clearance pipeline with an almost mechanical patience. Community reports trigger explosive ordnance disposal call-outs. Single items are destroyed rapidly if isolated. But, if evidence suggests contamination patterns, the site becomes a formal tasking order, authorised through district secretaries and processed by regional mine action offices.
Only then do teams deploy into gridded land, divided into 25 by 25 metre boxes, where deminers move with calibrated spacing and safety distances. The land is not walked; it is partitioned into procedural geometry. Even movement is standardised into risk-managed intervals.
I was intrigued by HALO’s methodical approach to such a dangerous task. A minefield is not approached as chaos but as a solvable spatial equation. The system also acknowledges uncertainty. If mines appear scattered without discernible pattern, the methodology escalates to full clearance rather than reduction or cancellation.
Reduction allows land to be released when evidence of contamination is absent after exhaustive survey. Cancellation applies when land has already been reclaimed by civilians through repeated use – ploughed multiple times, cultivated for years, or formally acknowledged by landowners as safe through written consent. In such cases, the absence of harm becomes the evidence itself.
The machinery of excavation extends into difficult environments where water and mud blur the boundary between ground and liquid. Lagoon clearance requires specialised MBBS excavators, earth bund construction, soil extraction, drying processes, and reintroduction of processed material after screening. Even here, contamination is treated as a removable risk rather than a permanent condition.
Yet the environment resists simplification. Mangroves, ponds, forest edges, and military trench systems all demand different mechanical responses, each one negotiated with forestry permissions and environmental restrictions. The system is constantly balancing humanitarian urgency against ecological regulation.
The question of safety is never final
Casualties, though statistically reduced in recent years, remain a haunting reference point. The last recorded mine accident was in 2020, though earlier incidents in areas like Mullaitivu and Nagar Kovil still circulate in institutional memory.
Pirashanthan explains that HALO operates stringent safety protocols. Any accident or incident, however minor, is systematically reported and investigated, whether in the field or in the office so that relevant lessons can be learnt.
What complicates the narrative further is the temporal paradox embedded in demining. The conflict ended in 2009, yet the operational landscape still behaves as though it is mid-conflict in procedural terms.
Clearance operations that began in 2011–2013 by various international actors, including Indian organisations such as Sarvatra and Horizon, have left layered legacies of partial clearance, re-tasking, and inherited contamination zones. The land is therefore not post-conflict in any clean sense; it is post-multiple intervention, which is a different and more fragmented condition.
When Pirashanthan speaks about his own trajectory, the institutional memory becomes embodied. He joined in 2007 as a radio operator during active conflict conditions, then moved through data, clerical work, store supervision, information management, survey operations, and GIS. His career is not a ladder but an accumulation of experience.
Each role builds on rather than replaces the previous one. His later international assignments – Cambodia for field officer training, Somaliland for operational exposure, Angola as non-technical survey adviser – read like an itinerant archive of global contamination zones, each with its own variation of buried violence.
Even the question of safety is never final. The land can be released, but it cannot be guaranteed in absolute terms. Instead, it is declared safe under administrative confidence intervals. Post-clearance inspection ensures that documentation matches physical reality, but even this is ultimately a verification of process, not metaphysical certainty. The system trusts itself, but only after exhaustive self-interrogation.
A complicated picture
What emerges from all this is a complicated yet fascinating picture. International donors fund fragments of certainty. National institutions regulate procedural legitimacy. Field teams translate uncertainty into grids. Communities negotiate between memory and necessity, often returning to land because livelihood requires it regardless of certification status. The result is a landscape where safety is not a condition but a negotiated output.
Standing in Jaffna, it is impossible not to notice how normal life coexists with procedural suspicion. Children play near fields that were once surveyed. Farmers move along edges of previously restricted zones. Mechanical clearance continues in adjacent districts where remaining contamination is measured in fractions of square kilometres but still dictates years of operational planning.
The land appears indifferent, but it is not. It is being slowly rewritten by machines that are themselves constrained by funding cycles, bureaucratic authorisation, and environmental permissions.
There is no dramatic resolution to this. The work continues in incremental dissolves. The final square kilometre will not end the narrative; it will simply convert it into another administrative phase – monitoring, verification, and institutional memory maintenance. The minefields will eventually disappear from maps, but they will persist in procedural archives and in the habits of those who once had to assume the ground was hostile by default.
In that sense, demining in northern Sri Lanka is not only about removal. It is about sustained distrust of the earth, carefully managed until it becomes safe to trust again.
(The writer is an author based in Colombo)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)