Demining Syria: How Not to Let Word Games Bury the Work

On Sept. 22, 2015, the infantry fighting vehicle I was driving hit an anti-tank mine. It felt strange to spend the 11th anniversary of my injury standing among ruins in a country far from home that had also been devastated by Russian mines and shells. As members of a Ukrainian delegation on an official visit to Syria, we were discussing with local colleagues how to bring areas destroyed by war back to life. For me, the connection between these experiences felt very real. The effects of attacks on civilian infrastructure by Russian and Assad forces have long been documented, but seeing the destruction and working among the ruins is a different experience.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Two days earlier, on Sunday, Sept. 20, we signed an intergovernmental agreement on mine action cooperation in Damascus. Next came Idlib and Aleppo: local response teams, destroyed neighborhoods, and tests of Ukrainian technologies. Two days of field visits is not much, and I do not claim to fully understand the situation across the country. But I had seen enough to spend the long journey home thinking about issues I know well from Ukraine’s experience. In my March column after my first visit, I wrote that Ukraine could help Syrians build a mine action system by sharing our own solutions and mistakes. This time, I was more concerned about the gap between what people say about building such systems, what they believe those systems can achieve, and what they actually do. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine’s Science Under Fire: Russia Is Targeting Knowledge, People and the Future Russian strikes are killing scientists, destroying laboratories and equipment, and putting Ukraine’s scientific and technological capacity at risk. Start with the foundations In Aleppo, we visited a district in ruins, where people were already clearing the area and trying to rebuild what can still be saved. The Syrian government’s goal is to move people from tents back into homes. Standing amid a mix of concrete, steel, bricks, and household waste, I thought about what I usually say in meetings: how we are building a mine action system, which approaches we use, and what experience we draw on. But here, I found it hard to see how everything we talk about would allow us to clear these areas within realistic limits of time and resources. In Ukraine, I see how expensive and slow humanitarian demining can be, even in much simpler conditions. The level of complexity here is different, and using familiar approaches seems likely to cost even more and take even longer. I may be wrong in this assessment. But it is Ukraine’s experience that makes me question whether consistently following standards is enough to deliver results within a reasonable timeframe. My first thought was to use remotely operated equipment much more widely. Mechanized methods are already covered by international standards. But I wonder whether all the requirements for carrying out the work remain justified given the technology available today. How far can robotics allow us to rethink procedures? We must demonstrate that the work is safe and that the land will be safe to use afterwards. At the same time, when another way to achieve a safe outcome becomes available, we must also examine whether a particular requirement is still necessary. This question applies both to operators’ procedures and to the standards themselves. Years of experience in applying them should not make them untouchable or beyond question. What worries me most is that we may agree on all the right words, build a system around them, and still not answer whether it can do the job it was created for. If clearance requires money that cannot be raised and timelines that leave people’s return home an uncertain prospect, then the practical value of the proposed approach comes into question. Who is responsible? Another related question is how much influence the country itself can have over the choice of approaches and the planning of the work. Syrian colleagues are expanding response teams, looking for equipment, and working to ensure that the national center can fully coordinate the sector. International programs are being rolled out in parallel, with their own budgets, procedures, and priorities. According to the information we received, government approvals are being obtained and work is being carried out in response to government requests. For now, however, it appears that operators largely agree among themselves on who will work where, while the national center has a limited role in these particular decisions. I understand why organizations make arrangements among themselves: work must continue, duplication needs to be avoided, and a state institution’s capacity does not develop overnight. But I want to understand how this practice will grow into a system that the country itself can coordinate. Syrians are making efforts to take on more responsibility. To what extent does the way partners work help them gradually gain a corresponding say in decisions? If we wait until the center has enough capacity while continuing to coordinate the main operations among ourselves, where is that capacity supposed to come from? Supporting a national institution also requires changes in the way its partners work. It means involving the local team in planning while decisions can still be changed, explaining the constraints of our own programs and working together to align them with the country’s needs. Sometimes this will be harder than reaching an agreement among a few experienced international organizations. But it is difficult to learn how to coordinate a sector if your role remains largely limited to approving plans developed by others. Training and advice are needed, but they do not replace participation in the decisions themselves. The same applies to separate arrangements with farmers, the energy sector, and other government bodies. They all have urgent needs, and helping them is necessary. The question is how these arrangements fit into an overall plan and what role the institution being built has in that process. I do not expect the Syrian center to decide on every deployment or determine how every task should be carried out. Operators have their own areas of expertise and responsibilities. But any discussion of national leadership must also include partners’ willingness to reconsider their own plans when the country proposes a different sequence of actions. In Syria, I recognized another familiar situation: a local team puts a great deal of effort into earning donors’ trust and securing resources for its own work. It needs to demonstrate capacity that it is still largely trying to build. An international organization enters the same discussion with a reputation built over many years, established procedures, and existing relationships with donors. I understand this difference. But when a lack of capacity becomes an argument for working mainly through an external system, I struggle to see how the local system is supposed to grow stronger. Enthusiasm and a desire to rebuild the country are not enough to manage large programs. Skilled staff, financial controls, and accountability are needed. The Syrian team must meet these requirements too, even in difficult conditions. But an international organization’s reputation does not automatically prove that its work is effective in a particular country either. Trust in procedures does not tell us how efficiently resources have been used or what the country itself will be able to do afterwards. This is why it feels to me like a game of saying the right words. The country’s representatives learn how to describe their needs to secure support. In meetings, they talk about the future system, then return to searching for the machines, equipment, and people they need today. Partners talk about national leadership but continue to work within the boundaries of their own projects. Building a system must go hand in hand with urgent work. The problem arises when this work continues but the national team’s involvement in joint planning does not grow. Under these conditions, even effective individual projects do not necessarily add up to the system everyone agreed to build. Ukraine’s experience makes me particularly sensitive to this. We too were discussing the future model for mine action while expanding state units capable of responding to hazards. Now I was seeing a familiar situation from the outside. Our own solutions also need to be adapted. We came to the site of a destroyed factory after a local resident reported a suspicious object. The Ukrainian operators launched a drone equipped with a standard high-resolution camera, collected images, and tried to analyze them. A neural network trained in Ukraine produced too many false positives: Syrian rocks and debris proved challenging for it. We continued processing the data later at the hotel. Eventually, the images revealed a 152 mm artillery munition and a cluster munition. During a ground survey, the Syrian team found those same items. This is a good start to our joint work, but more effort is needed before we have a solution ready for Syrian conditions. We saw the limitations of our own technology, and we will work on them. What I find difficult to understand is why the same approach is sometimes missing when it comes to transferring governance models. Knowledge brought from another country needs to be tested against local realities, even when it is backed by decades of experience. Among the Syrians we worked with are people who have returned from Europe and elsewhere. They have a great deal of energy and experience, and a strong desire to rebuild their own country. They have to put teams together, restore connections, and make decisions in conditions that are hard to understand without speaking to people in person. Staffing problems, local culture, and who can reach agreement with whom all matter. Arriving with a ready-made model is much easier than understanding how it will work for the people involved. I keep telling my Syrian colleagues that I did not come here to teach them how to build their own country. I share what we have tried, where we made mistakes, and what we had to redesign. If I see that a Ukrainian solution may not work in local conditions, we say so immediately. I want us to be able to speak just as openly within international partnerships, without first having to agree with every proposed approach in order to earn the right to receive support. After this trip, I have a clearer understanding of what I expect from our cooperation: assistance should leave Syrians with greater capacity to solve their own problems themselves. Teaching them to work according to our rules is not enough. We ourselves will have to align our work with the institution we are encouraging them to build, explain our decisions to it, and be prepared to change those decisions after discussion. Otherwise, we may build any number of things, but certainly not a national system. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.