Community Liaison

Throughout the life of the OES project the MACC SL has had a Community Liaison Team supporting the field operations.
The team, comprising four national staff and two LAF soldiers provide the link between the clearance contractor’s staff, and the communities themselves.

The principle role of the Community Team members is to ensure that the user of the land is confident in its safety once the clearance process has been completed. This is achieved by communication with the village Moukthar¹ , the landowner, and others living near the area. This communication is established before clearance takes place, and is maintained throughout the clearance period, until the day the clearance process is officially declared completed. On the day of the official completion the landowner or the official representative for the land is walked over the area, and shown the boundaries of the cleared area.

This is not the last time that the Community Liaison team member will meet with the landowner. Some months following this completion day, the CL team member will again meet with the landowner to complete a Post Clearance Review of the cleared area.

The CL team have proved their worth to the project in many other aspects too. Their build up of trust within the community has resulted in further information being relayed to the MACC SL both on known target areas, as well as new suspected and dangerous areas. Information offered on any additional areas by the community is further investigated by the CL team to enhance the reliability and if confirmed by either or both a General and Technical Survey the target location will be added to the IMSMA database. The extension of the Phase 3 contract, the “Sweep Through” phase is comprised solely of additional tasks within the OES project area reported through the Community Liaison team.

The Team have also established themselves as the initial contact point for community sightings of Unexploded Ordnance. When a CL member is contacted they respond completing a UXO Tasking Request that is then reviewed by MACC SL Operations and passed to the LAF Survey/EOD Team, who then either remove the item to a central demolition site and destroy it, or destroy it in-situ.

As the team members are in the field on a daily basis, and continuously in communication with the local communities, observations of unsafe behaviour and wrongly founded perceptions of the danger posed by landmines and is regularly addressed through the reinforcement of safe behaviour messages.