Almost half of more than two dozen people killed this year in accidents involving land mines and unexploded ammunition have been children playing near deserted Russian checkpoints and bases, said the report by the HALO Trust, which specializes in land mine removal.
Based on a preliminary survey last month of the war-ravaged republic, the report gives the first firm indication of the scale of the problem, likely to be one of the most grim and enduring legacies of Chechnya's 21-month war of secession with Russia.
An estimated 20,000 hectares of farmland are out of use because of the presence or fear of mines, said Nick Nobbs, a former British army officer running the HALO Trust's project in Chechnya.
Russian troops mined every crossroad, and few were cleared before their withdrawal. Several villages remain uninhabitable, and wide swaths of fields, roads, riverbanks and forests are dangerous for farmers, shepherds and villagers gathering firewood in the area.
Departing Russian troops told the Chechen commander who took over the main Russian base of Khankala that some 20,000 mines ring the site, but they left him no maps. The civilian airport and surrounding checkpoints are similarly mined.
The problem of unexploded bombs, rockets and artillery shells is at least as serious, Nobbs said. "The scale of the fighting and damage suggests that [the problem] is very large," he wrote, citing several villages that saw major battles: Smashki, Dargo, Stary Achkoi and Zony.
Three children were killed and nine injured by land mines in April, bringing to 13 the number of child fatalities this year. In all, 27 deaths from mines have been recorded through April 1997, although HALO Trust suspects there are many more about which the agency has not yet learned.
Clearing the mines will take "years rather than days or weeks," said Nobbs, who has come to Chechnya after two years of mine-clearing work in Angola and a stint in Afghanistan.
He has been given the go-ahead from Chechen and Russian authorities, and will work with teams of fighters who have enlisted in the official Chechen army.
They face painstaking and dangerous work detecting and disabling buried pressure-sensitive mines, including powerful anti-tank mines as well as smaller anti-personnel mines.
More anti-personnel mines scattered by aircraft and rockets are hidden by leaves and grass. Returning refugees also are endangered by booby-trapped mines in and around houses.
Mine-laying did not stop with the end of the war last August. Nobbs said he saw new mine fields laid by Russian Interior Ministry forces along Chechnya's borders with Ingushetia and Dagestan.
Rebel field commander Shamil Basayev, now a government minister, has said, however, that the biggest risk might come from the many mines laid by Chechen fighters to deter attacking Russian forces.
The post-war Chechen military has set up its own mine-clearing unit, but it is so catastrophically short of resources that it reacts only to reported accidents rather than systematically clearing mined areas.
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