Mines turned into toys
2002-12-15 20:28
Donets - Next Christmas Ukrainian children will find something unusual under their trees - plastic toy pelicans and sandbox tools made from land mines.
In their former incarnation, these toys were casings for anti-personnel land mines.
The mines-to-toys project evolved from an $800 000 NATO-sponsored program to help demilitarize the Ukraine.
It aims to reduce the country's stockpile of 6.4 million anti-personnel mines, which is the fourth largest arsenal in the world after China, Russia and the United States.
The project is based at the formerly top-secret Donetsk State Chemical Plant in eastern Ukraine, where workers packed explosives into artillery shells and missiles that the Soviet military targeted at the West.
"I always used to ask myself what can I tell my kids about my job?" said Lena Kazakova, a 14-year veteran of the plant whose twins were born the same year she started working.
"I used to make something up. But now I can tell my girls something positive, 'We're saving people's lives,' and that makes me happy."
Kazakova is one of nine women who have been trained to shuck open mines and remove the explosives.
The mines are taken from a storage shed to a workroom, where a young woman carefully counts the boxes, checks that the mines haven't been destabilised in transit and removes the detonator. They then go to a reassemble table where several women in lab coats and headscarves pry open the mines and remove the mechanical components.
The mine bodies, still armed, are then loaded into a pneumatic press that punches out the explosives. Two women then take the empty plastic mine bodies and explosive material off to be washed and recycled.
The whole process takes about 10 minutes per mine.
All the mines stored at the plant, about 400 000, are expected to be dismantled by September 2003.
Factory management plans to sell the toys, but will also donate many to the region's orphanages and kindergartens.
- SAPA