In recent days, Maryam Azizvand and her son Ronahi Khodeie were injured in a landmine explosion in West Azerbaijan. This comes after Yalpiri Yildirav, a Turkish citizen, was injured in a landmine explosion in Takavard village in the war-torn Karabakh region. And last year, two journalists were killed by landmines in the same area of Azerbaijan.
According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, more than 4,200 people of whom 42% are children have been falling victim to landmines and ERW's annually in conflict zones across the globe. In fact, there are even landmines left over from the Second World War, which as of yet have not been cleared.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, "Mines are now proliferating so fast that there are perhaps as many as 110 million of them spread in 64 countries worldwide, and it is estimated that 2 to 5 million more mines are being laid each year. Scattered like deadly seeds, they kill and maim between 1.000 and 2.000 people per month, most of them innocent civilians."
In a conference at the prestigious ADA University which I attended together with 22 foreign experts, Fuad Muradov, the Chairman of the State Committee on the Work with the Diaspora, noted how the conflict with Armenia and the use of landmines had completely destroyed the cities of Shusha and Agdam, as well as many other towns in the Karabakh region. He added: "Our main goal is to build peace in the region. However, for that to happen, all landmines must be removed and removing them is an uphill struggle when the maps you have are not reliable." To date, Armenia has refused to hand over all of the landmine maps and this blocks peacebuilding.
As part of my recent trip to Azerbaijan, I was in Aghdam. Known as the Hiroshima of the Caucuses, the city today is a ghost town, as the population was ethnically cleansed from the area and all of the homes in the city lay in ruins. In the past, Aghdam had a population of 100,000 people, who used to enjoy theaters, cafes, restaurants, vibrant Azerbaijani tea houses, places of worship and even museums and historic monuments in the area. They all have been destroyed. Even a loaf of bread from the Bread Museum dating from World War II was not spared. Nor were the cemeteries, as the gold teeth were removed from the graves and sold to the Iranians, while the bodies were tossed away, deprived of a proper burial.
To make matters worse, the massive planting of landmines in the city inhibits reconstruction efforts. Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev stressed that Armenia planted more than one million landmines in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. Furthermore, more than 220 Azerbaijanis have been killed or injured by landmines in the Karabakh region since the Second Karabakh War ended.
Mined areas are the greatest disaster of our time. During our visit, we stated to the government of Azerbaijan that we could provide technological support to Azerbaijan in the field of mind clearance. Israel has invented a new robotic technology to clear landmines. With the help of these robot machines, any type of mine can be safely removed from various depths of the earth without manual interference. We have informed the Azerbaijani government about this in detail and made our proposals.
I believe we have the technology in Israel to solve this problem. We used it here to clear away landmines from the Golan Heights. We have special systems that we can send far away. With these systems, they can find where the landmines are and what is the best way to remove them, even though only 25% of the landmine maps that Armenia gave to Azerbaijan are usable and many more have yet to be delivered. Israel has become the best state not only to create robots to find landmines, but in robots to use for everything.
Today, we don't send soldiers to fight anymore. No one else can do the same. As discussed in a book that was recently written about me by the journalist Rachel Avraham titled "Ayoob Kara: The Man Behind the Abraham Accords," the trauma that I experienced during the First Lebanon War prompted me to strongly believe that robots rather than people should fight against Hezbollah, as I don't want other people to suffer as I have. I will never forget how I lost two brothers because such robots were not available at that time.
Similarly, I don't want people to continue to be killed in landmines long after the wars and conflicts are over, as this is a major impediment to peace building in the Caucuses and across the globe. Our technologies can give all of the solutions for Karabakh and for what Azerbaijan and other countries need to find to rid our world of landmines, once and for all, and by doing that, making peace will become closer to being within the realm of the possible.
Ayoob Kara is running in the Likud Primaries. He served as minister of communications.
