CORACLE ARTICLE STUART HUGHES Kaveh Golestan's last meal was the best he'd eaten in months. On a perfect Spring morning in early April I sat down with Kaveh -- the BBC's Tehran cameraman -- as well as correspondent Jim Muir and our Kurdish translator and driver for a picnic near the town of Kifri in Northern Iraq. We made tuna and tomato sandwiches and boiled up tea sweetened with honey on the propane camping stove we kept in the back of our jeep in case of emergencies. Smoking a pungent Iranian cigarette on the duvet we had thrown down on the ground, Kaveh said the picnic was the finest thing he had tasted in his 59 days in the Kurdish-held north of Iraq. A few hours later he was dead. After our picnic we drove into the centre of Kifri. Two days earlier American bombers had targetted positions on a low hill, which had been occupied by Iraqi government forces for the previous ten years. The Iraqis had abandoned their trenches, although a day earlier they had shelled the sites they had left behind, killing three people and injuring about a dozen others. On the day we arrived the mortar bombardment had apparently stopped and we asked the local commander from the governing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan whether we could drive up to the abandoned trenches to film and set up our videophone. He gave us permission and asked a Peshmerga soldier to accompany us as a guide. We followed well-worn tracks leading towards the top of the hilly ridge. Our Peshmerga guide advised us not to park on the highest point of the hill in case the Iraqis spotted the glint of our vehicle in the sunlight and tried to attack it. Instead, he asked us to stop just beneath the summit, a few metres off the main track. We followed his advice. As Jim Muir switched off the engine of our jeep I glanced at my watch. We had 20 minutes until our next live broadcast for BBC News 24 - just enough time to choose a suitable spot and set up the videophone. I stepped out of the vehicle, intending to retrieve my flak jacket and helmet from the boot. As my foot touched the grass there was an explosion that knocked me to the ground. My ears rang. My right foot felt like a millstone had been dropped on top of it. When I looked down, I saw that my heel had been blown wide open. The sole of my foot had been ripped apart, the skin hanging loose like modelling clay. My heel bones were exposed and my calf was peppered with shrapnel. I assumed we were coming under mortar attack and curled into the foetal position, hugging the rear wheel of the jeep. I heard two more explosions and a volley of gunfire. Then silence. "I'm hit," I shouted, trying to stem the panic rising in my throat. In the confusion I still had not realised that my injuries had not been caused by incoming fire. It was only when I heard our translator Rebeen Azad shout "It's a minefield. We're in a minefield" that I began to comprehend fully what had happened. I had stepped on an anti-personnel mine. My memories of the next few minutes are a collage of shouts and fragmented images. They are of Jim breathlessly asking "where's Kaveh?," Rebeen, close to tears shouting, "I think he's dead," and the sound of my own shallow breathing as I lay in the boot of the car with a scarf wrapped tightly around my foot, waiting for Kaveh to be dragged onto the back seat. I knew from the hostile environments training I had received that I would survive since anti-personnel mines are designed to maim rather than kill. However, as I looked out of the window at the patchy scrubland outside, desperately trying to ground myself in reality, I remember thinking what an unremarkable place it was to die. I saw Kaveh only briefly after the accident. I glimpsed his head and shoulders as he was carried, wrapped in a blanket, into the first aid station I was rushed to for emergency treatment. He looked serene, as though taking an afternoon nap. It was only after I had returned to the UK that I learnt the full extent of his injuries. We believe the two explosions I had heard as I lay beneath the jeep were a small blast mine followed by a larger Italian-made fragmentation mine packed with 2,000 pieces of shrapnel. We suspect Kaveh accidentally triggered them as he ran for cover. The mine probably popped out of the ground before exploding at waist level, shredding Kaveh's lower body to pieces and killing him instantly. Over the next few days I received treatment at an American Special Forces field hospital in Iraq and an RAF base in Cyprus, before finally returning to Britain by air ambulance. I was taken to hospital in my hometown of Cardiff where doctors decided my injuries were too severe for reconstructive surgery to take place. My right foot and lower leg were amputated on Monday April 7th. The incident in which Kaveh was killed and I was injured, though tragic, was certainly not an isolated one. Dozens of people in Northern Iraq, many of them children, have been killed and hundreds have been injured in recent weeks by unexploded ordnance and landmines. The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which is co-ordinating a mine clearance operation in the region, says it is facing an emergency situation. Iraqi Kurdistan has one of the world's worst landmine problems. Only Angola and Afghanistan are as badly affected. According to MAG, between 8 and 12 million mines litter Iraq. An estimated 760 Iraqi villages are affected by the presence of mines and almost 220 million square metres of land is suspected as being mined. The most difficult question I have been asked since the accident came from a newspaper reporter. He asked me what my feelings were towards the person who laid the mines that killed my friend and maimed me. "You must feel a lot of anger towards the soldier who put those mines there," the reporter said. But my feelings are not of anger or hate. Having spent long nights and days at remote checkpoints with Kurdish forces I realise that whoever laid the mines was probably a poor, scared soldier with limited training, following orders and hoping to get back to his family as quickly as possible. I am sure the thought that the weapons he was planting would one day kill a man and maim another barely entered his mind. He was simply doing what he was told. I direct my anger instead towards those involved in the international trade in landmines, which kill and injure people every day in at least 70 of the world's poorest countries. Looking back on "Operation Iraqi Freedom" from a distance I find it no easier to reach a definitive conclusion on the rights or wrongs of the war. To begin with, British forces were sent into battle without the clear support of the British people. America and Britain's decision not to allow UN inspectors more time to search for weapons of mass destruction, the subsequent failure of coalition forces to find evidence of WMDs and the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein are all extremely troubling. In addition, the recent demonstrations in Iraq against the presence of American "liberators" in the country and the mammoth task facing relief agencies, who continue to warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe, show that although the worst of the fighting may be over, the most difficult challenges for the coalition may still lie ahead. These reservations, however, must be weighed against the positives that have emerged from the war, not least for the Kurds of Northern Iraq who endured unimaginable suffering under Saddam Hussein. Just before the start of the war I visited the town of Halabja near the Iranian border to report on the 15th anniversary of the chemical attack there. On 16th March 1988, more than 5,000 people were killed when Iraqi government forces dropped chemical weapons - including mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX - on the town. The Halabja attack has come to symbolise the brutality of the "Anfal" - the campaign of genocide by the Baghdad regime against the Kurds conducted during 1988, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Human Rights Watch estimates that at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children, were killed during the Anfal. The people of Halabja are still suffering the side effects of the chemical attack. Medical research on the local population has shown alarming increases in disorders such as cancers, congenital abnormalities, strokes and chronic lung, skin and eye problems. Most of those I spoke to in Halabja insisted the American-led military action to oust Saddam Hussein was long overdue. In Sulaymaniyah, the main city in the east of Iraqi Kurdistan, I interviewed a photo lab technician in her early twenties. On the day I spoke to her she was preparing to flee to safety with her relatives in the countryside, terrified by the prospect that Saddam Hussein's forces would use chemical weapons again. I asked her what she thought about the hundreds of thousands of people who had taken to the streets of London and other cities to protest against the war. "They don't live in Iraq" was her blunt reply. "If I lived where they do I'd probably think the same as them, but they don't know what it's like here," she said. "Saddam Hussein is the source of all our problems. War is the only answer." For the Kurds of Northern Iraq, whose lives I was privileged to share during a turning point in their history, the coalition forces were not oppressors but liberators. Stuart Hughes asks Coracle readers to consider helping the following charities: Mines Advisory Group 47 Newton Street Manchester M1 1FT 0161 236 4311 www.mag.org.uk The Rory Peck Trust 7 Southwick Mews London W2 1JG 0207 262 5272 www.rorypecktrust.org BIOG Stuart Hughes is a World Affairs Producer with the BBC. In the past year he has completed assignments in Israel, the Occupied Territories, Pakistan, the USA and across the Middle East and Europe. On April 2nd he was seriously injured when he stepped on an anti-personnel mine in Northern Iraq. His colleague, the BBC Tehran cameraman Kaveh Golestan, was killed. Stuart's foot and lower leg were subsequently amputated. He is currently recovering but plans to return to overseas assignments later in the year. Prior to joining the BBC in 1994 Stuart spent six months as a volunteer on Iona. 5