Giant rats put noses to work on Mozambique's landmines

In the Croatian wars, with its long and hard to guard front lines, the mines were more or less shoveled out of trucks , with little in the way of administration. To make matters worse, when the spring floods came and eroded the riverbanks (the river systems, during the wars, were less well-maintained), they took the mines buried there with them, and so they ended up in other places alongside the rivers.

The Croatian government has a GIS webapp up at https://misportal.hcr.hr/ . I used it to mark my paper map with a sharpie, so I would know in which areas I'd better not pitch my tent. The mined areas (in red) viewable through the webapp show the contours of the breakaway ethnic-Serbian "Republika Srpska Krajina" pretty well. (The stuff to the far eastern side of the map is the border front with Serbia and has nothing to do with the Krajina contours).

It amazed me to find these areas still so devastated and deserted. Bombed out houses everywhere, even in town centres (notably Pakrac), where the young people I spoke to who were working and living in these scarred towns hadn't even been born when the fighting started (early 90's, I remember we had a refugee in our class in primary school.).

The house my mother grew up in, and the block surrounding it, had to get evacuated twice. You wouldn't naturally think Pulaski Street in Chicago would be a great place to find bombs but you aren't counting on my grandfather, who twice had a shell land in his foxhole on Iwo Jima and fail to explode. Believing them to be his lucky charms, he brought them home with him after the war and put them in his basement, next to his collection of nails.

The CPD bomb squad said, after disarming the second one, "If he has a third one down here, it is your problem."