HALO Trust CEO Shares Powerful Message on Land Mine Removal at Redlands Forum

It was a simple picture at the end of the presentation: a classroom, with young students gathered around a teacher, many with hands raised. James Cowan, CEO of the HALO Trust—an NGO that enters war-torn areas to remove land mines—reflected on what the teacher might have been asking. Maybe a math question. Maybe geography.

No, he told the audience at the Redlands Forum on Wednesday night. The teacher was asking which of the students had walked to school needing to avoid land mines.

The HALO Trust is an “international organization that works to protect lives and restore livelihoods” as it clears land mines in regions devastated by war. Cowan, a former intelligence officer in Northern Ireland who fought in Iraq in the mid-1990s, noted the irony of returning to Middle Eastern countries—not to fight, but to help make them safer.

Cowan gave a brief overview of HALO’s mission, starting with why and how land mines were placed. “Land mines were put in the ground to make war economical,” he said. During World War II, Germany produced land mines on a massive scale that killed or maimed tens of thousands of soldiers. The human cost of those forgotten mines is still being counted. A family in Afghanistan, for example, lost a mother and three children to a mine, leaving behind the father and two children. Hundreds are still being maimed or killed.

The trust was founded in 1988 with the sole purpose of clearing land mines, but it has since expanded its work to include conservation. The Okavango Delta in Angola, vital to the survival of elephants in the region, is one example—clearing it helps in more ways than one.

Headquartered in Kabul, the trust started with just a few people willing to do the dangerous job of defusing ordnance. Today, HALO recruits and trains local residents—including many women—to do the work. “It gives them a future in a specialized role,” Cowan said. It also empowers them economically, as they earn income for their families.

Notable figures around the world have supported HALO’s work. Prince Harry followed in his mother’s footsteps, visiting Angola and advocating for international support to make cities livable—without the underlying threat of land mines.

“Two hundred seventy-four thousand hectares of land have been made safe,” Cowan said.

HALO currently operates in more than a dozen countries.