Tromsoe Mine Victim Resource Center/TMC is a different research center. Together with 20.000 sisters and brothers in the South we build chains of survival for poor people wounded in mine fields and wars they never asked for. The “Tromsø model” does save lives.

The photo is important: Laila was hit by a bouncing mine (bounding fragmentation mine, VS-69, produced at Valsella and triggered by trip wire, jumps up 75 cm (to breast height) before exploding and sending off ca. 400 steel splinters, each ca. 3 mm. in diameter, in every direction with a speed of about 1100 meters/sec, enough to kill in a radius of 40-50 meters) when she in 2001 was gathering her goats in the evening in a little village outside Halabja on the border between Northern Iraq and Iran. Laila was torn apart by splinters in one eye and in the abdomen. She survived and can still see on one eye. She probably still herds her goats in the same mine field – not because she is stupid or because her parents have many kids and don’t care about human worth, but because they are poor, because all pasture is occupied by mines and still will be, and because they need goats to survive. Low-risk or high-risk depends on your position. This is how mines are. This is how thinking is.

Pay attention to all the people surrounding Laila, kids and grown-ups: This was expected. This concerns everyone, she is one of us. The collective trauma, the collective suffering, the collective mobilization. This is why they resist and never give up.
Neither the Curds, nor the Palestinians nor TMC.


The picture is taken by our great lads, the doctors in the village that have been trained by us and who saved Laila’s life.