Quote Originally Posted by Stan View Post
I agree with Rex; the majority of our most recent IED awareness program was very similar to our current UXO campaigns. Only the target audience changed to include adults over 50. We had a 10-year long mad bomber indiscriminately placing IEDs in residential areas and without any apparent motive (even now after a year of hearings he has yet to fully disclose his reasons).

The only commonalities were the general area where he liked to place his VOIEDs and the materials he used (thanks in part to our awareness campaign, one IED was rendered safe and recovered for forensics).

There was little hope in changing 100,000 people’s daily routine in a 10 square-kilometer residential area, so we concentrated on making people more aware and set up CCTVs. We counted on the folks that live in the general vicinity to review the recordings for what they conclude ‘doesn’t fit in my neighborhood’.

I’d be very interested in your four principles of humanitarian response to IEDs.
Thanks, Stan. My response is similar in vein to what I said to Rex - in a humanitarian context, with such high victimization reported to be occcuring in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the humanitarian community is currently clueless. All we know data-wise at the moment is that "its really bad" and we don't know if we can do anything about it, never mind what to do.

A lone mad-bomber (I'm not familier with the situation in Estonia, so pardon my ignorance) can be tracked/monitored, I suspect, by using commonly available GIS-based crime tracking systems. There are ready-to-use application extensions available from ESRI and a range of other compaines that allow that. And, as you pointed out, that was a much smaller population at-risk in a much smaller geographic area. The situation in countries where the IED threat is very high is a bit different than scattered whack jobs, I reckon. Hell, it might be harder, too hard, in those high-threat countries, but our community doesn't actually know much at the moment.

Our own IED Safety Training over the past few years has focused on what it sounds like yours did - signs to look for, things to avoid, who to report to, etc. Our organization has been somehow or another involved, victimized if you will, in five IED incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, with serious injuries reulting from two of the incidents, so we take our safety and precautions very seriously. But, what I'm interested in learning with this effort is, if trends are able to be monitored and clarified, can large-scale behavior modification have some kind of positive impact.

I'm not suggesting that this somehow falls outside the Humanitarian Mine Action community - they're the only ones who will be initially willing to take this on if there's more that can be done to reduce victimization than is currently the case.

I'll send you my principles off line - I've tweaked them as much as I'm probably going to, but I'm reserving them to hopefully have a bit of impact among the relief/development folks.

Cheers,