In 1997, wearing body armor and surrounded by warning signs emblazoned with skulls, Diana, Princess of Wales, drew the world’s attention to the brutal and enduring consequences of land mines by walking through a minefield in Angola, which was then enduring a civil war.
On Wednesday, her son, Prince Harry, made the same journey through a partially cleared minefield, at a time when countries are beginning to break away from the international anti-land mine treaty drawn up in the months after Diana’s visit.
Harry visited Cuito Cuanavale, a remote community around 350 miles from the live minefield that Diana walked through in Huambo 28 years ago.
During a previous trip in 2019, Harry had retraced his mother’s steps on the same piece of land, which had been made safe and reclaimed for homes, schools and businesses.
Both he and his mother traveled with The Halo Trust, a British land mine clearance nonprofit.
The group said that Harry had joined a group of de-miners in what it believes to be Africa’s largest remaining minefield, and helped to destroy two anti-tank mines from the conflict that raged between 1975 and 2002.
The timing is symbolic. Months after his mother’s visit to the southern African country in January 1997, 164 nations signed a United Nations convention banning antipersonnel land mines, leading to a virtual halt in global production of the weapons and the destruction of stockpiles.
This year, at least five countries will leave the convention. Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania announced their withdrawal in March, saying in a joint statement that the security of their region had “fundamentally deteriorated” since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that it was “essential to evaluate all measures to strengthen our deterrence and defense capabilities.”
The withdrawal will come into effect in September, and Finland will follow two weeks later. Antipersonnel land mines are already being used in the Ukraine war — including some supplied by the United States — and the latest announcements have raised fears that the indiscriminate weapons, and the terrible destruction they wreak on children and civilians, will spread once more.
The Halo Trust said that at least 60,000 people were known to have been killed or injured by land mines in Angola since 2008, and the true total was likely to be higher. Of those, 80 deaths have come in the past five years, despite continued clearance efforts.
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