A sign saying MINES sits right next to the children playground and the kids here know why. “Because there are mines and you can die,” they say.

This is what the children from the village of Hodzici told us in 2014, and it is what they are still saying today.

Nearly 15 percent of Bosnia’s population is endangered by land mines left over from Bosnia’s 1992-1996 war. Hodzici, the northern village close to the town of Doboj, is one of the 1.400 Bosnian communities that have to cope with the menace that has already killed or injured some 30 people here. Villagers have stopped counting.

“It is a catastrophe,” Mehmedalija Hasanamidzic Mesa declared as he skillfully waled along the edge of a minefield.

One part of it seems clean, while the other is overgrown with clover.  

“My brother, his wife… people plow the fields, but the area has not been checked,” Hasanamidzic said.  

Although a part of the village has been cleared, some houses remain dangerously close to the mines and the fear of them is already engraved in the faces of the villagers. It can be heard when they sigh.  

“My nephew died as he was tending sheep. We all know where the land mines are, but someone occasionally goes to chop wood,” said Safet Avdic with a one-word explanation: “Poverty.”  

The hamlet of Barakovac has been cleared last year and he was told that the area around his home is safe, but he is still distrustful.

“Well, some 99 percent of it is cleared, but there is that one percent that could be fatal,” Avdic said. “Children should not walk through the woods anyway, why would a child be in the woods? Something might happened because of that one percent,” he added.  

A part of the village that has not been cleared lies right at the 30-kilometer-long line separating Bosnia’s two entities – Republika Srpska and the Federation. And that line is nothing but a minefield.  

Despite warnings, dozens of people have been killed or injured – mostly shepherds and people who went to chop wood. Recently, it’s been mainly wildlife. Three people have died and four were injured last year while trying to make the land arable.  

Hodzici seems to be a village on no man’s land. Residents pay their electricity bills in Republika Srpska, their phone bills in the Federation, but expect help from neither. They don’t even count on Bosnia and Herzegovina helping them get rid of the mine fields.  

“I doubt it,” Hasanamidzic said, adding that politicians seem to be worrying only about themselves. “I don’t know. God help us.”