HALO Is Leaving Kosovo After 27 Years. What Is Left of the Job Now Belongs to Kosovo.

On 23 September 2026 the HALO Trust closed its Kosovo programme after 27 years. Of 585 mine and bomb casualties since 1999, 438 came in the first two years. The clearance that mattered opened an airport, a motorway and mountain trails, and about 6.67 km² of cluster contamination is still Kosovo's to clear.

In the summer of 1999 the old town of Gjakova, in western Kosovo, was mostly ash. Homes and shops had been burned, and the main mosque and its minaret had been deliberately destroyed that May. Today the old town has been rebuilt in the wooden Ottoman style, around a main street of busy café bars and restaurants.

On 23 September 2026 the HALO Trust, the British-American demining charity, announced that it had finished its humanitarian landmine clearance in Kosovo and was closing the programme. Agron Boshtraj joined HALO's Kosovo team in 1999, and he has seen what the country looked like at the start. "I have just come back from Gaza and the destruction there is very familiar to me," he told the charity. "It's what Kosovo looked like when the refugees returned home in 1999."

The headline most outlets ran was simple: the mines are gone. That is not quite what happened.

The first month

During the 1998–99 war more than 800,000 Kosovar Albanians were driven from their homes. When they came back that June they found their fields and school yards seeded with two different kinds of danger. The Yugoslav army had laid minefields along the borders with Albania and Montenegro. NATO had flown more than 10,000 combat bombing missions over Yugoslavia, and the cluster bombs it dropped on targets in Kosovo each carried hundreds of bomblets. HALO estimates that about one in five failed to go off.

Tom Dibb, still with the charity, drove in from a HALO programme in the Caucasus in a mine-protected Land Rover. "The NATO road convoy went in on 12 June and the humanitarian convoy followed on 13 June, with the HALO mine clearance at the front," he recalls. "Arriving in Pristina we were pelted with flowers."

The first month after the war was the worst. Around 150 people were killed or injured by explosives. The Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, which has tracked Kosovo since then, counts 585 casualties from mines and other explosive remnants between 1999 and 2024: 117 dead, 468 injured. Of those, 438 happened in 1999 and 2000, before anyone had organised proper survey and clearance. The bomblets were the crueller legacy for families. The Monitor notes that unexploded cluster submunitions caused five times more child casualties than landmines did. Children pick them up.

After 2000 the numbers fell off a cliff and stayed there. The last incident the Monitor lists is from 2019, when a woman and four children were hurt by hand grenades.

Which ground gets cleared first

By 2025 HALO's Kosovo teams had cleared an area the size of more than 2,800 football pitches. That figure is the one charities usually lead with, and Atholl Stewart, HALO Kosovo's last programme manager, thinks it is the wrong one. "The real impact of removing landmines and cluster bombs is not measured in hectares cleared," he says, "but in what that land makes possible over time."

Pristina airport, which now handles almost five million passengers a year, could only be redeveloped after a nearby minefield was cleared. The E851 motorway runs through Orlat, a district where hundreds of cluster bombs had to come out of the ground first. Above the town of Peja, near the Albanian border, HALO spent from 2020 until June 2024 on a steep, wooded slope of national park called Zatra, an area the size of 53 football pitches. The team found 26 BLU-97 bomblets. "It's very steep which made it hard to use a large detector held by two people," said the team commander, Luigj Bisaku. "Often we had to use small individual ones." Peja had 150,000 visitors in 2023, and many of them come for exactly those trails.

Research backs up Stewart's hunch, and it comes from another country. Giorgio Chiovelli, Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou studied Mozambique, which went from heavily contaminated in 1992 to declaring itself mine-free in 2015. They matched the full record of demining to satellite images of night-time light, a standard proxy for local economic activity. Across the country the link between clearance and growth was positive but modest. It grew large where cleared land connected things, along transport routes and around trade hubs, and stayed weak in remote farmland. The authors went further and estimated that if Mozambique had cleared its old transport corridors first, in a coordinated way, rather than in the scattered order it actually followed, the aggregate gains would have been considerable.

Read that back against Kosovo and the hectare count starts to look beside the point. An airport, a motorway and a hiking trail were each a bottleneck until someone walked them with a detector.

A charity that plans its own exit

"Most humanitarian interventions do not end," HALO wrote in its announcement. "HALO's do." That line is partly marketing, but only partly. Programmes that were meant to be temporary tend to become permanent, because the organisation running them needs the work to continue. A demining charity has an unusually clean test of success, and passing it means packing up.

What HALO leaves behind is mostly people. For most of the programme's life it employed more than a hundred local men and women, in a country where jobs are hard to find, particularly for women. In 2018 it started paying childcare stipends so that mothers could take the work. Kosovars trained on that programme now lead HALO operations in Syria and Ukraine, Positive News reports, and Boshtraj's trip to Gaza suggests the list is longer. HALO now has around 1,500 Ukrainian staff, and according to the Cluster Munition Monitor 2026, at least 927 people were killed by cluster munitions in Ukraine last year, 87 percent of the world's total.

The part that is not finished

The explosives, in fact, are not all gone. HALO has stopped. The job has not. The charity is handing "any residual contamination" to Kosovo's own mine action authorities, and there is more of it than the word residual suggests. The Kosovo Mine Action Centre reported in January 2025 that roughly 6.67 square kilometres were still contaminated with cluster munitions. Norwegian People's Aid, which returned to Kosovo in 2014 after that centre confirmed the problem was bigger than thought, is still clearing in northern municipalities that missed out on the early systematic work. Kosovo's own mine action strategy sets 2030 as the date to finish.

The money is getting thinner. Mine Action Review reports that clearance output in Kosovo fell in 2025, partly because United States funding was suspended that year. And survivors have been an afterthought throughout. The Monitor notes that Kosovo still has no dedicated victim assistance programme, and that the law on war victims is often applied arbitrarily.

None of this undoes what happened. A country where 438 people were killed or maimed in 1999 and 2000 now goes years without a recorded casualty. Life expectancy has climbed from 58 during the war to 78, according to HALO, and the economy has grown past 14 billion dollars. The diaspora in Germany and Switzerland could send money home to build houses because there was safe ground to build them on.

Stewart puts it better than the hectare count does. "Mine clearance was not the outcome of Kosovo's recovery," he says. "It was one of the prerequisites that made recovery possible." The ground that is left is Kosovo's to clear now.

Sources

• The HALO Trust, "HALO clears the way for Kosovo's future", 23 September 2026 — https://www.halotrust.org/news/halo-concludes-humanitarian-landmine-clearance-in-kosovo/
• The HALO Trust, "Kosovo: clearing explosives, creating jobs" (programme page) — https://www.halotrust.org/where-we-work/europe-and-caucasus/kosovo/
• The HALO Trust, "Clearing the dangers on Kosovo's Accursed Mountains", 19 July 2024 — https://www.halotrust.org/news/clearing-the-dangers-on-kosovos-accursed-mountains/
• Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, Kosovo country profile: casualties and victim assistance — https://the-monitor.org/country-profile/kosovo/impact
• G. Chiovelli, S. Michalopoulos, E. Papaioannou, "Landmines and Spatial Development", NBER Working Paper 24758, June 2018 — https://www.nber.org/papers/w24758
• Norwegian People's Aid, Kosovo programme — https://www.npaid.org/mine-action-and-disarmament/where-we-work/kosovo
• Mine Action Review, Kosovo — https://www.mineactionreview.org/country/kosovo
• The HALO Trust, "Cluster bombs killed record numbers of civilians in 2025", 8 September 2026 — https://www.halotrust.org/news/unexploded-cluster-bombs-kill-more-than-ever-before/
• Positive News, "What went right this week", week 39 of 2026 — https://www.positive.news/society/good-news-stories-from-week-39-of-2026/