- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
Huambo, Angola (CNN) - Enrique, Duke of Sussex, will make "a particularly significant and moving journey" during his 10-day tour of South Africa, when he honors his mother's legacy on Friday and returns to the site of the famous hike in the minefield that his mother visited.
Admired for her humanitarian work, Princess Diana advocated the cleaning of land mines when she visited Huambo, the country's second city, 22 years ago with the organization The HALO Trust. The city was one of Angola's fiercest battlefields during the country's 27-year civil war: its land was contaminated with these weapons.
A 1997 photo of Diana wearing protective gear while being escorted through a clear road in the minefield, live, and comforting the amputee children caused global efforts to end the production and use of these weapons . He died only a few months before an international treaty that prohibited land mines was drafted and signed.
Archie, son of Enrique and Meghan, makes his debut in South Africa
“The results we have now are due to Diana's contribution. She made the donors know that the international community is also part of this problem and that they could help, ”HALO Angola Operations Manager Valdemar Goncalves Fernandes told CNN. "We do not produce ammunition and mines in Angola."
Fernandes, 45, is the only current HALO staff member who worked in the demining at the time of Diana's visit, and had joined the charity a few weeks earlier. At that time he was a 23-year-old boy, who had been deployed in a nearby minefield the day the princess visited him and saw the images in a newsletter after his shift, since the trip had been kept secret .
During her visit 22 years ago, the late Princess of Wales, photographed here with children injured by land mines, also visited the Neves Bendinha orthopedic workshop in Luanda, Angola.
Originally from Huambo, Fernandes lived in the city during the brutal conflict, which ended in 2002, including two phases of siege and intense fighting. He recalled a particularly dangerous period, since December 1994, when the city was in the hands of the UNITA rebels. Hunger and struggle prevailed and forced recruitment into the militia forces was a constant threat, he said.
The thorough process of mine clearance of the place Diana visited was suspended after her trip in 1997, due to the changing situation in the war-torn country. Fernandes oversaw its completion between 2004 and 2005.
He said it was "a big surprise when they told me that I would meet Prince Henry in the exact place where Princess Diana visited, 22 years ago."
Diana broke through the red flags that warn of active land mines during a visit to Huambo, Angola, in 1997.
Harry and Meghan's private secretary, Samantha Cohen, said - in a statement, before the trip - that it would be "a particularly significant and moving journey" for the Duke of Sussex.
He added that the 35-year-old prince would "see how an area that was a dangerous minefield in 1997 is now a busy street with schools, shops and houses, a demonstration of the benefits of mining."
After visiting the old minefield, Enrique will head to the Huambo Orthopedic Center, another place his mother visited more than two decades ago. The facility has been recently renovated and will be renamed in honor of Diana during Enrique's visit.
Felisberto Cambonguele, 50, is head of the Prosthesis Department. After having worked at the clinic for the past 32 years, I vividly remembered the day the princess came to visit.
He told CNN that hospital staff was removed because of Diana's relaxed attitude. "We began to think that the princess would be very well dressed [and that] she would wear a crown," he recalled. Instead, the woman who arrived "seemed the most loving person."
"She had contact with our patients, touched our children who were also receiving treatment ... it was an unimaginable joy," he said. "Many of us realized much later that she was a princess because she presented herself with so much humility."
Cambonguele said Diana's visit encouraged residents to take precautions, in addition to the growing efforts of NGOs to extract mines from the land.
Enrique, photographed visiting a cleaning project of a minefield in Mozambique, in 2010. The Duke of Sussex has resumed the issue of the removal of land mines in the years after his mother's death, in 1997.
Angola's protracted conflict left up to 1.5 million people dead, according to the CIA World Factbook. Around 4 million people were forced to flee their homes and were internally displaced; more than half of them, children, said the United Nations.
The elimination of land mines in the years since Diana's trip has allowed the displaced to return to their communities to rebuild villages and build hospitals, schools and homes, according to HALO.
However, despite all the work to destroy landmines in Angola, there are still more.
In October 2016, Manuel Rodríguez, who was then eight years old, dated a group of friends. They picked mangoes and played under a tree, about 800 meters from their house, when they found a metal object and began kicking it like a soccer ball. The explosion killed the 10-year-old cousin of Manuel, Frederico, and wounded him so badly that they had to amputate his left leg below the knee.
"I felt angry at first," Manuel's mother, Ermelinda, told CNN. “The war ended a long time ago. Many people go through that place. There are always many people there and they had never found it. It had to be the day the children were there. ”
- Enrique and Meghan, Africa doesn't want them
Manuel, who will also meet with Prince Henry on Friday, taught him how to wear a prosthesis at the Huambo Orthopedic Center and will return to receive new prostheses as he grows up. Since the accident, he has mastered his crutches and returned to his old school.
About 100,000 landmines have been destroyed since HALO began operations in Angola in 1994, the group said. In May, the national mining authority estimated that 1,104 mined fields in Angola have to be cleared, at a cost of almost $ 263 million.
HALO has been leading a campaign to free Angola from all its mines by 2025. But with the current funding rate, he said the threat of landmines would continue to plague their lands until about 2046.
Even with the large amount of work still to be done, only 12 months ago HALO seriously considered closing his Angola team, citing massive donor fatigue. The charity said the funds for the removal of landmines had fallen from $ 48.1 million in 2006 to a record low of $ 3.1 million in 2017.
However, two things changed it, the organization said. The first was a powerful speech by Enrique in June, urging governments to help clean up Angola finally; the second was a massive financing initiative of 60 million dollars from the country's government.
Through the Okavango Headwaters project, the hope is to clear the land mines of two of the country's national parks, renewing and preserving a vital transnational ecosystem that spans Namibia, Angola and Botswana. Harry will launch this project in Dirico, in the southeast of Angola, on Friday morning before his arrival in Huambo.
“People have forgotten the war, but the mines are still there. We need them removed, ”said Fernandes. “All these items come from abroad, from western countries. I still believe that the international community needs to commit a little more to solve this problem once and for all. ”
Meghan Markle, Prince Henry, Princess Diana