On January 15, 1997, Princess Diana walked through a minefield in Angola.

The background for her walk was the civil war in Angola that raged for 27 years, from 1975 through 2002, which meant that she was walking through a minefield while the war was still going on. When Angola secured its independence from Portugal, a civil war broke out between a Communist faction supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and an anti-Communist faction supported by the United States. The war was not only long but deadly, resulting in 500,000 to 800,000 deaths of civilians and soldiers; and the displacement of 4 million refugees.

The war also left Angola infected with landmines which meant that on any given day, with a blue sky overhead, a person in the wrong place at the wrong time could step on a mine and be maimed or killed. In fact, although the war ended in 2002, since 2008, 60,000 innocent people have been killed or maimed by land mines.

So in 1997, Princess Diana walked through a minefield in Angola for two purposes: one, to raise awareness and urgency to clear the mines in Angola; and two, to create an international treaty that land mines no longer be used in war. Her goal was to have a “mine-free world.”Princess Diana’s walk was highly successful. In Angola over 120,000 landmines have been cleared since her walk. Land that used to be uninhabitable because of mines is now used for homes, schools and businesses. And, within a year of her walk, 164 nations signed the Ottawa Treaty banning land mines, leading to a halt in their production and to the destruction of stockpiles. Real progress.

You might think that with such dramatic success, the only reason for her children to ever go back to Angola would be to celebrate the mine-free world their mother had dreamed of. Sadly that is not the case. Just two weeks ago, on July 16 to be exact, twenty-eight years after his mother first walked through a minefield, Princess Diana’s son Prince Harry was back in Angola walking through minefields. Why now?