Landmines

Children and landmines

Many civilian casualties are also children. In many countries, child survivors have to end their education prematurely due to the period of recovery needed and the accompanying financial burden of rehabilitation on families, the ICBL notes in a 2009 update on landmines and children.

As that report describes, suffering at an early age carries through to later life; education rates among child survivors are lower than average while school drop-outs are more frequent, diminishing employment prospects later on. This can happen because

• Psychological support for children experiencing trauma is rarely available while the psychological effects linger for many years (and sometimes for the rest of their lives).
• Accessible inclusive or special education is seldom available and further hindered by the lack of appropriate training for teachers.
• Insufficient awareness of disability issues among teachers and fellow pupils can lead to discrimination, isolation and the inability to participate in certain activities.
• This can be de-motivating for child survivors to stay in school.

Despite the challenges, Vietnam and Mozambique, for example, have attempted to address these problems with efforts for more inclusive education. Other countries such as Croatia and Lebanon, for example, have less progress, according to the ICBL update.

Landmines and non-human victims

Most discussions on landmine victims understandably refer to human suffering.

Without belittling that, there are also animals that suffer from landmines as the image shows.

Elephants in Sri Lanka (as seen in the photo) and along the Thai-Burma border, for example, are increasing victims of landmines.

Livestock and other animals can all fall victim too, which for some communities can be a major problem. However, as hard as civilian casualty data can be to obtain, it seems harder to obtain data on animal victims.

US efforts to avoid landmine use

US law has prohibited all antipersonnel mine exports since October 1992 and in December 2007, the export moratorium was extended until 2014.

Furthermore, the US has not used antipersonnel mines since 1991, nor produced them since 1997.

The ICBL also reports that the United States has contributed at least $796.8 million in support of mine action between 1999 and 2008.

Yet, the US still hasn’t signed the landmine treaty

President Clinton, in 1994, was the first leader to call for an international ban on anti-personnel landmines. Yet in 1997 when they all met in Ottawa, Canada, to sign a treaty to ban the use, the USA weren’t there. The wanted the option to use landmines in some cases, such as along the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. This, they say would help to defend South Korea.

As the introduction to a landmine documentary noted back in 1999, their refusal to sign the treaty also paradoxically allowed the US the right to lay mines anywhere, even as it supported mine removal and humanitarian relief for the victims of mine warfare.

With the Clinton administration deciding not to sign the treaty, they set the objective of joining in 2006. However, the Bush administration announced in 2004 that the US would not accede.

According to its policy announced in February 2004, the US can use any type of landmine (antipersonnel or antivehicle) that self-destructs and self-deactivates for the indefinite future and without any geographic restrictions. The policy also allows the US to use non-self-destructing antipersonnel mines in Korea until the end of 2010.

Around the time the treaty came into effect, the US were considering a new mine systems, which caused uproar in the human rights and disarmament activist circles.

Human Rights Watch, for example (also part of the ICBL coalition) has been very critical of the United States’s landmine policies. Back in 2001, for example, it criticized the US as also bearing responsibility for the landmine crisis pointing out that at the time, the United States was one of the largest producers, exporters and stockpilers of landmines.

However, in 2002, the US canceled a program to combine existing antipersonnel and antivehicle mines into a mixed system.

For a number of years the US was looking into developing new mine systems that would have been prohibited by the mine ban treaty, but such plans were abandoned in 2008 by the Pentagon. The US can, however, still use non-self-destructing antivehicle mines without geographic restriction, but only with presidential authorization, and only until the end of 2010.

The US does stockpile a lot of landmines, however — approximately 10.4 million antipersonnel mines and 7.5 million antivehicle mines, the third largest landmine stockpile in the world after China and Russia, according to the IBCL. As of 2002, the stockpile had 1.56 million non-self-destructing landmines, including 1.16 million M14 and M16 antipersonnel mines (which are the ones for any future war in Korea) and about 403,000 Claymore mines. About half of those mines are stored in the continental US. The US military also keeps a substantial number of self-destructing, scatterable antipersonnel mines in South Korea.

With Obama’s administration, messages about landmine ban position has been mixed. At the end of November 2009, the State Department seemed to announce that it would not sign the 10-year-old anti-personnel landmines treaty. However, perhaps because of the immediate criticism that announcement generated, the next day the State Department insisted that Washington’s policy on the issue was still being reviewed.

Geopolitically, as the previous link noted, the initial State Department announcement was seen as a victory for the Pentagon, which has long opposed the treaty, and Republicans wary of all international treaties that may limit Washington’s freedom to act in the world as it wishes.

But other key nations have also opposed the landmine treaty, which the 2009 landmine monitor report also details. (From the previous link, country-level reports on progress and other issues are available.)