Combating the Land Mine Scourge

▪ 1997

by Douglas L. Clarke U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has called them "weapons of mass destruction in slow motion"—the 110 million land mines buried in 68 countries stretching from Cambodia to Costa Rica. The United Nations has estimated that they kill or maim roughly 20,000 people each year. Most of the casualties are innocent civilians, many of them children, because practically all of the mines in place today have no self-destruction or neutralization features. They remain deadly hazards long after a conflict has ended or the lines of confrontation have moved. With some 23 million land mines buried in its sands, Egypt has more unexploded mines than any other country. Many of these date from World War II, and the others are from the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars. The most densely mined country is Bosnia and Herzegovina, where there are an average of 152 mines per square mile. As international publicity and abhorrence to these indiscriminate killers have grown, so have the public and private efforts to remove the mines already planted and to ban or at least severely restrict their use in the future.

      Land mines fall into two broad categories: those that target tanks, trucks, and heavy vehicles and those designed to kill or injure people. Antimine efforts have focused on this latter group, commonly known as antipersonnel mines. Compared with the magnitude of the task, these efforts have been almost insignificant. Twenty times as many new mines are laid each year as are cleared. Many of the countries that are the most heavily mined—Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique—are also among the poorest in the world, and the social and economic price they pay is enormous. Afghanistan is thought to have 10 million unexploded mines, one for every two members of the population. Some 15 million mines are scattered throughout Angola, a country with 70,000 amputees from land mine explosions and where much of the agricultural land is unusable because of mines.

      Opponents of land mines placed high hopes that the first review conference of the 1980 Geneva Convention on Inhumane Weapons would result in an outright ban on antipersonnel land mines, but they were quickly disappointed. The conference met three times in late 1995 and early 1996, but it was obvious from the beginning that too few parties supported an outright ban. In the end the conference did agree on some important changes. The rewritten convention, which deals with antipersonnel mines, will apply in civil as well as international conflicts. The delegates mandated a transition from "dumb" to "smart" antipersonnel mines; except for those planted in mapped and guarded areas, mines must be equipped with devices that will render them permanently harmless after 120 days. As some existing mines are made out of plastic or wood and can be detected only by slow and dangerous probing by hand, the conference also directed that future mines have a metal mass of at least eight grams. Parties to the convention were given nine years to bring their stockpiles up to these standards.

      Disappointed that antipersonnel mines were not outlawed entirely by the review conference, its critics also complained that the delegates failed to approve a verification or enforcement regime for the convention and had failed to effectively block the trade in land mines. Critics also argued that the fuzzy definition of antipersonnel mines agreed upon by the conference opened the door for the use of antitank mines against personnel as technological advances blur the distinctions between the two types of mines. The convention had made no stipulations with regard to antitank mines. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the delegates they had ignored the "groundswell in public opinion" against mines and warned them that by the time of the next review conference, in 2001, "an additional 50,000 human beings will have been killed and a further 80,000 injured by land mines." Canada served as host for a conference in October on antipersonnel mines attended by 50 countries. It adopted a declaration calling for the earliest-possible agreement on a global ban, but many crucial nations, including Russia and most Middle Eastern countries, did not sign it, and China did not even attend.

      Land mine opponents hoped that unilateral and regional actions by governments might be more successful in the long run than the global approach exemplified by the Convention on Inhumane Weapons. In March 1995 Belgium became the first country to enact a law completely banning the manufacture, trade, use, and stockpiling of antipersonnel mines. That same year South Africa announced a permanent ban on the export of antipersonnel mines, while France established a moratorium on their production. In April 1996 Germany renounced the use of antipersonnel mines by its armed forces and said that it planned to destroy the remaining mines of that kind. In September Italy, one of the largest producers of land mines, pledged to renounce the production and export of these weapons and thus became the 33rd nation with a moratorium on the export of antipersonnel mines.

      In his 1994 UN General Assembly address, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton called for the eventual elimination of antipersonnel land mines, an appeal he repeated at the UN in September 1996. In March 1996 the U.S. announced a unilateral ban on the use of "dumb" antipersonnel mines and pledged to destroy its stockpile of such weapons by the end of 1999. It made a significant exception to this new policy, however; it would not apply in Korea, where such "dumb" mines would be used to "defend the United States and its allies from armed aggression across the Korean Demilitarized Zone." Many military authorities questioned the military utility of mines, but this U.S. policy strongly implied otherwise. Other countries saw a useful role for these weapons. Both China and Finland advocated "reasonable limits" rather than an outright ban and pointed to the defensive nature of mines along a border. Chile employed mines to combat drug merchants crossing the mountains.

      Whatever the prospects are for restricting or banning the manufacture and use of land mines, the herculean task of removing the millions of mines already in place remains. It took Germany three years and $175 million to clear the last 1,100 mines along the old border between the former East and West Germanys, a remnant of the more than 1.5 million mines once planted there. Furthermore, most of the countries plagued by mines are at the other end of the economic and technological spectrum from Germany, and they need international help. The UN and its agencies are operating demining programs in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Somalia. The Organization of American States is seeking to clear all land mines from Central America by 2000 (there are an estimated 170,000 mines in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica) and in May announced an initiative that could lead to the world's first land-mine-free zone.

      New technologies are being sought to make demining quicker and safer. Sniffer dogs are being used by some countries to detect the vapours given off by the mines' explosives. Lasers, infrared sensors, and ground-penetrating radars are also being used to locate mines. Superman has even been called in to help the effort in Bosnia; in a comic book in Serbo-Croatian, distributed by the U.S. government, the superhero teaches children about the dangers of land mines.

Douglas L. Clarke, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, is a military analyst and author of The Missing Man: Politics and the MJA.

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