Why are limbs still being lost to landmines?

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5827210.ece



March 2, 2009


Diana put mine clearance on the political map. But, on the tenth anniversary of the treaty she inspired, millions of mines remain

Damian Whitworth
At a café in the Bosnian town of Tuzla, on a clammy August afternoon in 1997, an American man who had both his legs blown off in Somalia waited for an unlikely visitor to a local volleyball game. Ken Rutherford, one half of a two-man landmine survivors' group, had fixed up the “sitting” game between landmine survivors and was somewhat amazed that the event was to be observed by the world's media.



Earlier, a Bosnian boy had asked what the fuss was all about. “Some Diana is moving in,” replied his friend. He was, of course, talking about the Princess of Wales. That summer her visit to Bosnia was to put the unglamorous, underexposed issue of landmines on the front pages.

Three weeks later she was dead. But the momentum that she lent the issue kept it rolling forward. Two weeks after her funeral the Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Convention, was approved by 100 countries. It prohibits the use, stockpiling and production of antipersonnel landmines and set a ten-year deadline for clearing mines. The treaty came into force in March 1999 and its tenth anniversary was marked yesterday.

But what, in the absence of Diana, has been its legacy? After her death, unsurprisingly, landmines dropped out of the news. Ten years on, there have been undoubted successes but also depressing failures; continued deaths and thousands of maimings, political infighting and controversy over the failure of Britain, one of the biggest sponsors of landmine clearance, to clean up its own backyard.

Lou McGrath, chief executive of the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which was a co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on the treaty, says that the publicity Diana brought to the issue put pressure on governments and ensured that it was not watered down. Mike Whitlam, the former Red Cross director-general who worked closely with Diana on landmine issues, goes further. “I don't know whether Ottawa would have been as well supported or whether governments would have known as much about it without her,” he says. “She was crucial. She was one of only two or three global icons who could push something like that through. It needs somebody like her or Mandela, otherwise people don't listen.”

Ken Rutherford was also a member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) , the coalition that won the Nobel Peace Prize. He flew from Diana's funeral in London to Oslo for the conference that approved the treaty. Of Diana's role, he says: “She transferred it from a military to a humanitarian issue. The Bosnia visit brought the media to the field.” By visiting victims of all ethnic groups “she showed that landmines are indiscriminate”.

Diana did not speak to those of us who followed her on that trip. She didn't need to - she knew the power of a picture, just as she did when she went to Angola earlier in the year and walked through a minefield.

“Treaties don't clear mines,” says McGrath. “After all the publicity, people say ‘They've signed a treaty! They believe the issue has been dealt with.”

Landmines are explosive devices placed in, or on, the ground, which are triggered by a person or vehicle passing close by. The treaty has been hailed as successful for reducing hugely stockpiles of landmines and their use. Some 42 million stockpiled landmines have been destroyed and very few countries now deploy them, unlike in the 1990s when several dozen nations used landmines, including the US in the Gulf War. Last year two governments - Burma, and Russia (in Chechnya) - are believed to have done so. “That's a massive decrease,” says Stuart Maslen of the Landmine Monitor, the ICBL's research project.

Rutherford believes that “a major victory” has been the stigmatisation of the weapon. As Maslen puts it: “People don't want to be seen using mines. It's not acceptable.”

But McGrath cautions that while “to some degree the campaign has stigmatised the weapon, it hasn't stopped its use. Especially for some of the poor, non-state groups, landmines are still an effective weapon.” Landmine Monitor believes that armed groups have used them in Afghanistan, Colombia, Ecuador, Iraq, Peru, India, Burma, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. There have been unsubstantiated reports from several other countries.

When it comes to the clearance of mines planted during conflicts that continue to blow up people for years afterwards, the picture is more mixed. One problem is figuring out the scale of the challenge. More than a million landmines are thought to have been disposed of, but these days mine action groups shy away from estimating how many mines exist because previous estimates are thought to have been badly inaccurate. “The estimate a decade ago of 100 million mines was way over the top. Beyond that I couldn't give you a figure,” says Maslen. “The problem was never as large as everyone made it out to be.”

If not 100 million, there are certainly still many millions of landmines in former war zones. In the 1990s, an average of 20,000 incidents a year involving mines were recorded, a third of which are estimated to have killed people. Last year there were 5,426 reported accidents, with 1,401 deaths. The downward trend can be attributed both to reduced use of mines and to removal of old mines.

McGrath points out that it took Europe 50 years to clear its mines after the Second World War, and they still turn up occasionally. But Guy Willoughby, of the HALO Trust, another of Diana's favoured British charities, that specialises in the removal of hazardous war debris, points to the clear-up after the Second World War as evidence that we are painfully slow in our progress: “Northwest Europe was cleared very quickly because people just got on with it - field managers were not distracted by having to attend workshops on gender transition and converting their monthly operational plans into new-fangled goals and supergoals.” Villagers in Cambodia or Angola “don't give a damn about clever international methodologies”.

Willoughby is a fierce critic of what he calls “the mine action industry” and says that Diana's involvement turned out to be a mixed blessing, through no fault of her own. Her attachment to the issue “gave the subject matter great momentum but it didn't necessarily increase the number of mine clearance teams out in the villages. It created a huge sector known as ‘mine action'.” He says that international donors who want to help the clean-up face a “snowstorm” of funding applications, and that money is wasted on conferences and projects of tangential importance. He is also aggrieved that in Afghanistan, where HALO claims to have been responsible for 65 per cent of the mines destroyed last year, the UN is shifting its funding to areas where his organisation regards it as too dangerous to work. He says that he will be forced to make redundancies: “Better to have 634 redundant deminers than 634 tortured and beheaded (or bombed) deminers.”

Others strongly dispute his criticisms. “Nobody wants to spend unnecessary time or money on meetings but you have to keep up the political pressure,” says Maslen. Rutherford adds: “There are groups involved in this business who criticise the ICBL for spending too much money on conferences and taking money from clearance. I have said to them: ‘I would love to see your budget from 1991-97 and your budget now.' Support for clearance has gone up year on year. There are so many legitimate issues in the world to support. Governments are going to support those issues that are most relevant to them. If no one is crying foul , none is going to get support.”

So what has been achieved? “We have had ten years of practical effort every day in the worst affected areas - people searching for and clearing mines,” says Richard Moyes, of Landmine Action. “It has been a remarkable, effective effort. On the other hand, we don't want to be complacent about it or whitewash areas of concern. A number of countries have not met their obligations.”

Clearing mines is a slow, painstaking and dangerous business. Mines must be detected, either by people scouring the ground with metal detectors or by bomb-sniffing dogs or even, sometimes, rats. They must then be dug out carefully and defused.

De-mining organisations such as the HALO Trust, which employs 8,000 people, are paid by governments and other organisations to undertake specific projects. Some deminers are former service personnel with expertise in bomb-disposal techniques, but most are recruited locally and sometimes include landmine victims who need a livelihood after losing limbs.

Under the treaty, countries had ten years to clear up their landmines. Last year 15 countries that failed to clear all their mines were given extensions to the deadline that has just expired. One of those grudgingly given another ten years by the ICBL was Britain, the sixth biggest donor to landmine- clearance organisations (see box, right).

Elsewhere there have been marked successes. For example, HALO has declared its work in northern Mozambique done. There has been great progress in Cambodia, which some believe could be almost mine-free in a few years. But more than 70 countries still need to clear mines.

In Bosnia, for example, the picture is grim. There are more than 1,500km2 of suspect land to be cleared (at conservative estimates) and on average 3.2km2 is cleared each year. “Bosnia has been a big disappointment,” says Maslen. “A lot of money has gone in, a lot of international assistance. Year after year they fail to meet their own targets.”

Rutherford, who has returned to Bosnia, says: “We could pour in hundreds of millions of dollars but those mines will never be cleared until there is a final political solution.” McGrath is optimistic about the big picture. “Within the next five years we should have done the worst of it,” he says. But Whitlam, who is no longer involved in demining charities and so has no need to present the task as manageable, is more pessimistic: “It will take a long time.”

Landmine clearance relies on funding from governments (the US is the largest donor). But international aid for landmines work is down: in 2007, pre-credit crunch, it fell by $45 million on the previous year, to $431 million (£304 million). The collapse in the value of the pound against the dollar has also effectively made projects more expensive for British organisations. A $6 million programme that previously cost £3 million now costs more like £4 million. “So simply to maintain our number of deminers we need an extra 30 per cent,” says Willoughby.

McGrath says that the decade since Diana's death “has been a hard ride and we have to continue to be inventive in keeping the issue alive”. MAG now has 3,500 people around the world. But if Diana were still around , he says, “I think we would be a lot wealthier. The publicity would still be there and people would still be writing about us.”

Rutherford is now a professor of political science at Missouri State University and is writing a book about the drafting of the Ottawa Convention. His original two-man band is now known as Survivor Corps and has offices worldwide and a headquarters in Washington employing 20 people. He was heavily involved in the convention banning cluster munitions that was approved last year.

Diana's death did not impede his organisation: “She gave us the political and economic legitimacy for donors and governments to recognise our skills set and see us as an organisation worth supporting.” He wishes that mine-clearance companies had more resources, but believes that the treaty will stand as “an excellent example of how the world came together [to show how] a new form of politics can be developed between governments and non-government organisations towards a prohibition.”

Who knows how much farther along the road to total landmine clearance the world would be if Diana had lived. Rutherford believes that she was committed to the cause: “She was very attractive, well-spoken, articulate, independent-minded. And she knew how to get things done.”

Angola

240sqkm of mined areas

Tens of thousands have been severely injured by landmines in Angola, the country whose plight helped to launch the initial campaign - led by the Princess of Wales. Since then, NGOs and the Government have worked to clear the country, with more than 50km2 demined since 2003. However, an estimated 240km2 of mined areas remain to be cleared.

Colombia

200 deaths

Despite destroying its army's entire stockpile in 2004, anti-personnel mines are still laid in Colombia. Farc, the Marxist rebel group in the country's remote south, still justifies their use: Raul Reyes, its deceased commander, said that they “try to ensure that there are no civilian casualties”. About 200 people died in Colombia last year as a result of landmines. One may have been Raul Reyes, whom some reports claim trod on one of his own mines.

United States

10.4 million landmines

The United States, which has not signed the Mine Ban Treaty, considers landmines to be a “needed military capability” and maintains a stockpile of 10.4 million. Their main strategic justification is South Korea, where the US holds more than a million anti-personnel mines for use in the event of a war with the north. As of 2010, however, all US mines will self-destruct or self-deactivate after a set period.

Former Yugoslavia

1,500sqkm of mined areas

Given their size, the countries involved in the 1990s Yugoslav conflict are among the worst afflicted by landmines in the world - in particular Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Balkan state has destroyed most of its stockpile of half a million mines, but has an estimated contaminated area of 1,500km2 - more than double that of Afghanistan. De-mining accidents there are often fatal, with six people dying during one week this time last year.

United Kingdom

The Falklands

The reason for Britain's non-compliance with the Ottawa Convention lies in the South Atlantic. There are an estimated 16-20,000 mines left in the Falkland Islands, a legacy of the conflict with Argentina in 1982. Many are in areas close to Port Stanley, the capital of the islands. The mines were laid by Argentine forces.

Britain abandoned its clear-up in the early 1980s after several deaths of de-miners. “We would have expected greater progress on clearance,” says Stuart Maslen, of Landmine Monitor.

The Falkland Islanders themselves are ambivalent about clearance. They point out that the mines are in clearly signed and sealed-off areas, and that two generations have grown up with them without anyone getting hurt. Even the penguins are untroubled - they seem to be able to waddle through the minefields unharmed.

“There is no economic or social reason to clear them,” says Mike Summers, a member of the Falkland Islands executive council. “They present no danger. It would be nice if they weren't there, but to our way of thinking spending hundreds of millions of pounds to clear them would be an appalling waste of money. It would be better to spend the money in the Balkans or somewhere where there is a real and serious danger.”

Lou McGrath, of MAG, admits that “I would put the Falklands low down the list of urgent areas”. But Richard Moyes, of the campaigning group Landmine Action, insists that the work must start: “We recognise that it's technically and economically challenging, but it's an obligation that Britain has had for ten years and it's a legal obligation. You can't just ignore it. If rich countries start choosing which parts of the law to implement, they have very little credibility when it comes to pushing those such as Angola and others.”

In a barely reported move, Britain said last year that it will begin trial de-mining work in three of the 117 mined areas on the Falklands. It is hard to believe that all the areas of rocky scree and swampy peat will be cleared in another ten years without a sudden and enormous push.