DISARMAMENT: Landmines Ban Likely by End of Next Year

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 25 1996 (IPS) - Disarmament activists are confident that governments will approve a ban on the production and sale of all anti-personnel landmines by December 1997.

The momentum is now on the side of governments who seek a total ban on such mines, Robert Lawson, a disarmament specialist in Canada’s foreign ministry, told the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) Committee on Disarmament Thursday.

Following a meeting of some 50 anti-mines governments in Ottawa last month, Lawson sees real progress toward drafting “a very basic, simple text that says we should ban anti-personnel mines.” Besides Canada, the nations most strongly pushing for such a ban include South Africa, Germany, the Philippines, Australia, Mexico and Ireland, he added.

The crucial boost for the anti-mine campaign, however, is not simply the growing number of supporters for a ban, but also the recent announcement by Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy that his government will push for a Dec 1997 deadline by which the ban must be approved, argued Steve Goose, director of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Control Project.

Previously, Goose noted, nations had haggled over whether to ban only low-technology mines as opposed to more sophisticated ones which are easier to de-activate. Such a scheme, some activists claim, would only favour industrialised governments which market high-tech mines while penalising poorer countries — without ending the landmines crisis.

But now, Goose told the committee, “the (total) ban movement has clearly overtaken the restrictive approach” of only banning certain types of mines.

“It’s quite clear to me that we’re going to have a ban, and we’re going to have it soon,” he said. “Progress has been spectacular.”

He credited this to the success of anti-mine campaigners in convincing the public that the humanitarian devastation caused by landmines outweigh any military value they may have.

“The key to the success of the campaign was the early emphasis on the humanitarian disaster caused by mines,” explained Jim Wurst, editor of the ‘Disarmament Times’. That focus, in turn, has made it more difficult for governments to justify landmines as a legitimate weapon, he said.

“Landmines are not strategic weapons,” agreed Lawson. “In many cases, they’re tactical weapons of dubious tactical value.” He noted that when Croatian troops equipped with sophisticated tanks swept into Bosnian Serb-held zones of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1994, “they just treated (mines) as speed bumps.” Humanitarian aid groups and refugees were often not so fortunate.

For all that, mines remain a favoured weapon in many developing country conflicts both within and between states. In Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia, they have taken a staggering toll in human lives and misery. As many as 30,000 people are killed or maimed by landmines every year.

Those three nations have the greater share of the roughly 110 million landmines planted in 69 countries around the world, said Sadig Rasheed, an advisor to a forthcoming U.N. study on children and armed conflict. Their chief victims are civilians, especially children.

Yet some countries, notably the United States, are wary of banning all landmines too quickly. Although Washington has pushed for language committing all nations to “reach conclusion…as soon as possible” on a landmine ban, the White House has yet to decide on how soon that actually may be, Goose said.

The U.S. government has yet to decide whether it will even attend the meeting to ban landmines which Axworthy has set for the end of 1997 in Canada, he noted.

Other countries may also be able to delay the ban if they succeed in having the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva handle the issue, according to Goose. Canada will strongly oppose such a manoeuvre by arguing that landmines are primarily a humanitarian concern, and therefore outside the Committee’s purview, Lawson said.

Goose remains confident that a “campaign of stigmatisation” against landmines can also be taken to U.S. manufacturers. When Human Rights Watch wrote some 50 U.S. manufacturers to urge an end to all further production of anti-personnel mines, he said, 14 agreed in writing.

Stigmatising the weapons as indiscriminate and militarily dubious has worked well, agreed Wurst. Now, he argued, “this understanding has to be expanded from mines to encompass all light weapons.” Next on the list, he contended, should be cluster bombs and all weaponry that contains depleted uranium, a dense radioactive substance made from the potentially toxic uranium-238 isotope.