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RIGHTS: Pitfalls On the Path to Clear Landmines

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 29 2004 (IPS) - Landmine clearance efforts around the world need to spend more money on clearing mines than on bureaucracy, according to a new book ‘Mine Action After Diana’ published Tuesday.

The book has been published by the campaigning group Landmine Action, The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and Pluto Press. It is written by mine action expert Stuart Maslen.

The book seeks to promote a campaign against landmines that had been supported by Princess Diana. The book which seeks in part to commemorate her campaign was launched a week ahead of the opening of a Diana memorial water system in Hyde Park in London next week. Princess Diana died Aug. 31, 1997 in a car crash in Paris.

The author and activists are seeking to strengthen their campaign for action under the Ottawa Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty that came into force five years ago. The treaty binds about two-thirds of countries that have accepted it to ban production, trade and use of anti-personnel mines, eliminate them from stockpiles and clear them from their lands by 2009.

The United States, Russia and China are some of the countries that have notably not signed the treaty. A mid-way review on the Ottawa treaty will take place in Nairobi later this year.

More than 30 million stockpiled mines have been destroyed and millions of mines and other explosives like cluster bombs, shells and grenades have been cleared under the anti-mine action so far. But that is only a fraction of the landmines out there.

“The Ottawa Treaty has been successful but there is no room for complacency,” Andrew Purkis, chief executive of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund said in a statement at the launch of the book. “There are still an estimated 200-215 million mines stockpiled by 78 countries and countless more scattered in the ground around the world.”

There is no firm estimate of how many landmines are actually scattered around. “There are many millions, spread over 85 countries,” director of Landmine Action Richard Lloyd told IPS. The most affected countries, he said, are Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Angola and Bosnia.

More than a billion dollars has been committed to mine action so far. Over the next five years “we would like to see at least the same amount committed,” Lloyd said. “But more than that we would like to see it used differently. We would like to see more money spent on actual mine clearance than on UN coordination or on research and development for hi- tech equipment that never gets used.”

A recent UN compilation of proposals showed that only about 25 percent of funding they handled was spent directly on mine clearance, Lloyd said. Several representations to the UN over this brought an acknowledgment from UN officials that they “recognise problems with the way things are being run,” Lloyd said.

The British government has recently changed its funding policy for mine action to pay mine agencies directly rather than channel the money through the UN.

The book says targeting of mine action has at times been “unacceptably poor, sometimes failing to address those minefields with the highest impact on the civilian population.” It says people most at risk need to be involved, rather than leaving mine action to outsiders. It argues the need for more transfer of skills from international experts to national counterparts.

“Countries affected by mines and explosive remnants of war ultimately have to be able to deal with the problem themselves,” the book says. Mine action has also done too little to help victims, it says. “Victim assistance services are still woefully inadequate.”

The book upholds the Sudan Landmine Information and Response Initiative as an example of mine action involving local communities. Members from both sides of the conflict use local information networks to build a picture of the mine problem, it says. The group has also trained local teams to clear landmines.

The Diana, Prince of Wales Memorial Fund has so far committed about eight million dollars to organisations working with people affected by landmines.