DISARMAMENT: U.N. Peacekeepers Are Latest Landmine Victims

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 1996 (IPS) - A weapon the United Nations describes as one of the world’s most devastating is now killing U.N. peacekeepers.

As of last week, anti-personnel landmines had killed 42 U.N. peacekeepers and injured 315, with most of the casualties taking place in the former Yugoslavia.

“Not much about those events have been seen in the media,” U.N. Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Peter Hansen told reporters here. “But it took an American casualty to get the issue of landmines into the editorial pages.”

When a U.S. soldier and two British army officials of the new multi-national Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia were wounded by landmines last month, the U.S. soldier made it to the front pages of leading newspapers here and was decorated for bravery in the line of duty.

The United Nations has led a global campaign for a ban on the production, export, and use of landmines. But the response to the campaign has been relatively poor.

A U.N. Review Conference, which met in Vienna last September, failed to take any drastic action against the spread of the weapon. The same Review Conference began another session in Geneva Monday to take up the issue.

An Inter-Agency Standing Committee of the United Nations has expressed disappointed at the outcome of the Vienna meeting.

“The discussions at the Review Conference centred on the military and economic aspects of the landmine issue and failed to take adequately into account the humanitarian dimension of the landmine crisis,” the Committee said in a statement Monday.

“A total ban on landmines is the only effective measure to end the indiscriminate killing and maiming of innocent civilians and relief personnel,” the Committee says.

The United Nations reckons there are some 110 million landmines in 69 countries. Hansen said current estimates place the number in Croatia at about three million, with a similar number in Bosnia and Hercegovina.

He said that most of the landmines came from 12 to 20 countries, including China, Italy, Bulgaria, and some of the former Eastern bloc nations.

The international community spends about one billion dollars annually to remove mines, according to U.N. estimates. The world body itself operates mine-clearing programmes and has hired deminers to remove some 100,000 landmines a year. But more than two million mines are added annually.

At the current rate of mine clearance, Hansen said, it would take about a thousand years to clear all the mines buried in Afghanistan alone.

“We are fighting a losing battle,” he said. “Unless the production and use of landmines is banned and stopped, we are never ever going to make any progress.”

“They are not just scattered in outlying areas, but could be found in the cities, in irrigation systems, roads and in areas where civilians moved about,” Hansen said.

Asked what enforcement measures were contemplated, Hansen admitted there were few that could be undertaken, although publicity would be a strong deterrent.

“Governments could change their positions on the landmines issue as the public became more aware of the problem,” he said.

In the meantime, the United Nations is studying the ownership of companies producing landmines.

In a message to the Geneva meeting Monday, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said: “I urge you to make full use of the extension of the negotiating process in order to keep the issue of landmines on the international agenda and to bring about further progress towards the ultimate goal of the total elimination of anti-personnel mines.”