Killing fields: the anti-personnel mine is not a weapon, it is a crime against humanity. Why is it still used?

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by W.F. Deedes

The anti-personnel mine is not a weapon, it is a crime against humanity. Why is it still used?

IN the long grasses of Cambodia, hidden under the rubble of Kabul, Afghanistan, and in a score of other countries, there lurks the world's cruelest soldier, indiscriminately killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children. If the world were able to focus on the carnage wrought on some of the poorest people on earth by the anti-personnel mine, there would be international uproar.

But the anti-personnel mine strikes singly, not in headline-grabbing massacres. None of us hear about the old woman gathering firewood in Mozambique who is suddenly struck down. There is no report of the child who loses her life in Angola while fetching water for her family. Nobody hears their cries. Nobody sees their bodies.

In a 1994 State Department report, it was reckoned that anti-personnel mines claimed some 2,000 victims a month. The International Committee of the Red Cross has estimated that 900 of these casualties result in death. That is among the more dependable figures.

For the rest, nobody knows for sure how many million mines are scattered around the Third World, nor how many millions more remain stockpiled for use in the future. It is a certainty, however, that more mines have been laid in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere in the last few years than all the de-mining teams in the world have yet managed to pick up.

So this scourge will be with us for a long time to come. Thousands of people will be killed, thousands more will lose limbs; and, to judge from the abortive outcome of the recent conference reviewing the 1980 UN Inhumane Weapons Convention, most industrial nations of the world have no serious intention of altering their course.

Professional defenders of the anti-personnel mine in countries like Britain and America have learned a language all their own, calculated to convey the best of intentions while stopping well short of any fundamental change of policy. The next review conference is to be held in five years' time. By then, according to the United Kingdom Working Group on Landmines, another 50,000 human beings will have been killed and 80,000 more injured by landmines.

Nor is that all. What appalls those of us who visit mine-laden countries are the millions of acres which have been sterilized by mines or fear of mines, and so are denied to those who earn their living off the land. What is the future of a refugee who, after long exile, returns to his village, only to find the land infested with mines? The chances are that he will set about trying to clear what he can. A high proportion of casualties in Cambodia have been inflicted on people who knew they were in dangerous zones but did not feel they could afford to abandon their land.

It has been reckoned that a mine which costs $3 to purchase and almost nothing to lay costs between $200 and $1,000 to clear. The United Nations maintains about 5,000 de-miners in the field; but in the last recorded year they managed to lift only 85,000 mines. It was estimated that during the same period some 2.5 million new mines were laid.

Given these limitations, I believe that even as we campaign for a ban on these mines, non-governmental organizations should play a bigger role in mine-awareness education, starting with schoolchildren from the age of seven. Earlier this year I saw such work being undertaken by CARE International, the Atlanta-based aid and development organization. Unquestionably, more work in this field could reduce casualties.

WHAT drove me to campaign against these mines at an unlikely age for crusades was what I have witnessed in some Third World hospitals. A man seized with a heart attack in Piccadilly Circus or on Manhattan's 44th Street can reckon on an ambulance reaching him fairly quickly and the best of care in the nearest hospital. There is no prospect of that for victims of mines.

The accident is most likely to happen in a remote area. If the victim has not been killed outright, the probable result is loss of the leg below or above the knee, together with other, incidental injuries. The explosion, which has the effect of driving detritus into the shattered limb, may arrest bleeding for half an hour; but not many of those wounded in Third Wold countries can count on practical help, let alone treatment, within that space of time. I have seen victims being taken to the hospital on bicycles.

In what passes for emergency rooms in some of these places, the surgeons are skilled but wretchedly ill-equipped. Painkillers and other medications are in short supply -- partly because if they were more abundant, they would be sold off. I have watched operations in which the surgeon has had to work with barely sufficient anesthetic, marveling at the stoicism of the patient.

What is the outlook for a man who lives by tilling the land after he has lost a leg or an arm? If he is lucky he may eventually get an artificial limb. There are prosthetic factories in Third World countries, some of them run by the Red Cross -- but they can supply only a small proportion of the need. The chances are that the man who has lost his leg will be driven to become a beggar.