SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
landmines
As US Approves Landmines for Ukraine, Victims Demand 'Mine-Free World' at Global Summit
"Every landmine planted is a child, a civilian, a woman, who is just waiting for their legs to be blown off, for his life to be taken," said one survivor who lost a leg to a landmine in 2005.
Nov 26, 2024
"Look what anti-personnel landmines will do to your people," read a sign displayed by two of the protesters who gathered in Siem Reap, Cambodia this week to confront delegates at a conference on the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty.
The people holding the sign were among those who took part in the demonstration while using wheelchairs or crutches due to the amputations and serious injuries they have suffered from landmine attacks.
More than 100 people lined a walkway leading to the conference venue on Sunday as the Siem Reap-Angkor Summit on a Mine-Free World opened.
The conference began days after the Biden administration announced a reversal of its own policy and approved a plan to provide anti-personnel landmines to Ukraine—a decision that was condemned by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and other human rights groups.
As Amnesty International USA advocacy direct Ben Linden said last week, the weapons are "inherently indiscriminate" because they cause explosives to scatter across a wide region, putting people at risk long after conflicts end. The majority of landmine victims are children.
In 2023, at least 5,757 people were killed or maimed by landmines, 84% of whom were civilians. Over one-third were children.
Alex Munyambabazi, who lost a leg to a landmine in 2005 in Uganda, was among those who assembled at the landmines summit.
"We don't want to see any more victims like me, we don't want to see any more suffering," he toldAgence France-Presse (AFP). "Every landmine planted is a child, a civilian, a woman, who is just waiting for their legs to be blown off, for his life to be taken. I am here to say we don't want any more victims. No excuses, no exceptions."
The U.S. and Russia are not signatories to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, but Ukraine is. According to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Ukraine "asked" for anti-personnel landmines.
Tamar Gabelnick, director of ICBL, told AFP that Ukraine's use of U.S.-supplied landmines would signify a "blatant disregard for their obligations under the mine ban treaty."
Ukrainian delegates were present at the Siem Reap conference this week.
In a message delivered to delegates in Siem Reap, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the "important progress" made by the treaty, "with over 55 million anti-personnel devices destroyed across 13,000 square kilometers in over 60 countries, and thousands of people receiving lifesaving awareness education and victim assistance services."
"I call on states parties to meet their obligations and ensure compliance to the convention, while addressing humanitarian and developmental impacts through financial and technical support," he said. " I also encourage all states that have not yet acceded to the convention to join the 164 that have done so."
"A world without anti-personnel mines is not just possible," Guterres said. "It is within reach."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Inconceivable': US Condemned Over Decision to Provide Landmines to Ukraine
"Ukraine already faces years of demining due to Russian landmine use," said the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. "Adding to this contamination would impact its own population for decades to come."
Nov 20, 2024
The Biden administration's decision Tuesday to reverse its own policy and greenlight the provision of anti-personnel landmines to Ukraine drew international condemnation, with human rights organizations warning that generations of civilians will bear the costs of the move.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work against the weapons, said Wednesday that it "strongly condemns" the Biden administration's move and noted that Ukraine is prohibited from acquiring or using landmines under the terms of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production, and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction.
Neither the United States nor Russia—which has used landmines repeatedly against Ukraine since its full-scale invasion in February 2022—are signatories to the treaty. But in 2022, the Biden administration barred the transfer and U.S. of American-made landmines except in defense of South Korea, reversing a Trump-era policy that weakened restrictions on the weapons.
"The U.S. must respect its own policy prohibiting landmine transfers," ICBL said Wednesday. "As the world's largest donor to mine clearance, spending millions annually to protect civilians, it's inconceivable the U.S. would facilitate laying new mines."
"Ukraine has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the Mine Ban Treaty since 2022. ICBL urges Ukrainian officials to demonstrate this commitment by refusing this transfer. International humanitarian law cannot be set aside during conflict," the organization added. "Ukraine already faces years of demining due to Russian landmine use. Adding to this contamination would impact its own population for decades to come."
ICBL implored the administration to reverse its decision, saying that "the protection of civilians cannot be compromised, even in extraordinarily difficult circumstances."
It's unclear when U.S. landmines will be shipped to Ukraine, which is already littered with landmines that, at the current pace, will take an estimated 757 years to remove. An unnamed official toldDefense News that the U.S. landmines would be delivered to Ukraine "soon."
On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced a fresh package of military assistance for Ukraine that includes mortar rounds, artillery ammunition, and "demolitions equipment and munitions." The package was announced hours after Ukraine fired American-made long-range missiles deep into Russian territory for the first time in the wake of U.S. President Joe Biden decision to allow Ukrainian forces to do so.
"Anti-personnel landmines are inherently indiscriminate weapons that maim and kill civilians long after conflicts end and shouldn't have a place in the arsenal of any country."
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that Ukraine has "asked for" anti-personnel landmines.
"So I think it's a good idea," Austin said of the administration's decision to roll back its 2022 policy.
Ben Linden, advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia for Amnesty International USA, expressed strong disagreement, saying in a statement that the decision was "reckless" and "a deeply disappointing setback for a president who once agreed that landmines put more civilians at increased risk of harm."
"It is devastating, and frankly shocking, that President Biden made such a consequential and dangerous decision just before his public service legacy is sealed for the history books," said Linden. "Anti-personnel landmines are inherently indiscriminate weapons that maim and kill civilians long after conflicts end and shouldn't have a place in the arsenal of any country. Even the 'nonpersistent' mines are a threat to civilians. In the face of continued Russian aggression, including the killing and injuring of Ukrainian children, landmines are not the answer to keep civilians safe."
News of the Biden administration's decision came shortly before ICBL issued its annual report on anti-personnel landmines and their impacts worldwide.
The 142-page report found that "there were at least 5,757 new casualties from landmines and explosive remnants of war in 53 countries and two other areas in 2023, including 1,983 deaths."
"Civilians made up 84% of all recorded casualties in 2023," the report noted, "while children were 37% of casualties when the age was recorded."
Mark Hiznay, associate arms director at Human Rights Watch and an editor of the report, said in a statement that "new use of anti-personnel mines by countries that have not joined" the international mine ban convention "threatens both civilian lives and the effectiveness of this lifesaving treaty."
Keep ReadingShow Less
War Forever. War Everywhere. War Left Behind.
The destruction of our world is the warfare that consumes so much of it and the reverberating violence each conflict leaves in its wake.
Sep 23, 2024
Count on one thing: armed conflict lasts for decades after battles end and its effects ripple thousands of miles beyond actual battlefields. This has been true of America’s post-9/11 forever wars that, in some minimalist fashion, continue in all too many countries around the world. Yet those wars, which we ignited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are hardly the first to offer such lessons. Prior wars left us plenty to learn from that could have led this country to respond differently after that September day when terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Instead, we ignored history and, as a result, among so many other horrific things, left our weaponry — explosives, small arms, you name it — in war zones to kill and maim yet more people there for generations to come.
Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.
That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.
Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.
A Deadly Glossary
Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.
Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.
As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.
Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.
Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”
According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.
How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.
After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)
Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.
Afghanistan, Every Step You Take
At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.
Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.
When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.
The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)
And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.
From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.
When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.
Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.
In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular