State Legislators and Activists Urge a Ban on Use of Landmines in Possible War
By Heidi Taylor
WASHINGTON—The more than 135,000 American servicemen amassed in the Middle East are not alone. With them is a stockpile of over 90,000 U.S. landmines (and counting) in countries like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait that ring Iraq, Pentagon records show.
Last week, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, and several other congressmen wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to ban the use of these weapons in the possible war on Iraq, citing among other things, that almost every other member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) already has banned the use of these weapons.
“New US antipersonnel mines, on top of the hundreds of thousands of mines already in the ground in Iraq from the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars, would pose serious dangers to innocent civilians, our own troops and future peacekeepers involved with post-conflict reconstruction,” they stated in the letter.
Sunny Robinson, of the North Shore Coalition for Peace and Justice, was more specific. “Landmines go on waging war after war is over,” she said, adding that there is a lesson to be learned from Afghanistan, where now hundreds of thousands of “ordinary people… have had their hands, legs, arms, feet blown off.”
Gina Coplon-Newfield, coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines–an organization within the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, co-recipients of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize–said that the dangers posed by landmines, even so-called smart or self-destructing mines, far outweigh their benefits.
“Not only are they a threat to opposing troops but also to civilians and our own troops,” she said, adding that calling the self-destructing landmines “smart” is misleading because in reality they are indiscriminate in whom they maim and kill. They could be set to self-destruct after a number of days as a precaution, but a group of refugees or displaced persons fleeing war could walk right into a literally ticking bomb, Coplon-Newfield said.
She added that the diplomatic consequences of using mines would also be great because even the United States’ closest ally, the United Kingdom, has signed a 1997 treaty that prohibits the use of any type of mine, either antitank or antipersonnel, in warfare.
Although the United States didn’t sign the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty (signed by 146 other countries), then-President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 64 in 1998 ordering that U.S. forces discontinue the use of mines by 2003 everywhere except Korea, and that the United States move toward signing the Mine Ban Treaty by 2006.
Bush, however, called for a formal review of this policy in the summer of 2001. And in December 2001, the Department of Defense recommended that the administration abandon steps toward banning the use of landmines. For now, however, Bush has neither dropped nor reaffirmed 1998 presidential directive.
The last time that the United States used landmines was in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and, according to a study published last September by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, mines caused 81 U.S. casualties during that war. Those deaths accounted for 6 percent of all U.S. troop casualties in that conflict, according to the report.
The benefits of using landmines, as stated in U.S. landmine doctrine, range from adding temporary offensive strength to disrupting or disorganizing enemy attacks and enemy lines of communication, according to the GAO study. Proponents also defend the use of landmines as a cheap and effective defense mechanism for guarding borders, tanks and troops.
But the GAO report also indicated dangers and concerns about the use of landmines as identified in Department of Defense lesson-learned reports, which include the loss of battlefield mobility and the fear of casualties caused by friendly fire.
Just last month, an American serviceman was severely injured after stepping on an antipersonnel landmine of unknown origin during a routine patrol in Afghanistan, according to a report by the Army News Service. The Pentagon says U.S. forces planted no mines in Afghanistan.
“Both non-self-destructing or self-deactivating (“dumb”) and self-destructing and self-deactivating (“smart”) antipersonnel landmines cannot distinguish between the foot of a soldier and that of a child, between friend and foe,” McGovern and others said in the letter to Bush. “The United States military, unquestionably the strongest in the world, can defend itself and its interests without the aid of this indiscriminate menace.”
According to the United Nations, every year almost 20,000 people are maimed or killed by landmines. Of those, 80 percent are civilians and one-third are children.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Published in The Newburyport Daily News, The Gloucester Daily News, and The Salem News in Massachusetts.
