Rhona Ezuma
Long in my imagination the word ‘landmine’ has conjured up the image of Princess Diana walking in fairly outdoorsy clothing holding the hand of a young, frail looking African infant. This image draws on the tense political predicament of the ’90s which put landmines on the agenda as a humanitarian issue, as well as placing Diana at the forefront as one of its avant-gardes.
In 1997, through the Ottawa treaty a victory was won in the name of people everywhere, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) effectively prohibited landmine sales. For me, this seemed to spell the end of it all. Landmines had ceased to be a problem. People would stop manufacturing them, trading them and developing them. And, therefore, the awful stories I had heard about children going out to play before returning bloody and limbless would finally come to an end.
As far as my knowledge could take me at eight, this was generally how I imagined things would work out. It was not until walking past the Students’ Union, whilst trying to escape a plethora of flyers that I stumbled across a Mines Advisory Group stall. The people behind it reminded me that landmines remain a central humanitarian issue. A conversation with a friend who had been travelling in Eastern Europe only compounded this affirmation. He described the damage he had seen brought about by landmines during his time there. In Bosnia, whole areas suspected to be plagued by landmines were blocked off by metal wiring; people were still restricted to only walking in designated pathways, and straying from the path was like a partaking in a gamble where an arm, leg or foot, if not a life were at stake. “Hadn’t this all been sorted out? AGES ago?” I found myself gawping at him. Sadly, as this clearly illustrated, it had not. Though the media may no longer focus on them like they used to, the 110 million active landmines continue to be a problem that affects nearly 80 countries all over the world, including Afghanistan, Angola, Austria, Cambodia and Egypt.
One of the strongest premises which saw the ICBL make a breakthrough was that landmines do not disappear with the end of conflict. Even for countries where landmine territories have been blocked off, the socioeconomic disadvantages of having them is a drawback. This is particularly true for the developing world, which has to see hectares of potential agricultural land go to waste. Such harmful impact does not only tell us that the problem hasn’t been solved yet, but that the effects being perpetuated will continue to be felt for a long time to come.
This is another reason why landmine digging is so important. Landmines cannot always be detected by metal detectors because they are usually cased in plastic. This makes their extraction a combination of costly, time-consuming and extremely dangerous, which has led the UN to estimate that the world will not be entirely free of land mines for 1,100 years.
However, the most disconcerting point is that despite the continuing effort of MAG and Stop the Landmine, 38 countries including China, the US, India, Russia, Iran and Israel have failed to sign the Ottawa treaty and instead are wasting more money developing into anti-personnel landmines whose detonators are said to be more ‘enemy target specific’ and will decompose after all the years I’ve been alive. Landmines remain a problem, and one which can only be resolved by international political consensus. It is important then that we remain active in reminding the public and politicians of the continued danger of landmines, and push to keep it at the forefront of global agenda.
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