June 9, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 27,1423

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KARACHI, June 8: The military buildup on the Indo-Pakistan border has resulted in extensive anti-personnel mine laying operations being conducted by both India and Pakistan since December 2001, says a press release issued by the Amnesty International Pakistan on Friday.

The press release adds that while neither government has actually released figures regarding the scale of the mining operations, an attempt at mining the 2,897-kilometre-long Indo- Pakistan border may amount to one of the largest mine-laying operations in the world since 1997 when the Ottawa Mine Laying Treaty came into force.

“In many areas mines have been laid in agricultural or pastoral lands and civilians have been evacuated from these areas. Apart from a large number of civilian casualties, deaths of large numbers of livestock on both sides of the border have also been reported, adversely affecting both agricultural and pastoral communities in India and Pakistan.”

The press release says that the large-scale land acquisition for mining operations has resulted in displacement or at least temporary dispossession of land of a large number of people living in the border areas. Out of the 70,000 acres of land acquired for defences in Jammu and Kashmir (India) around 25,000 acres have been mined. Similarly some 98,000 acres of land have been acquired in Punjab (India) for construction of defences and mining, according to the press release.