KABUL, July 27: A major international conference on landmines opens on Sunday in Afghanistan — one of the world’s most heavily mined countries — that will seek to highlight the devastation caused by a weapon that creates new victims in the country every single day.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is due to open the conference, jointly organised by the government and a host of anti-mine groups led by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL).
He is expected to tell delegates that after more than 23 years of occupation and conflict, Afghanistan is ready to sign a 1997 international convention that bans the use and stockpiling of mines.
“It is very important that a country so heavily mined as Afghanistan is a signatory to the convention,” a United Nations official said on Saturday.
“What better place to start than in a country where you have so many victims of this terrible weapon.”
Scarcely a day goes by in Afghanistan without land mines claiming new victims — usually non-combatants.
Latest figures from the International Committee of the Red Cross show it alone has treated more than 50,000 mine casualties since 1988 — including nearly 800 in the first six months of this year.
Nearly 80 percent of those treated were civilians and more than 10 percent children aged below 14.
Despite so many countries signing the international convention, military experts say definitions contained in the treaty are so loose as to make it almost useless.
“Many people think of a landmine only as something you put in the ground and which detonates when you stand on it or drive over it,” said an ordnance expert with the International Security and Assistance Force for Afghanistan.
“But what is to stop someone using a grenade with a trip wire attached to the pin to cause the same effect. Is that a mine or a grenade?”
WEAPON OLD AS MODERN WAR
Landmines have existed in one shape or form since the creation of munitions-based modern warfare. Their chief aim is not to kill, but rather to maim in order to take the victim out of conflict and also those who need to attend to him.
“It is a calculated, deliberate weapon,” the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) expert said. “We figure that if one person is injured by a mine, you actually take three people out of combat. It is a great weapon for attrition.”
Recent technological advances mean mines can be made these days without metal, making them particularly difficult to detect by orthodox sweeping. Once armed, mines can usually be rendered safe only by a controlled explosion.
“You can’t put the cork back in the bottle...you have to blow them up and there is a danger in that,” the ISAF officer said, noting that almost all the injuries suffered by the multinational force since it was deployed to Afghanistan earlier this year had been as a result of ordnance clearing operations.
Afghanistan remains one of the most heavily mined countries in the world — a legacy of a decade-long Soviet occupation from 1979.
Some of those mines have lain in fields for years, and with more tha a million refugees returning to the country this year alone since the Taliban’s overthrow in December, farmers are returning to their lands to cultivate crops.
“The old mines become more and more unstable, their materials deteriorate and they become volatile,” ISAF said. “That is when you get the big danger.”
You can scarcely walk a block in the Afghan capital without seeing a victim of a mine blast.
“I lost my foot about six years ago,” said Moin Falzar. “I was taking my goats to the river on a path I had been on many times. I remember a big bang and then I was lying down and bleeding. Since then I haven’t been able to work.”—Reuters