Landmines not necessary
2009-11-26 11:34
War is a messy business. "Collateral damage" has to be one of the ugliest terms in modern usage - bundling up the death of civilians into a neat, sterile term that implies no blame or consequence.
News stories about schools or homes being bombed are always heartbreaking. There is no stronger message against the pointlessness of conflict than seeing families screaming for their loved ones outside a razed public building or private residence.
The dogs of war would have us believe that, while every effort is made to target attacks accurately, some measure of collateral damage is acceptable in a war-torn area - because it's not possible to take out individuals or to time detonations when there's no one in a building.
Be this as it may, at least in most targeted airstrikes, there's some sense of purpose. Buildings are blown up because they house military technology. Seventeen civilians were killed because they were unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a known war criminal, during a time of war.
But one form of offensive weapon continues to claim lives for decades after the wars have ended, and the lives claimed are often those who are most innocent, and have no memory of the war itself. Landmines are perhaps one of the ugliest weapons we have at our disposal. They are littered around countries, cordoning off whatever areas are of strategic importance at a particular time in combat, then leaving their legacy for years to come.
Unexploded landmines
As South Africans, we frequently see landmine victims with missing limbs on our street corners. These people are commonly Mozambican - their home countryside peppered with mines that explode beneath innocent victims years after the civil war ended.
When I was travelling in Laos, I once saw an American tourist raging at a polite Laotian guesthouse owner because there were no walking trails through the jungle. The tourist's line was that he had come to see the countryside, and that is what he intended to do. The Laotian's quiet response was that the jungle was filled with unexploded landmines, and it wasn't safe for anyone to walk there.
The American seemed to think that this was the direct fault of the Laotian, and stormed off in a huff, walking stick in hand. In reality, the landmine problem in Laos is the direct fault of the Americans.
And it's the Americans who, yet again, refused to sign an international ban on landmines this week. The US joins such upstanding nations as China and Russia in their refusal to sign the ban - stating that it cannot meet its national defence needs and international commitments without the use of landmines.
In America's defence, the nation is today one of the largest global contributors to landmine clean-up programmes, hasn't used landmines since the 1991 Gulf War, hasn't exported them since 1992 or produced them since 1997, but the fact remains that if they hadn't sprinkled them all over the planet, there wouldn't be any need to clean them up.
I also think that we're sufficiently advanced in the art of war that we could find good enough ways of keeping people where we want them without littering the countryside with untargeted weapons that killed 5 197 people last year - a third of them children.
Georgina Guedes is a freelance writer. She's glad America is at least sending a delegation to the anti-landmine conference this year.
- News24