UNICEF calls on China, India, Russia and US to join Mine Ban Treaty

With landmines claiming up to 20,000 victims a year, many of them children, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) today called on China, India, Russia and the United States to join the Mine Ban Treaty and immediately cease production of the weapons.

“Landmines are a deadly attraction for children, whose innate curiosity and need for play often lure them directly into harm’s way,” UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy told the first World Summit on a Mine Free World being held this week at the headquarters of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya.

The millions of antipersonnel landmines and other explosive remnants of war across the globe pose a vicious threat to children, who are being injured, killed and orphaned by them long after wars are over, and she called on the four countries - among the largest holders of the weapon in the world - to also do more to assist those whose lives have been disrupted by mines.

“Landmines, meant to be used against soldiers in war, are devastating the lives of children at peace,” Ms. Bellamy said. “Countries have a moral responsibility to ratify the Mine Ban Treaty and rid the world of these devastating weapons.”

Since it went into force five years ago, 143 states have ratified the treaty, which prohibits signatories from using, stockpiling, producing or transferring landmines.

“The cost of playing too close to a landmine is brutal,” Ms. Bellamy said, citing loss of limbs, blindness, deafness, and injuries to the genital area as some of damage landmines inflict on children. In part because they are physically smaller, children are more likely than adults to die from landmine injuries.

Over 80 per cent of the 15,000 to 20,000 landmine victims each year are civilians, and at least one in five are children, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Among the most contaminated countries are Iraq, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Colombia and Angola.

UN Assistant Secretary-General Julia Taft, Director of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Recovery, told the summit that countries like Afghanistan and Angola will never fully develop without the removal of landmines.

“The landmine problem is a critical development issue,” she said. “The terrible human toll taken by these indiscriminate weapons is compounded by deep and lasting economic damage. Millions of mines still in the ground mean that there are hundreds of roads that cannot be travelled, thousands of acres of farmlands that cannot be tilled, and entire communities that are deprived of health care and education and essential investment.”

An ambitious project to clear mines from a wildlife sanctuary in Angola, scene of a three-decade-long civil war, was launched at the summit today in a bid to give thousands of elephants and local villagers new hope.

“The direct threat to people from these seeds of misery must be our first concern but it is clear that the environment, upon which local people depend for items such as food, shelter and natural medicines suffers, too,” UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said.

The $1 million project, backed by the California-based Roots of Peace, initially aims to help restore an ancient elephant migration route linking Botswana with Zambia and Angola. It is part of a wider plan aimed at creating a vast trans-frontier conservation area which is being supported by the governments of Switzerland and the United States.

Angola has over 2,200 known sites harbouring mines or unexploded ordnance.