Get rid of landmines, UN officials urge nations

Two senior UN officials on Thursday appealed to nations still producing or stockpiling landmines to get rid of the weapons, saying the explosives continued to kill and maim civilians, including children.

Some children are left orphaned after losing their parents to mines, they added.

"Until the largest producers - even those not producing any more, but are still stockpiling - do away with their stockpiles and stop producing, I think none of us should be content," Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children's Fund, told a news conference on the sidelines of the Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World.

According to the Geneva-based, Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention Implementation Support Unit, 50 countries have not yet ratified or acceded to the treaty banning the use of landmines. Those countries include China, India, the Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the United States, which between them, hold more than 180 million stockpiles of anti-personnel mines.

Bellamy said landmines were "a deadly attraction for children, whose innate curiosity and need for play often lure them directly into harm's way".

The director of the UN Development Programme's Bureau for Conflict Prevention, Julia Taft, told the news conference that mine action activities were a prerequisite for development.

"Because landmines are indiscriminate in their nature and make no distinction between combatants, farmers or children at play - we all have an obligation, as our own challenge, to make sure that these pernicious elements of war are removed," Taft said.

"The presence of landmines is making unavailable and inaccessible vast amounts of potential agriculture land - we want to have people live in safety," Taft added. "They prevent the safe return of refugees and IDPs [internally displaced persons] and provide incredible cost to human health care systems, which are already overstretched."

Accompanying Bellamy and Taft was Nikola Kokorus, a 14-year-old boy from Bosnia-Herzogovina, who lost his right hand in 1993 to a landmine he picked up, believing it was a toy, when he was only three years old.

"I threw it against our front steps and watched beautiful sparks fly," Kokorus told reporters. "And then my toy exploded, blowing three fingers off my right hand. Afraid of infection, the doctors amputated everything up to my wrist.

"My toy took away what would have been my writing hand - the hand I would have used to help my father, a farmer, raise cattle just as he had once helped my grandfather," he added.

Kokorus urged adults to do everything in their power to stop the use of landmines. "Children should never be punished, as I was, by their curiosity and innocent desire to play," he said.

More than 80 percent of the 15,000-20,000 landmine victims each year are civilians and at least one in five are children, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Addressing the Nairobi Summit, convened to review the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition on the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines - also known as the Ottawa Convention - Canada's governor general, Adrienne Clarkson, deplored the continuing use of landmines by countries that had not signed the treaty.

"It can not be justified under any circumstances in the name of defence - the extremely limited utility of these weapons is vastly outweighed by the human cost, which is mainly borne by non-combatants," said Clarkson. "We want a mine-free planet. We urge you, therefore, to join the convention as soon as possible."

The convention has already been ratified by 144 states, including the host nation Kenya, which has also completed destroying its stockpiles of landmines.

Kenyan president, Mwai Kibaki, said: "As we celebrate the achievements made towards the common goal of ending the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines, let this Summit on a Mine-Free World be remembered as the forum where states and individuals renewed their commitment to the goal of total elimination of landmines.

"Let us also commit ourselves to assist landmine survivors requiring lifelong care and to clear mined areas in order to allow for [the] resettlement of displaced persons," Kibaki added.

SEE: IRIN Web Special on Humanitarian Mine Action, (with special focus on the 2004 Nairobi Summit of a Mine Free World)