TITLE: BANNING, CLEARING MINES A TOP PRIORITY FOR U.N., U.S.

 
(Richardson: U.S. commitment to demining unwavering) 
  
By Judy Aita  
USIA United Nations Correspondent  
 

United Nations -- Calling on nations to "work to ensure that by the  
year 2010 no child's life is cut short" by landmines, U.S. Ambassador  
Bill Richardson told the U.N. General Assembly that even though the  
United States did not sign the Ottawa treaty banning the deadly  
weapons, the U.S. commitment to humanitarian demining is unwavering.  
  

The General Assembly was ready December 17 to adopt a resolution  
urging nations to help finance, coordinate and provide technical  
assistance to demining programs around the world. The assembly, which  
has passed similar resolutions by overwhelming margins since 1993,  
also stressed the importance of international assistance for the care  
and rehabilitation of mine victims.  
  

The Ottawa treaty -- which bans the use, stockpiling, production and  
transfer of anti-personnel mines -- was opened for signature on  
December 3 and has been signed by 122 countries. Citing current U.S.  
military commitments, the United States did not sign the convention.  
  

Nevertheless, Richardson stressed the leading role U.S. officials have  
played in efforts to ban landmines as well as fund and organize  
demining programs in nations around the world. He cited U.S. Senator  
Patrick Leahy and President Clinton's new special representative for  
global humanitarian demining, Ambassador Karl Inderfurth, a former  
U.S. delegate to the assembly.  
  

Richardson also outlined the U.S. "Demining 2010 Initiative,"  
announced by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense  
Secretary William Cohen in October to ensure that civilians in every  
country on every continent are secure from the threat of landmines by  
the end of the next decade. The program not only includes continuing  
global humanitarian demining efforts, but accelerating and expanding  
that work with the aim of finishing the process by the year 2010.  
  

"I am proud to note that the United States is the leader in  
humanitarian demining worldwide," the ambassador said.  
  

Since 1993, the United States has spent $153 million on demining  
efforts, with more than $16 million going to the U.N. program for  
Afghanistan and another $16 million for Angola. U.S. experts have  
assisted 14 nations in removing landmines from their territory, he  
noted.  
  

In the past six months the United States has added three new countries  
to the program -- Chad, Lebanon, and Yemen -- and it plans to add  
Guatemala and Zimbabwe shortly, Richardson said.  
  

"What we have done so far, welcome as it may be, is not enough to  
resolve this problem once and for all," Richardson said. "We should  
not content ourselves with simply continuing this process. Now it is  
time for international organizations, landmine-affected countries, and  
donor countries to dedicate themselves to finishing it," he added.  
  

The magnitude of the international landmine crisis has been repeatedly  
summarized by its grim arithmetic: there are an estimated 110 million  
mines buried in the ground in more than 70 countries. These mines are  
waiting to kill and maim innocent children gathering firewood or  
farmers tending their fields, and will continue to kill for many  
decades to come. The United Nations estimates that 30,000 people are  
killed or maimed by landmines each year.  
  

United Nations-coordinated demining efforts have involved 6,000  
de-miners, but the effort is dangerous, slow and costly. While the  
mines are extremely cheap to produce -- less than $5 each, finding and  
blowing up a single one can cost anywhere between $100 and $1,000.  
Assuming that no new mines are laid, removing all mines currently in  
the ground could cost anywhere between $50,000 million and $100,000  
million, and at the present rate of clearing mines it would take a  
decade to complete the job, the U.N. has estimated.  
  

"We must bring to the struggle against landmines the same  
determination and the same sense of mission that brought an end to  
chemical weapons. We must make landmines, too, a weapon of the past  
and a symbol of shame," Secretary General Kofi Annan has said.  
  

"During 1996 and 1997 there has been an increase in the number of  
mine-action programs in place and their scope," Annan said in a mine  
clearance report to the General Assembly. "Meanwhile mine action has  
come to mean more than mine clearance, it has also come to encompass  
mine awareness, victim assistance and globally effective advocacy."  
  

Mine-action programs are not only about mines, the secretary general  
said, "They are about people and their interactions with a  
mine-contaminated environment."  
  

The aim of U.N. mine-action programs, therefore, "is not only  
technical -- to survey, mark and eradicate mines -- but also  
humanitarian and developmental -- to create an environment in which  
people can live more safely and in which economic and social  
development can occur free from the constraints imposed by landmine  
contamination," Annan said.  
  

The United Nations currently coordinates mine-clearance programs in 13  
countries -- Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia,  
Croatia, Georgia, Guatemala, Iraq, Laos, Mozambique, Somalia, the  
Sudan, and Tajikistan.  
  

The U.N. program helps countries survey the extent of the mine fields,  
trains local personnel in the techniques to remove the mines, educates  
locals on the problem, and helps set up physical and psychological  
rehabilitation programs for victims.  
  

While the United Nations sometimes undertakes emergency demining to  
facilitate peacekeeping missions or the delivery of humanitarian aid,  
the U.N.'s primary objective is to help countries develop and maintain  
their own demining programs. In some places, such as Angola and  
Mozambique, the General Assembly has agreed to turn over the U.N.  
peacekeeping missions' equipment to the national programs.  
  

Countries afflicted with mines need a national capacity to deal with  
them, according to Tore Skedsmo, chief of the U.N. mine action  
service, who drew a parallel between international mine clearance  
assistance and food aid.  
  

"In the long run, mine-affected countries have to be able to clear  
mines themselves. The international community can help, but it can't  
stay on the job forever....It's essential for the international  
community to give food to starving people, but there's also a  
humanitarian responsibility to help them reach the point where they  
can grow their own," Skedsmo said.  
  

The U.N. Voluntary Trust Fund for Assistance in Mine Clearance was  
established by the General Assembly in 1994. The fund helps launch  
mine clearance operations, provides seed money for field coordination  
and funds to bridge financing delays, and helps buy urgently needed  
equipment.  
  

By October 1997 more than 40 countries and organizations had  
contributed $32.36 million and pledged an additional $9 million to the  
Trust Fund. The ten largest contributors have been the European Union,  
Japan, Denmark, the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Norway,  
Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.  
  

The Afghanistan mine-action program is "the largest, longest-running  
and most fully indigenized program of its kind ever mounted," the  
secretary general said in his report.  
  

From its inception in 1989 until the end of May 1997, over 550 square  
kilometers of mine-affected land has been identified, over 251 square  
kilometers have been designated as high-priority, and a total of 112.1  
square kilometers of high-priority land has been cleared.  
  

While still regarded as one of the countries most severely affected by  
landmines, Afghanistan has been cleared of more than 580,000 mines and  
unexploded ordnance. Some 3.2 million people have received  
mine-awareness briefings and thousands of others are getting messages  
through local radio and television broadcasts.  
  

In Bosnia-Herzegovina some estimates place the number of mines laid at  
more than 3 million, contaminating not only roads but agricultural  
land, towns and villages. Because of the shifting nature of the  
fighting, many areas were mined more than once and sophisticated  
mine-laying techniques were used to hamper detection and clearance,  
the U.N. has reported.  
  

Civilian casualties in Bosnia were deceptively low during wartime, but  
are rising dramatically as refugees and displaced persons return to  
their homes, the U.N. has reported, estimating that there are around  
90 incidents a month, 80 percent of which involve male farmers.  
  

The Bosnian demining program was started in March 1996 with funds from  
the U.N. peacekeeping operation and the United States. Now operating  
under a U.N. mandate with the additional cooperation of the World  
Bank, the European Union, the NATO Implementation Force and other  
nations, the Bosnian Mine Action Center is expected eventually to  
become an entity of the Bosnian government.  
  

In Angola, where an estimated nine to 15 million mines were strewn  
across the country during two decades of civil war, a two-year project  
started in April 1997 is developing the nation's capacity to de-mine.  
The project will help train Angolans as deminers and the Central  
Mine-Action Training School will be completely under Angolan  
management at the end of the two years. 
 

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(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State.)