Washington -- Since the world is able to make technology work so effectively in waging war, why can it not be more efficient in cleaning up the debris such as antipersonnel landmines?

Addressing an international audience April 14 in Alexandria, Virginia, a U.S. State Department official asked this question and said the United States' response late last year was to launch a presidential initiative called Global Humanitarian Demining 2010, calling for a worldwide campaign to remove all mines threatening civilians within 12 years.

Priscilla Clapp, the department's deputy special representative for global humanitarian demining, told attendees from Angola, Cambodia, China, Croatia, Canada, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom that the United States "has doubled its spending on demining programs this year and expects to reach a $100 million demining investment in the coming fiscal year."

She said humanitarian demining encompasses the full range of activity: "mine awareness training, landmine detection and removal, removal of unexploded ordnance, immediate assistance to landmine victims and their longer term rehabilitation, and the development of new technologies to facilitate mine detection and removal." The goal of the 2010 initiative is to commit $100,000 million a year from public and private resources to demining and raise what she termed "a realistic challenge to the community of nations."

The Mine Victims Fund, a non-government organization which has offices in the United States, and the United Kingdom and soon will begin operations in Canada, is dedicated to rehabilitation of land mine survivors. The Fund sponsored the two-day conference to assess the scope of mine victim assistance and to identify shortfalls in the process and recommend strategies for the future.

One attendee, former Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania Ken Rutherford, now works with the Mine Survivors Network, a non-profit group of landmine survivors who work on mine victim assistance.

Rutherford said his interest in Africa, called "the most heavily (mine) seeded continent" by a conference participant, began when he was 15 and conducted a social behavioral study of the migratory path of hyenas in the Masai Mara game reserve in Kenya. Later he worked in Senegal and in Somalia, where he helped to set up credit unions.

He said Somalia's landmines hindered his relief effort. While traveling near the border with Ethiopia in a landcruiser, he was injured by a mine.

"I drove over one," Rutherford said. "You probably can't tell, but I don't have any legs. My right leg was amputated in Nairobi and my left leg was amputated about a year ago here in Washington."

Rutherford insists the United States should have "a comprehensive ban on all antipersonnel landmines. Without a doubt, that should be our policy." But he also says "The United States is at the forefront of the effort to help alleviate the effects of existing landmines in the ground in terms of rehabilitation of land and people. In terms of funds, training -- the United States has given more to demining and landmine victim assistance than most of the countries who signed the treaty to ban landmines combined."

Another participant, Roland Joffe, directed the Hollywood film "The Killing Fields," which tells the story of the terrorist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Since making the film, he has helped set up the Cambodia Trust "which now runs three clinics in Cambodia and a prosthetic school where we've completed our second year of training prosthetists."

The internationally-recognized school "helps to provide much-needed prosthetics to Cambodians and also enables Cambodians to take advantage of their misfortune and create an industry to develop their own prosthetic schools and their own prosthetists," Joffe said.

He said many of the fitters and makers of artificial limbs are "locals who were in the army, many of whom have disabilities themselves. They actually get field training -- go to a school, learn from qualified English prosthetists in the main, but there are people who come from all over the world to help out. So to that extent, they've been provided with skills. They've also been provided with self esteem."

Joffe said the effects of the Vietnam war and other events "deeply affected that country (Cambodia) and, of course, the disastrous regime of the Khmer Rouge really annihilated a whole generation of educated, trained people. So the prosthetic school is doing a number of things: it's training Cambodians to be prosthetists; it is rebuilding the self-confidence of the Cambodian people; and it also begins to put in place the beginnings of the kind of infrastructure you need to enable the country to rebuild itself with a well-rooted government structure."

He said his group, the Cambodian Trust, "is not an intervention that's being made; it is deeply welcomed by the country. Cambodians are ready to do this and actually want to do it. There are still stresses in the country and... it is a great thing to do something like a prosthetic school which can be used as a kind of basis for creating a neutral social, political structure that is actually dealing with people's everyday lives.

The Mine Victims Fund conference concludes April 15 with reports by rehabilitation experts from Croatia and field operators' perspectives from Mozambique and Cambodia.