Landmines In Pakistan Ruin Lives, Leave Hundreds Dead
PESHAWAR, 4 April 2008 (IRIN) - Palvasha Ahmed and her two younger sisters know all too well the risks posed by landmines.
“Our cousin, Maryum Ahmed, 19, was injured by a landmine nearly a year ago in her village in South Waziristan. She lost her right foot and now goes around on a crutch. No one will marry her,” the 17-year old said in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
For most young women in the conservative NWFP and adjoining tribal areas, most of which lie along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, not getting married could well be the worst possible tragedy in life: Disabled girls are unlikely to be taken as brides and this means a life of dependence on their own family, who often sees them as a burden.
Palvasha, the daughter of a shopkeeper from South Waziristan who moved to Peshawar a few years ago to escape conflict between government forces and militants there, also explained: “My cousin could get only limited treatment because her father refuses to let her be examined by a male doctor.”
This is the norm across much of the tribal areas, with access of women to healthcare gravely handicapped due to the traditional refusal to allow them contact with any man who is not a close family member.
Nearly 50 mine casualties in 2008
According to the Peshawar-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), SPADO, (Sustainable Peace and Development Organisation), which is engaged in a campaign against anti-personnel landmines and cluster bombs, there have been at least 48 casualties in Pakistan during the last three months caused by mines. For 2007 the figure stands at 184 and for 2006, 488.
Raza Shah Khan, executive director of SPADO, believes there are upwards of six million landmines in Pakistan, though no official figures are available.
However, according to a 2007 report by the international Landmine Monitor, Pakistan and its eastern neighbour India were the world’s largest producers of landmines; together stockpiling at least 11 million antipersonnel mines.
In addition to areas along the Afghan border, the report said mines were still in place in Kashmir, a territory disputed between India and Pakistan, even though both sides claimed to have carried out de-mining operations along the Line of Control, the tentative border that separates Indian and Pakistani-administered parts of Kashmir.
“Villages in Poonch District here, near Indian-controlled territory, have many mines. The earthquake of October 2006 and also rains since then have caused mines from the Indian side to slip to Pakistani-controlled territory, which is located downhill,” Muhammad Farooq, a social activist based in the town of Bagh in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, told IRIN.
Over 400 killed
The Ottawa-based Landmine Monitor states there have been at least 1,144 incidents involving landmines in Pakistan from 2002 to 2006, with at least 440 killed and 704 injured.
In incidents since then, military personnel have been the most frequent victims, followed by children.
Landmines are being used by both militant insurgents and government forces, in internal conflicts against religious extremists in tribal areas of the NWFP and against nationalist elements in Pakistan’s vast southwestern province of Balochistan.
“We hear regularly of injuries caused by landmines in areas where there is fighting, such as the Kohlu District,” said Farid Ahmed, coordinator of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in Balochistan.
“Both militants and armed forces personnel use landmines, often planted along roadsides,” he explained.
According to SPADO, most recent casualties have been reported from the North and South Waziristan agencies and the neighbouring Bajaur Agency.
This is both because the tribal territories lie along the Afghan border, which has been heavily mined since 1979 - the year the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan - and because mines continue to be used by militants battling Pakistani forces.
Settling local scores
Alarmingly, local tribes are reported to have begun using mines as a part of their arsenal against rival tribesmen or to settle personal feuds, adding to the number of mines on the ground in many areas.
Women, who often walk long distances to fetch water, or children, are frequently the victims of such mines. Their growing use by non-state militants, also means no records or maps exist as to where they have been placed.
Pakistan is among 37 countries in the world that are not yet signatories to the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, commonly known as the landmine ban treaty.
Organisations within the country continue to demand that it sign the agreement, but there is as yet no evidence this is likely to happen in the near future. Awareness regarding the issue or concern about the risk to civilians posed by landmines is still low, even though hundreds have been killed or maimed by the devices in recent years in tribal areas of the NWFP, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and in Balochistan.
© 2008 IRIN News
Landmines are part of the insanity of war that doesn’t seem to mind killing and maiming people who are not an “enemy” at all—people who just happened by days, weeks, months or years later. Many decades ago they were thought of as progress in the art of war. Now we humans are learning that real “progress” is clearing them away and trying to get all civilized people and nations to agree by treaty: No, no more, never again. We shall agree in advance not to hate each other so much as to litter random boobytraps for accidental destruction of children and grandchildren. But our new “progress” is slow. Many more decades of effort will be needed.
!!APRIL ACTIONS……DON’T JUST SIT THERE…TAKE ACTION!!
Join with the US Campaign Against Land Mines and FCNL in April Actions
http://www.banminesusa.org/
http://www.fcnl.org/weapons/clusterlanding/april_action/
Some of y’all may already know me as a strong believer in RKBA; but that doesn’t make me militaristic. To me, private firearms, rifles, shotguns, and handguns, are for the defense of individual citizens; landmines are weapons of States, cruel and heartless things (even as States are). Anything that weakens the power of States to dominate our lives (like scattering these landmines uncaringly hither and yon) is a good thing.
It should be pointed out here that President Clinton refused to sign the Ottawa Treaty in 1997, an agreement signed by 137 nations to ban the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel landmines. In a similar vein, in September, 2006, Hillary Clinton voted against an amendment to a Senate bill to ban the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas. Senator Obama voted for the ban.
Bevandavies, I was going to make a nearly identical post, but you beat me to it. Hillary Clinton is an unabashed hawk now posing as a dove. She mocks Obama, claiming that his entire political resume consists in his anti-war speech, but refuses to admit that she made speeches claiming that Iraq had WMD and was involved with al Qaeda. She told the same lies as Bush and voted for the war. She sheds crocodile tears over wounded US soldiers but none over the millions of Iraqi civilians killed, maimed or driven into impoverished exile, and expresses no remorse for putting those American soldiers in harm’s way in a counterproductive, illegal, fraudulent and brutal war. How anyone can support her while claiming to be a progressive is utterly beyond comprehension.
Gee, you fellows are sure slow! War makes profit. Landmines make profit and profit is King. If they kill some unintended victims then that’s the way the cookie crumbles. The world is imperfect, there are winners and loser.
Of course the winners don’t actually walk upon their landmines. Their children don’t walk upon the landmines. That happens to those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, if you lose a leg you likely have another one!
Of course, if we make the armament manufacturers financially liable for death and injury caused by their products then landmines would immediately cease to exist. And cluster bombs.
But don’t tell anyone I said so!
More than likely these landmines in this article were manufactured in Pakistan which joins India in refusing - so far as their Kashmir stand=off continues - to ban use of landmines.
The cause of removing landmines always reminds me of Princess Diana who had made it her life work to remove the mines and to make laws that would forbid the use of them. What a different world this would be if all those visionary leaders, who truly cared, hadnt been killed. This reminds me of how everyone in the world used to wait for America to care or rescue them. Now we cant even save ourselves. Few from “the outside” can come in and save us. Save perhaps the space aliens we havent met yet. Short of that it really is incumbent on each Earth citizen to do everything in their power to bring about the kind of world we all would like to imagine living in. Peace, fellow Earthlings.