Removing Landmines: One Limb at a Time?

Abstract

cwith one landmine per person, while Mozambique >seNg has been struggling with mine clearance as several million refugees sought to return to their lands. Until recently, these landmines have been removed one limb, or life, at a time ... a process that would last for centuries, with millions of victims. Now, with some mine clearance programs in place, the estimated time for total clearance is a mere ioo years! An individual woman peasant farmer seeks to prepare her field for planting ... and loses a leg in a landmine explosion. A couple of children, playing, lose their lives as their game takes them into an area of landmines. A mine clearance expert, risking his life to help stop the carnage, ends up in a hospital and requires prosthetic assistance. The statistic of z2,ooo per year casualties worldwide is composed of such individual cases. In too many African nations, nearly everyone knows a victim or a survivor of such unnecessary tragedy. With IOO,OOO,OOO landmines yet to be removed, several million more are being added each year. Anti-personnel landmines, easily held in one hand and scattered by various means, have killed more people than all the cold war weapons of mass destruction combined. But, is it just the immediate victim who is killed? What about the child who did not receive a vaccination because the landmine terror over-stressed the health sector? Or the malnourished family which cannot till fields strewn with landmines? It is hard to measure. Unfortunately, the immediate impact is minimal compared with the wider disruption of social interaction. A mere z8 mines (as was later dis-