"No one knows how many landmines there are in Angola. After 20 years of independence struggle and civil war, the soil is sown with mines conceived and built in every corner of the industrialised world. The estimates used to reach 12 million -- one for every man woman and child."
(Metro, December 1 2004)
So if you lived in Angola, there was a landmine with your name on it.
The article (surprisingly good given it was in the free commuter paper) went on to report that while estimated numbers of landmines in Angola have now dropped to half-a-million to one million, the number of casualties is actually rising at present. That's because people who have returned from refugee camps in Congo and Zambia are travelling on mine-infested roads as they try to reunite their families, and are attempting to cultivate minefields because they need to feed themselves and their families.
The Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World is currently in progress. Among other things, they will be celebrating the fact that 75% of the world's nations have now ratified the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction.
Can you guess who's missing? Yep. Bush opted out in late February this year, insisting that the U.S. would continue to use mines indefinitely if it so desired: `dumb' mines until 2010, `smart' ones indefinitely after that. (Spot the crisp, snappy military metaphors creeping in - wouldn't you rather be maimed by a `smart' mine than a regular old `dumb' mine?)
But aren't `smart mines' better? Human Rights Watch don't think so. Because they tend to be spread remotely, there's no way of mapping accurately where they are. They are spread far more densely than conventional mines and - perhaps because of the way they are marketed as `smart' and `safer' - they have also been deployed in populated areas. In addition, other countries with conventional mine stockpiles will now be more loath to part with them.
Though its consequences are real, war is a fiction. It depends for its continued existence as an organised societal practice on a whole series of shared beliefs and delusions. Here I'd like to briefly highlight two of these:
"There are such things as battlefields"
Battlefields are mostly cities, towns and farmland -- before they became places of death they were places where people made their livings, places that produced food. It's too easy to forget that.
"The killing stops when the peace treaty is signed."
Tell that to a landmine. Even the so-called `smart' mines that are supposed to deactivate themselves after a fixed period of time often don't: the Landmine Protocol to which the U.S. and China are signatories allows for a 10% failure rate for so-called `smart bombs.' Actual failure rates may well prove higher than this.