I lost both my legs in an explosion in 1982 near the Thai-Cambodian border. I had to chop off part of my own leg with an axe to reduce the weight so my friend could carry me thirty kilometers to a medical post. — Tun Channareth, who in 1982 stepped on an antipersonnel mine The mine has been designed with a view to disable personnel. Operating research has shown that it is better to disable a man than to kill him. A wounded man requires attention, conveyance and evacuation to the rear, thus causes disturbances in the traffic lines of the combat area. Also, a wounded person has a detrimental psychological effect on his fellow soldiers. — Pakistan Ordnance Factories brochure,     "Technical Specifications for Mine Anti-Personnel (P4 MK2)" Global landmine contamination has been recognized by the international community as a pressing humanitarian crisis. In some sixty-eight nations, fields, deserts, forests, roads and waterways are littered with an estimated 110 million mines. Antipersonnel mines claim a victim every twenty minutes—more than 26,000 each year. Almost all of the killed and maimed are civilians, often women and children, nearly always after the cessation of active hostilities. Mines have an average life span of fifty to one hundred years. Many are nearly undetectable because of their low metallic content. Some of the most popular varieties of antipersonnel mines cost as little as $3. Antipersonnel mines are indiscriminate hidden killers and constitute one of the great public health hazards of the late twentieth century. For millions of people, antipersonnel mines are the biggest influence in their daily routine because every step they take could literally be their last. Antipersonnel mines frustrate post-war reconstruction in a score of countries. Resources which should be used to rebuild schools and hospitals are instead diverted to landmine clearance, which the U.N. has estimated at $300 to $1,000 per landmine, a crushing financial burden for the world's poorest nations.

6. Harry N. Hambric and William C. Schneck, The Antipersonnel Mine Threat: A Historical Perspective, Symposium on Technology and the Mine Problem, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, November 18-22, 1996, p. 3. 7. Ibid., p. 15. In some cases, mines took an even higher toll. For example, during the last six months of 1968, 57% of all casualties suffered by the 1st Marine Division were from mines and booby-traps. H.E. Dickenson, Chief of Staff, 1st Marine Division (Rein), "Standard Operating Procedures for the 1st Marine Division: Countermeasures Against Mines and Booby-Traps," San Francisco, Department of the Army Office, Chief of Engineers, February 1, 1969, p. H-39. 8. Ibid. 9. Hambric and Schneck, p. 15.

Historically, the U.S. has been one of the world's most influential exponents of landmine warfare doctrine, as well as one of the world's major landmine producers and exporters. Antipersonnel mines made in the U.S.A. are being dug out at great financial cost and personal risk in the fertile coffee plantations of Nicaragua, the sandy loams of Somalia, the bomb-pitted paddies of Vietnam, and along southern Africa's old confrontation lines. From 1969 through 1992, the U.S. exported 4.4 million antipersonnel mines. DoD estimates that in this century 100,000 Americans have been killed or injured in landmine incidents, the equivalent of nearly seven military divisions.6 Landmines caused 33% of all U.S. casualties in Vietnam; 28% of U.S. deaths were attributed to mines.7 Startlingly, military records from the Vietnam era report that 90% of all mine and booby-trap components used by the National Liberation Front against U.S. troops were of U.S. origin.8 In the Persian Gulf War in 1991, 34% percent of all U.S. casualties were caused by landmines. 9 Behind the dry statistics are the faces of the victims: Jerry White, an American student trekking in northern Israel, lost a leg when he stepped on an antipersonnel mine in 1984; a ten-year-old Palestinian shepherd was killed in April 1995 while tending his flock in the Gaza Strip; two U.S. medical officers on honeymoon were blown up in the Sinai in June 1995; four children were killed and five wounded when the landmine they were playing with in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, exploded in October 1995; two Portugese and one Italian peacekeeper were killed, and seven others wounded, when an antipersonnel mine detonated in Sarajevo in January 1996.

10. Cited in the U.N.D.H.A Central Landmines Database, Afghanistan Country Report (New York: United Nations, 1996). 11. Shawn Roberts and Jody Williams, After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines (Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1995), p. 66. 12. U.N.D.H.A., Afghanistan Country Report.

With the end of the Cold War, humanitarian organizations and peacekeepers have raced against time to stabilize former war zones but instead have found themselves penned in and logistically paralyzed by millions of hidden killers. The terrible irony of modern day peacekeeping for U.S. troops is that their lives are sometimes threatened by landmines manufactured, sold and shipped out from their own nation a few years or a generation ago. U.S. mines have been identified during clearance operations in old and new global hot spots like Rwanda, Lebanon, Iraq, Nicaragua, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Somalia and Angola. While the notion of ten million landmines in Angola or three million in Bosnia is stunning, these dramatic sums are almost beside the point. The number of landmines sown is not as important as the landmine infestation per square mile. For as long as one landmine remains undetected in a field in Angola, and as long as five landmines sit in wait in a devastated city block in Grozny, Chechnya, there can be no peace of mind for the hapless and traumatized civilians living there. Crops rot in fields made fallow by only one landmine and in towns the fear engendered by landmines can force the closure of buildings, streets and sometimes entire neighborhoods. It is a sadly familiar story in at least sixty-eight countries. For example, after intensive fighting in and around the Afghan capital, Kabul, during the winter of 1994-95, there was a dramatic upsurge in antipersonnel mine casualties when refugees trekked back in the spring to reclaim neighborhoods which, unknown to them, were booby-trapped and strewn with landmines. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed and wounded in the month of April 1995, reported the International Committee of the Red Cross.10 Afghanistan's Mine Clearance Planning Agency (MCPA) reported that 8,000 civilians were being killed or wounded in mine incidents each year, a rate of twenty to twenty-five per day.11 U.N. deminers have identified fifty types of antipersonnel landmines in Afghanistan, the most ever recorded in one country.12

13. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia: Further Reports of Torture and Deliberate and Arbitrary Killings in War Zones (London, 1992), pp. 3-4.

Antipersonnel mines are also weapons of terror employed directly against civilians. The destruction of the Croat village of Lovas in October 1991 at the hands of Serb paramilitaries is a case in point. After being rounded up and taken to a clover field, "[fifty local men] were made to advance through the field, holding each other by the hand. At this point they realized they were being driven through a minefield. When they caught sight of a taut wire, they stopped. They were then ordered to pull it with their hands. At that moment, one of them stumbled on a trip-wire mine; a series of explosions followed, interspersed with machine-gun shots from behind....Some of the men were so badly wounded that they begged to be killed. Seventeen men were killed by mines or shot in the back."13

14. For a full legal analysis of antipersonnel mines, see Human Rights Watch Arms Project and Physicians for Human Rights, Landmines: A Deadly Legacy (Human Rights Watch, New York, 1993), pp. 261-318.

Human Rights Watch believes that any use of antipersonnel mines is a violation of existing international humanitarian law. The weapon is inherently indiscriminate, and its use clearly fails to meet the proportionality test of humanitarian law: the short-term military benefits are far outweighed by the long-term human and socio-economic costs.14