Friends of Landmine Victims

I came across this today, and thought it was a ‘fresh’ look at the old issue:
Landmines in Africa

Resisting An Underlying Moral Vacuum

So despite being outrageous, Barack Obama’s continual refusal to sign the international cluster bomb treaty is understandable even as the U.S. military has a stockpile of nearly one billion cluster bomblets that kill and maim citizens of other countries. Concurrently, the U.S. stockpiles 10.4 million antipersonnel mines and 7.5 million anti-vehicle mines while he, likewise, snubs ratifying the anti-landmine treaty.

A 34 day war wreaks havoc for years afterwards. | Not Another CONspiracy

Frederic Gras, a de-mining expert formerly in the French navy, who is leading the MAG teams in Yohmor, says: “In the area north of the Litani river, you have three or four people being killed every day by cluster bombs.

The Israeli army knows that 30 per cent of them do not explode at the time they are fired so they become anti-personnel mines.”

HRW: US cluster bombs threaten Iraqi lives

In 2003 alone, the US and UK used nearly 13,000 rounds of cluster bombs containing an estimated two million sub-munitions during three weeks of major combat. The new revelation raises fresh questions for former Us president George Bush and ex British primer Tony Blair, who insisted that post-conflict Iraq would be a safer place than it was under Saddam Hussein.

Relics of the Lao Civil War « We’re Lost and Everything is Dirty

part of that was cluster bombs – big metal cases full of nasty, tennis ball-sized submunitions. A single cluster bomb contained about 360 of them, and each one of those held about 200 ball bearings that shot out like bullets upon detonation. All in all, 250 million cluster bomblets were released in the skies over Laos, and a full eighty million of them didn’t explode. They’re still there, forty years later, blowing limbs off small children and stopping people from farming perfectly good land.

HRW warns about US cluster bombs in Iraq

According to the rights group, the US, France and the United Kingdom dropped over 61,000 cluster bombs containing 20 million submunitions in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.

Almost 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions dropped on Iraq’s soil during the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, the report said.

Dutch investments in cluster bombs banned < Dutch news | Expatica The Netherlands

The Hague – Dutch banks and pension funds will no longer be allowed to invest in companies involved in making cluster bombs after a majority of the lower house supported a motion submitted by the Socialist Party and the Labour Party.

Socialist Party MP Krista van Velzen, who has been working on a ban on cluster bombs for many years, called the vote “a revolutionary step”.

Clancy Sigal: Obama’s Mother and Mine
According to an American Medical Association study, an estimated 24,000 people, mainly civilians, are killed or ripped apart by landmines and “unexploded ordinance” (cluster bombs) each year worldwide.

Mostly the victims are the rural poor, many of them children of the same age as the President’s two daughters. They get blown up by ammunition left behind in current or former war zones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Cambodia, Vietnam and Kosovo.

It’s so easy for farmers or their kids to wander onto a plowed-over mine field and confuse a yellow-finned cluster bomblet with a relief package of food of the same color dropped by parachute. Kids especially are drawn to the toy-looking munitions. They die, from shock or bleeding, far from any hospital; survivors suffer brutal amputations and blinding.

Rwanda first country officially landmine-free - Developing World Stories - Tom Parry - Mirror.co.uk

Rwanda first country officially landmine-free
By Tom Parry on Dec 4, 09 09:35 PM in Cluster bombs

BRITISH mine clearance workers have helped Rwanda become the first country in the world to be declared 100 per cent landmine-free.

Lt Colonel Tim Wildish of the Royal Engineers led a training programme for 180 Rwandan Soldiers.

Since then over 20 minefields covering an area of over 1.3 million square metres have been made safe.

Over 9,000 live explosives buried in the ground were destroyed in the mammoth clean-up operation.

“Tens of thousands of lives are saved because of [the dogs’] great work,” said Baltimore, president of the Marshall Legacy Institute, which works in war-torn countries to remove landmines.

In a day, a person can clear land equal to maybe 5 yards from sideline to sideline on a football field, 20 yards if he has a metal detector. But a detection dog like Utsi can clear the entire field. In fact, Utsi cleared nearly 1,000 square yards a day during her five years working in the African country of Eritrea
The Whole Story

Unexploded mines: Lebanon’s hidden horrors - The National Newspaper

On the Lebanese side, teams of workers from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) are clearing a path for a new road through the area Israel withdrew from in 2000. The road is meant to represent progress, allowing UN peacekeepers to work more easily, and farmers to get to coastal towns.

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Every Wednesday afternoon, the 12 players on the football team led by Bashir Jalek open their bags and change their clothing sweat pants that expose their prostheses. .

Shoes tied to the lower end of the piece orthopedic and prepare for a workout that often makes their stumps bleed.

They are the members of Mine Survivors Club, the only football team in the region composed only maimed by these weapons.

Twenty-seven banks in 11 countries have scaled back investments in companies manufacturing cluster munitions, says Belgian non-governmental organization Network Vlaanderen.

Fourteen of those in countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway have cut investment completely.

Bangkok (AlertNet) - It started out as an opportunity to make a chunk of pocket money for the five boys but ended in a horrible tragedy: two dead, one burnt and one unconscious.

All they were trying to do was salvage scrap metal from a bomb casing near a small village in southern Laos.

If only they had just collected all the shards and left the rusty cylinder alone, they may have walked away with $25, a huge amount of money in a country where most people are subsistence farmers living on less than $1 a day.

Reuters AlertNet - Allure of scrap metal hard to resist in Laos

46 Nations Push for Cluster Bomb Treaty - washingtonpost.com

Last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah war helped bring cluster munitions to the forefront of the international agenda. The U.N. estimated that Israel dropped as many as 4 million bomblets in southern Lebanon during the conflict, with as many 40 percent failing to explode on impact.

US: Obama Rejection of Mine Ban Treaty ‘Reprehensible’ | Human Rights Watch

“President Obama’s decision to cling to antipersonnel mines keeps the US on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity,” said Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch. “This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs,” said Goose.

Global Health Day at WVU Focuses on Landmines - WBOY-TV - WBOY.com

The day’s address was given by the founder of a non-profit group called “Landmines Blow!” and her story is an example of how awareness is the first step to combating some of the toughest global challenges.

Alison Bock said more than 70 countries are still littered with landmines left over from war. The problem is that today, the armies are gone, and it’s the civilians who are left to navigate the mine fields.

SU - US uses cluster bombs in Sadr City

DPA quoted Leqa Yasin, a Sadrist lawmaker in the Iraqi parliament, as saying that technical and medical examination on the bodies of the victims and wounded of the recent clashes show that US occupation forces have used cluster bombs against civilians in Sadr City.

Vietnam latest news - Thanh Nien Daily

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded bombs, artillery shells, mortar bombs, rockets and landmines have killed 10,529 and wounded 12,231 people in the six most heavily-affected central provinces alone, the study by VVAF and BOMICEN said. Of the six provinces, around 7,000 people in Quang Tri and some 6,000 in Quang Binh have been killed or injured due to leftover ordnance, it said.

Glowing bacteria that finds landmines - Boing Boing

Glowing bacteria that finds landmines
Edinburgh University engineers have a plan to use genetically engineered bacteria that glow in the presence of explosives to detect landmines. The project is student-led, overseen by Alistair Elfick.