Ill. Man Designs Land Mine Crusher For Cambodia Mines Still Plague SE Asian Nation 13 Years After Civil War
Associated Press
July 3, 2006

CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. Gary Christ of Crystal Lake is preparing a machine he built for battle. On his family's farm, he's flicking levers and punching buttons, making the machine drop, pick up and move a 1,000-pound steel box slightly larger than a recycling bin.

The box is filled with independent metal rods heavy enough to thoroughly crush a can of cat food, which is standing in for a land mine.

Crushing land mines is exactly what Christ built his machine to do.

The apparatus, made of reused and recycled machine parts, will be sent to Cambodia, where a nonprofit group will use it to stamp out some of the explosives that plague that nation.

"It's just unbelievable to see (the impact) land mines have on the country," Christ said. "The lightweight design of this machine allows usage in soft ground, and the simple lifting and dropping action is less apt to be tangled in overgrown areas that cause (other) machines great difficulties."

Cambodia, sandwiched between Thailand and Vietnam, has one of the highest numbers of land mines, according to the United Nations Development Program. Mines are left over from years of civil war, the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, and the Vietnam War.

Now, 13 years after the official end of the civil war, Cambodians still deal with the repercussions of the conflict.

One in 256 Cambodians is a land mine amputee, Christ said; and few have money to buy wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs.

To read the full article, go to: http://cbs2chicago.com/topstories/local_story_184131512.html

U.S. Pledges $1.9 Million for Latin American Land Mine Removal Funds to support mine-clearing operations in Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile
By Eric Green, Washington File Staff Writer
USINFO.State.gov
July 6, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The United States has pledged almost $1.9 million to the Organization of American States (OAS) to support land-mine clearing programs in Nicaragua, Honduras and Chile, the OAS announced.

In a July 6 statement, the OAS said the pledge was made that day by the U.S. State Department's Office of Weapons Reduction and Abatement. That office serves as the State Department's lead organization in coordinating U.S. humanitarian mine actions worldwide.

The OAS said more than $1.45 million of the U.S. contribution will be channeled through the OAS Mine Action Program to support humanitarian mine-clearing operations in a section of Nicaragua called the North Atlantic Autonomous Region. The money will be used specifically for training, replacement of equipment and defraying costs involved in hiring more than 150 mine-clearing experts for one year.

The OAS says Nicaragua is the most heavily land-mined country in Central America. Nicaragua’s problem with land mines is concentrated near the country’s border with Honduras, particularly in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region. The OAS said the heavy concentration of minefields is because that region was the scene of intense military operations during the years of armed conflict in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Some 146,000 mines were placed within Nicaraguan territory, said the OAS.

The OAS said its mine action program has assisted Nicaragua in identifying and destroying 90 percent of the land mines buried in that country. Nicaragua is expected to complete its land-mine activities in 2007, said the OAS.

The U.S. pledge also includes a $283,000 grant for victim assistance in Nicaragua and Honduras under the OAS-sponsored victim assistance program in conjunction with the Massachusetts-based Polus Center for Social and Economic Development. The grant will help provide 325 land-mine survivors in Nicaragua and Honduras with physical and psychological rehabilitation, and 65 individuals will be provided vocational training in their communities, said the OAS.

To read the full release, go to: http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2006&m=July&x=200607061719171xeneerg0.9100611

High tech's slow march in land mine campaign
By Jonathan Skillings
CNET
July 11, 2006

The search for land mines is not something done in haste. Nor, as it turns out, is the search for new technology that could be used to find mines.

Despite a lot of promises about high-tech advances, people working in land mine clearance are using technology that hasn't changed dramatically since the Second World War. And a lot of them say that--given the risks of using technology that's still in its shakeout period--they'd just as soon stick with the tried-and-true.

"We need more of what we know works, rather than new technologies," said Noel Mulliner, technology coordinator for the U.N. Mine Action Service. "New technology is not going to get into the field fast enough. We want more of the simple stuff."

Land mines are a serious problem in many countries, from postconflict places like Bosnia to simmering trouble spots such as Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Along with unexploded hand grenades, mortar rounds and artillery submunitions, they are a potentially deadly litter from battle and can persist often many years after a cease-fire has been reached. Casualties run into the tens of thousands a year, according to estimates.

Over the years, there's been no shortage of clever ideas for finding and eliminating mines, from training bees and rats to sniff out explosives to using lasers to detonate mines and other ordnance. The problem is that those that aren't completely far-fetched can take too long to get off the drawing board or cost too much for cash-strapped humanitarian demining operations.

The most promising advance, just now getting into the field, involves a variation on the common metal detector--combining it with ground-penetrating radar into a multisensor system called HSTAMIDS. The U.S. military has been using it for a couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a version for civilian use is going through trials.

Other, more mundane forms of high tech, such as Internet hookups and Google Earth, are also starting to find more widespread use in the field of humanitarian demining. They can be of help in the remote areas typically targeted in efforts by civilian and nongovernmental organizations to remove land mines from former battle zones.

The goal here isn't a military one, with an army trying to speed from one point to another across defensive positions and under fire from an enemy force. Rather, it's an effort--at once global and local--to return communities to normal life, so that civilians can go about their daily business of raising crops, accessing potable water, taking goods to markets and just letting children out to play.

"It doesn't take too many mines to keep people from using a road," said Al Carruthers, technology officer for the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining.

To read the full article, go to: http://news.com.com/High+techs+slow+march+in+land+mine+campaign/2100-1008_3-6092261.html

To read the article "Scent of a land mine" on alternatives to metal detectors and radar, go to: http://news.com.com/Scent+of+a+land+mine/2100-1008_3-6092286.html

For pictures of demining and demining technology, go to: http://news.com.com/2300-11395-6092294.html

Village of the Disabled
By Chrispin Inambao Rundu
New Era (Windhoek)
July 5, 2006

Dikungu, 180 km east of Rundu, is far from being a textbook example of a typical African village, where groups of women pound corn with babies firmly strapped onto their backs and packs of dogs bark at anything and everything in motion.

This settlement has no free-ranging chickens and there is no livestock nor children running around, save for its three inhabitants - a man and his wife, who both had their limbs blown off by anti-personnel mines (APMs) planted indiscriminately by former Unita bandits; and the third resident of this sleepy settlement, boasting a handful of tiny thatched huts, being an elderly woman who is not of much assistance because her eyes were blinded by cataracts.

The couple are a grim reminder of the carnage wrought by bandits from the then rag-tag rebel Unita army that caused untold suffering among hundreds of villagers whom they maimed, raped, murdered and stole their property before the NDF put a halt to their activities.

A maroela tree towers over five grass huts dotting this settlement whose inhabitants say they only catch a glimpse of Kavango Regional Governor John Thi-ghuru who serves as councillor for Mukwe Constituency when he speeds past them on the highway nearby.

At the time New Era stopped to interview the couple a transistor radio was relaying messages in a local vernacular while old batteries were placed in the sun to recharge.

They are deprived of children because one of their children, a girl, died when she was merely four months old, and their son died at the hospital at Andara while he was on treatment.

A mine, planted at night on a bush-path most frequented by villagers along the banks of the Kavango River, blew off Rware Shamparo's right foot reducing it to a bloody mess of flesh. The incident that also left her with a huge unsightly scar on her left foot happened one December morning while she was on her way to the river to fetch water for her family.

This is not the only of her disabilities because she is also one-eyed as a result of an injury in the right eye that she does not recall much about because it occurred during childhood.

To read the rest of the article, go to: http://allafrica.com/stories/200607050986.html

For more information on the US Campaign to Ban Landmines, go to www.banminesusa.org

U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines
c/o Friends Committee on National Legislation
245 2nd Street NE
Washington, DC 20002
phone: (202) 547-6000
fax: (202) 547-6019
Email: landmines@fcnl.org

To make a donation to the US Campaign to Ban Landmines go to: www.banminesusa.org/support/body.html and click on Donate.