| Amputee Vets, Sen. Leahy, West Wing, Jackie Chan...
In this edition. . .
Senator Leahy on Bush Administration's "Squandered Opportunity" on Landmines Senator Leahy (D-VT), a long-time leader in Congress on the landmines issue issued a public statement and an Op-Ed (together with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's President Bobby Muller) on the Bush Administration's squandered opportunity on the landmines issue. To read the statement, visit To read the Op-Ed, published in the Rutland (VT)
Herald, visit Stars of TV Show "West Wing" Raise Awareness and Funds for Landmine Survivors On May 3, 2004, over 250 people gathered in Los Angeles to celebrate the resilience of landmine survivors and to raise funds for the Landmine Survivors Network, which sits on the US Campaign to Ban Landmines steering committee. NBC's "West Wing" stars Martin Sheen, Stockard Channing, and others performed "Raising Our Voices," a play based on the stories of landmine survivors. Landmine Survivors Network Executive Director Jerry White ended the performance by telling his personal story of landmine survival. "Raising Our Voices" illustrates how indiscriminate landmines are. The victims in the play cross cultural, social, and economic barriers and included a child in Ethiopia, a bus driver in Vietnam, a parent in Afghanistan, and a student in Israel. Moving musical performances by Sam Phillips and the New Philadelphia AME Adult Choir opened and closed the performance. For more information, visit Chechen President, Reuters Photographer, and Others Die in Landmine Blast May 10, 2004 A photographer for the Reuters news agency was killed Sunday by an explosion in Grozny, the Chechen capital, that also killed the province's Kremlin-backed leader, the agency said. Adlan Khasanov, 33, had worked for the agency in Chechnya as a photographer and television cameraman since the late 1990s. Khasanov was covering Victory Day, marking the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, when a blast believed to have been caused by a land mine tore through the stands. The explosion killed as many as 24 people, including Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov. Copyright 2004 AP. All rights reserved. Jackie Chan Left Haunted by Landmines After Trip to Cambodia May 10, 2004 Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan said Monday he dreamt about digging up landmines for a whole week after returning from a trip to Cambodia to raise awareness about the issue there. Chan spent three days in the country as a UN goodwill ambassador in late April, visiting landmine explosion victims and HIV/AIDS patients. Cambodia has Southeast Asia's highest HIV infection rate at 2.6 per cent for 2002, according to the UN. The country's remote areas are still strewn with landmines and unexploded bombs left over from three decades of fighting. Briefing the Hong Kong media about his trip Monday, he said he also walked through an area once sown with landmines that has since been mostly -but not entirely- cleared. Chan said he wasn't afraid, but that the visit as a whole shook him up so much that "for a week whenever I had a dream I dreamt about digging landmines.'' "A child could go to buy milk and return without legs,'' he said. Chan also said he's looking at a script for a movie set in Cambodia and will "very likely'' start shooting there next year, but declined to give details. The star of Hollywood movies Rush Hour, Rumble in the Bronx and Shanghai Noon, Chan will likely begin shooting the third film in the Rush Hour series later this year. © 2004 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved. Life and Limb; After Risking Both, A Vet Gives Thanks for Still Having the First May 9, 2004 You can never know what life will bring, and Jim Mayer certainly didn't on April 25, 1969, as he began to step over a two-foot wall lining a Vietnamese rice paddy and heard a click and froze for a split second. How could he possibly have guessed that 35 years later he would find himself in a back room at Fran O'Brien's Stadium Steakhouse, a few blocks from the White House, surrounded by friends who'd gathered to celebrate what happened -- or to be more precise, what didn't happen -- on that day. He heard that click and froze, but it was too late. He was standing on a 60mm mortar shell, American made, that the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese had wired up as a land mine. It blew him straight into the air. When he hit the ground, he saw that the bottom of his left leg was gone... When he woke up two days later, he had no toes left to move. Now here he is at 58, gliding through the crowd at Fran O'Brien's on two below-the-knee prostheses, shaking hands, cracking jokes, collecting hugs. After nearly two hours of this, he steps behind a small lectern at the side of the room, then pretends to change his mind. "Go buy a drink and we'll start the program in 25 minutes," he says. But the 70 or so people gathered for Jim Mayer's 35th annual Alive Day will have none of it... From the tables along the back wall, a cluster of Mayer's newest friends -- much younger men who lost their limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq -- join in. It may seem like a strange concept, celebrating the day you got blown up, but it doesn't feel strange to a fair number of the people at Mayer's party -- because they've been through the same experience he has... "January 11th is my day," says Fred Downs, who lost his left arm in 1968 -- and almost lost his other limbs as well -- to a Bouncing Betty, a land mine that flies above the ground and explodes waist high. Downs celebrates the anniversary quietly with his family. Quiet celebrations seem to be the norm, in fact, at least among the wounded vets at Fran O'Brien's, but Max Cleland's Alive Days tend to be more public. Cleland is the former senator from Georgia, currently serving on the board of the Export-Import Bank, who lost both legs and an arm to a grenade in 1968. He borrowed the concept from Mayer, who has worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) for 30 years and who served as Cleland's administrative assistant when the Georgian headed the VA in the late 1970s. "We all got on a bus, we got drunk as hell, went out to the shore of Maryland and ate crabs," Cleland says of the first Jim Mayer Alive Day he attended, and he has tried to celebrate his own every April 8 since. "Some years are better, some much worse, but in my mind it's always stuck that on that day, I should be grateful for being alive."... For full article, see http://www.banminesusa.org/news/909_vet.htm Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved Landmines Documentary Wins Award May 6, 2004 STORYTELLER Media Group won two awards at the recent WorldFest Film Festival held in Texas. "Dogs of Peace," Storyteller's documentary about dogs used to detect landmines in Afghanistan, was awarded the special jury prize at the film festival. Storyteller's hopes to win a few more film awards after the Discovery entertainment group in the US nominated "Dogs of Peace" for an Emmy Award and a Peabody Award earlier this year... Storyteller has just begun shooting 10 one-hour specials for Discovery in the US. © Copyright 2004 Business News Pty Ltd. U.N. Lebanon Peace Program Hinges on Tree-Planting 29 April 29, 2004 Residents of a tense border zone littered with hundreds of thousands of land mines are getting a chance to live a normal life thanks to a simple United Nations idea -- where there was a mine, plant a tree. Officials have so far planted 47,000 trees, mainly pines and palms, at US$6 apiece in southern Lebanon. They hope to reach 170,000, said Staffan de Mistura. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative for the area. "You can look at it two ways -- either as a tragedy or an opportunity," de Mistura told reporters. "When you have a mine and you take it out, you have a hole. When you have a hole, why not plant a tree?" Rebuilding the environment will likely boost the economy, he said ahead of a meeting with donors. "This is a beautiful area with great potential."... Years of war have left large stretches of southern Lebanon's highly fertile fields and orchards uncultivated. Fires -- often started by shelling -- caused deforestation, raising the risk that parts of the region could turn into desert... Refugees have been wary of returning to wrecked villages. Mine explosions over the past four years have killed more than 80 people and injured more than 200. The United Nations estimates more than 400,000 land mines and other ordnance were planted in the formerly occupied border zone, mostly by Israel and its Lebanese militia allies in their fight against Lebanese guerrillas, who also planted mines. Mine-clearing teams also have found ordnance left over from conflicts in the 1920s and World War II. Nearly 170,000 land mines have been removed since Israel's withdrawal, mostly thanks to the Israeli military's timely handover of minefield maps, de Mistura noted... © 2004. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. Seattle Systems Donation Helps Young Landmine Victims Regain Their Mobility April 27, 2004 (Business Wire) Donation of ShapeMaker Software to Kids First Vietnam Contributes to the Long-Term Improvement of Victims of War ShapeMaker version 4.4 is a shape manipulation software package that helps prosthetists and technicians sculpt digitized images of a patient's limb to accurately create a customized prosthetic device. The Kids First Vietnam Mobility Clinic is the keystone of the seven-acre Kids First Rehabilitation and Vocational Training Village, which provides training that contributes to the long-term social and economic development of disabled Vietnam children. Upon becoming fully equipped, the Mobility Clinic will offer an outreach program as well as prosthetic, orthotic and physical therapy services to disabled children in Central Vietnam. Quang Tri Province, home to the Kids First Village, was one of the deadliest battlefields of the Vietnam War. Unexploded land mines have resulted in scores of children with a wide range of impairments, including nearly 2,600 mobility-impaired children in the Quang Tri province alone... Seattle Systems is the first company to bring 'Flash' technology to the fitting of custom knee orthosis, debuting Digital Flash Scan technology, an easy-to-use knee brace shape acquisition technology for medical professionals. By enabling ultra accurate electronic shape acquisition, ordering using Digital Flash Scan reduces fulfillment times by 50 percent versus traditional methods. For more information, please visit www.seattlesystems.com. © 2004 Business Wire. All Rights Reserved. Mines Make Childhood Dangerous Pastime in Tajikistan April 24, 2004 (Agence France Presse) Being a child shepherd can be a deadly affair in the Tajik mountains -- littered with landmines from civil wars of the past and present-day fears of drugs, immigrants and Islamic extremism. On one day in late March, three boys were killed when they wandered onto a mine field near their northern village on the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Brothers Anvar and Ergashali Musoyev, aged 13 and 15, and their friend Muhamad Boboyev, 12, were herding cows not far from their Kizil Pilol village when the tragedy struck. "Sappers spent hours extracting their ripped-apart bodies the day after the tragedy," another resident of the village told AFP. Such tragedies are all too common here -- earlier that week a 10-year-old shepherd was killed nearby. And at least 68 Tajiks have died on landmines since 2000, according to official figures...Tajikistan is one of only two former Soviet republics in Central Asia, along with Turkmenistan, to have joined the Ottawa Convention banning the use of mines in warfare... The UN treaty has been signed by 150 countries -- although not the United States or Russia -- and has been ratified by 141 of these. The wife of Jordan's late King Hussein, Queen Noor, raised the issue of mines during a visit to Tajikistan last week. "We congratulate those who are working very hard to support the Ottawa Convention," the queen told a two-day convention in the capital Dushanbe. "From the bottom of my heart I urge you to push your governments to join (other) countries to save your men, women and children from death or life-long disability," she said. Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2004 All reproduction and presentation rights reserved. USCBL Letter to the Editor in International Herald Tribune
Land mine ban In the article "On land mines, America is a humanitarian leader" (Views, March 20), Richard Garwin asserts that the Bush administration deserves credit for its new land mine policy. But the Bush policy ignores and rolls back progress toward eliminating these indiscriminate weapons. The policy puts off the destruction of "dumb" land mines until 2010 and allows the U.S. military to use self-deactivating mines indefinitely. These self-deactivating mines - or so-called "smart" mines - cannot discriminate between the foot of a soldier and that of a child; they tend to be scattered by air and are thus difficult to mark and map; they pose tremendous challenges and costs for demining teams; and they threaten the lives and limbs of civilians and U.S. and allied troops who may step on the weapons weeks after they've been planted, not just days. President George W. Bush's new policy may well give political cover to countries like Russia, India and Pakistan, which have laid hundreds of thousands of mines in recent years with devastating consequences for innocent victims. Setting a goal of getting rid of "dumb" U.S. anti-vehicle and antipersonnel mines by 2010 is a positive development, but it is more than overshadowed by the message sent by abandoning efforts to join the Ottawa land mine treaty. The strongest military in the world should be able to join together with most nations in urging users of this weapon to stop sowing their lethal legacy. Gina Coplon-Newfield, Boston, Coordinator, U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines For more information about the US Campaign to Ban Landmines or to donate on-line, please see our website at www.banminesusa.org U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines To stop receiving these updates and action alerts, please write to landmines@fcnl.org from the email address that receives the newsletter and ask us to take you off the list. |
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