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U.S.
Campaign to Ban Landmines Email Newsletter In this edition. . .
Landmine
Victim Assistance Bill Gains Support in Congress This legislation will expand authority at the USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services to provide increased assistance for: Medical and Rehabilitative Services; Research, Prevention and Public Awareness Campaigns; and Facilitation of Peer Support Networks for Individuals with Disabilities, including Victims of Landmines, and other Victims of Civil Strife and Warfare. On April 11, 2002, Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan appeared as Guest Speaker at a Senate Briefing titled "Landmines in Afghanistan: A Case for Victim Assistance." The Senate Briefing was sponsored by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), Patrick Leahy (D- Vermont) and Arlen Specter (R- Pennsylvania). Landmine Survivors Network Board Member, Ambassador Karl R. Inderfurth introduced the panel and moderated the discussion. Her Majesty described the plight of landmine victims worldwide and made the case for the importance of increased support for victim assistance programs. Her Majesty spoke passionately about the situation landmine survivors face in the developing world with few medical supplies, little sanitation or clean water, and a scarcity of surgeons, physical therapists and psychologists. With 500,000 landmine victims in Afghanistan alone, their needs are great. Her Majesty was joined by Lincoln Bloomfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs and Special Representative for the President and Secretary of State for Mine Action, who provided an overview of the landmine situation in Afghanistan and the need for assistance programs for victims of landmines, civil strife and warfare. Representatives from the Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were also on hand to detail their current and future programs in Afghanistan and to provide an overview of their partnerships with international relief organizations in the areas of victim assistance. USCBL Coordinator Gina Coplon-Newfield praised Her Majesty Queen Noor, Senator Clinton, and the other leaders present for their support of this very important victim assistance legislation. Look out for future action alerts on how to voice your support of these bills to your legislators. Landmine Policy Radio Debate Available on the Web If you missed the recent US landmine policy debate on the National Public Radio Show "Justice Talking," you can now listen to it on the web by visiting www.banminesusa.org/news/963_npr_gina.htm. If your local NPR affiliate didn't run the show, you may be able to convince them to do so (as the folks who listen to North Dakota Public Radio just did) by getting several people to call them up. Check www.justicetalking.org/web/tunein.asp and scroll to the bottom of the page to see if your area has one of the 30 or so local stations around the country that regularly airs "Justice Talking." If not, give them a call! You can tell them that given that we expect the Bush Administration to come out with new US landmine policies soon, now is an important time to increase the public dialogue on this issue, and thus to play the show for their listeners. To find out how to contact your local NPR station, visit www.npr.org/members/ Chechen Land Mines Take a Toll May 4, 2002, Associated Press By YURI BAGROV VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- Hasan Ismailov used to be a champion youth boxer, dancing nimbly around the ring as he landed punches on opponents. But boxing is a thing of the past for the Chechen teen-ager -- along with the leg he lost in a land mine explosion. Ismailov, now 16, was with other children playing on the outskirts of Urus-Martan, a town in southwestern Chechnya, in December 2000 when Russian troops destroyed a car packed with explosives. After the soldiers gave the all-clear signal, a crowd moved in to look at the damage. A mine went off, killing 25 people and wounding more than 50. "When I came to, I found myself in a hospital bed, without my left leg," Ismailov said. His right leg, hands and face are marked with scars from cuts and burns, and he has a permanent squint that doctors attribute to the explosion. Other wounds are hidden -- psychological scars that make him, like many young mine victims, leery of talking with strangers. About 4,000 Chechen children have been maimed or killed by mines since the first war erupted in the southern Russian region in 1994, the United Nations Children's Fund says. In all, 7,000 to 10,000 people in Chechnya have fallen victim to land mines during the two wars. UNICEF estimates about a half-million mines are scattered across the republic, which is about the size of New Jersey. "De-mining is something we cannot even talk about, because the conflict is still going on," said Enrico Leonard, an emergency program coordinator at UNICEF's office in Moscow. Russian troops seeded mine fields in Chechnya early in the war, and rebels continue laying them daily. While Russian soldiers are often targeted -- military vehicles are blown up by mines almost daily -- civilians appear to be the most frequent victims. Many trip mines as they forage for wood or take their animals to pasture. UNICEF spent more than $1 million last year in Chechnya and surrounding regions teaching mine awareness to children and teachers and helping young victims recover. So far this year, donors have come up with about 30 percent of the $1.2 million that UNICEF has requested to continue the program. Every Friday, a UNICEF van delivers Chechen children to the Orthopedic Prosthesis Workshop in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, a Russian republic bordering Chechnya. Here they are fitted with prosthetic devices, and therapists help them learn to move around unaided again -- as well as overcome their fears. "Besides physical injuries, these kids have suffered psychological trauma," said Lyubov Sedakova, an orthopedist. "It was difficult for us in the first days, but now we can easily find a personal approach to any one of them." Making his second visit to the clinic, Ismailov, the former boxer, gingerly took a few steps on his new leg so clinic workers could make adjustments on the device, a jointed tube of rubber and aluminum covered with polyurethane foam and attached to a plastic bowl to hold the stump of his thigh. It takes up to five visits to perfect the fit. The workshop provided prostheses to 60 children in 2001. This year, it has stepped up the tempo, taking in 15 new patients every week, Leonard said. A local Chechen humanitarian group, Voice of the Mountains, identifies children who need artificial limbs and organizes the weekly trips from Chechnya. The van has to go through numerous Russian military checkpoints on the way to Vladikavkaz, and the children often see military engineers searching for unexploded mines on the roads. Rats to Detect Landmines? Rats Turned Into Remote-Controlled Robots Technique's Potential Uses Include Aid to Victims of Disaster or Neural Injuries By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, May 2, 2002; Page A01 (Article Excerpted) Scientists for the first time have managed to remotely direct the movements of rats by using implanted electrodes to control their behavior -- in effect transforming living animals into robots. The technique has potentially important implications for activities ranging from land mine detection, earthquake recovery and spying to the emerging field of "neural prostheses" -- using electronics to bridge nervous-system gaps caused by spinal injuries, strokes or other physical infirmities. "It's really just conditioning behavior," said physiologist John K. Chapin of the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center, noting that training an animal to do human bidding is as old as teaching dogs to fetch. "But it's different in that you can do it all with remote control," he added. "In theory, you could guide the animal anywhere." The Chapin team implanted three electrodes in the rat's brain. One was placed in a "generic" pleasure center that records satisfaction whenever needs -- for food, water or warmth -- are satisfied. The others were implanted to stimulate the whisker bundles on either side of the rat's nose. By triggering one of the whisker implants and then stimulating the reward center, the researchers were able to make the rat turn in one direction or the other and move forward -- much as a sled driver can order his dogs to "gee" or "haw." After up to 10 days of training, the rat could navigate practically any landscape, wearing a receiver and a power pack on its back and being steered by a technician issuing commands from a laptop computer up to 550 yards away, Chapin said. The rat thus becomes a living robot, controlled remotely by a human handler but able to go anywhere a rat can go. "This trumps that problem," Chapin said. "The rat is much more adept than a robot at getting around difficult terrain -- and it has a nose." The military and public service potential of the project has won funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army's research arm. Camera-equipped rats may have a future as land mine detectors, or as couriers or scouts searching for human victims trapped in collapsed buildings or mine shafts, Chapin said. They could also be used as the "rat on the floor" equivalent of the "fly on the wall," providing a real-time ability to eavesdrop on sensitive conversations taking place behind closed doors. "The rat looks normal and isn't feeling any pain because he's getting rewards for doing the right thing," Chapin said. "They get very tame. They love to get picked up, and they don't even have to be sacrificed because the longer we use them the better they get. We have one old lady rat that received an implant at the beginning of last September." © 2002 The Washington Post Company Mary MacMakin Honored by the Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR) This year's CIR Leadership Award Recipient is Mary MacMakin. Ms. MacMakin is the founder of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support for Afghanistan (PARSA), which helps impoverished Afghan widows and orphans. Ms. MacMakin is an inspiration to all who meet her, and her 40 years of work in Afghanistan represents an unparalleled achievement in the field of rehabilitation. The CIR Leadership Award in International Rehabilitation honors those who have worked internationally to advance the field of rehabilitation, champion the principle of inclusion and help others achieve their full potential. A portion of the proceeds from the CIR's Fifth Annual Awards Dinner held on April 8, 2002 will be utilized to establish an Afghanistan Disabilities Resource Center in Kabul. In this effort, the CIR will work in partnership with Award recipient Mary MacMakin and her organization, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation Support for Afghanistan (PARSA), to provide rehabilitation training and services to Afghan war widows and Afghanis with disabilities. For more information, visit www.banmines.org For more information about the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines or to donate on-line, please visit www.banminesusa.org
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