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Rain,
Mines And Aftershocks Slow Afghan Quake Aid By Nguyen Van Vinh
Driving rain swept across earthquake (news - web sites)-shattered Nahrin district in northern Afghanistan (news - web sites) on Friday, further disrupting aid efforts already hampered by the threat of land mines and aftershocks. . .
"This has turned into a logistical nightmare," a foreign aid worker on the spot said. "Rain is the last thing we needed. These poor people." . . .
U.S. and British Chinook helicopters had ferried 200,000 lbs of aid, including rice, beans, wheat, dates, water, blankets, tents and medical supplies to Nahrin, U.S. military spokesman Major Bryan Hilferty said.
International agencies have also managed to get aid supplies to a central distribution point in Nahrin, but the greater challenge is to get them to the scattered population of about 80,000 in the surrounding district.
"The aid is here, but it is difficult getting it to people," a U.N. spokesman said. "People are fearful of coming back into the town because of aftershocks, so they are staying on open hillsides."
Some people from outlying villages came with donkeys to haul food and blankets back to their shattered homes. Abdul Hashim, 43, was one man who made it to Nahrin. "We came here to get food and clothes which we have not received yet. They should send us food, tents and clothing because we live in a remote area destroyed by the earthquake," he said.
Despite the rain, getting uncontaminated water to the survivors was a key priority. Even before it started, rivers were muddy and contaminated in an area in its fourth year of drought.
Interim leader Hamid Karzai, who visited Nahrin on Wednesday and promised the survivors everything would be done to help them, has taken personal charge of the Afghan side of the relief effort putting off a trip to Turkey scheduled for Tuesday. The tragedy has become a test of Karzai's leadership skills in a nation split down many ethnic and other lines. Legacy of War
Land mines, the legacy of years of civil war in which Nahrin, 100 miles north of Kabul, was once on the front line, complicated the task and threatened to become a greater hazard because of the rain. The earthquake brought some mines closer to the surface and the rain was washing away the soil on top of the killer weapons.
Millions of mines are scattered around Afghanistan after 20 years of war. One killed a U.S. Navy (news - web sites) SEAL and wounded another near the southern city of Kandahar on Thursday.
A U.N. aerial survey showed an earthquake-shattered area with a nine mile radius in the foothills of the rugged Hindu Kush mountains. It showed 25 percent of all the houses in the area, which included 42 villages, had collapsed and 50 percent were seriously damaged. Only 10 percent escaped intact. U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokeswoman Rebecca Richards said in Kabul that longer-term needs were already being assessed. A four-member disaster assessment team was sent to the area on Thursday to start determining what would be needed in the future, she said.
There was particular concern that many able-bodied men died in the quake, leaving families and women without support.
Copyrigth 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
U.S. Soldier Killed By Mine in Afghanistan
Navy SEAL Death Reminder of Afghan Mine Problem (AFGHANISTAN) BAGRAM AIR BASE Afghanistan, 29 Mar 02 (Reuters)--
The death of a Navy SEAL was a reminder of the dangers the heavy use of mines in Afghanistan (news - web sites) during 20 years of war pose in the country, a U.S. spokesman said Friday.
"We're looking constantly," Major Bryan Hilferty told reporters at Bagram, an air base north of Kabul the coalition forces use as a staging area for operations against Taliban and al Qaeda remnants.
"It's just a great challenge here because there are so many mines," he said, confirming that SEAL Chief Petty Officer Matthew Bourgeois, 35, from Tallahassee, Florida, had been killed by a land mine in southern Afghanistan.
Nobody is quite sure how many mines -- ranging from little Soviet-era "butterfly" mines which look like toys to big anti-tank devices —litter Afghanistan.
Everybody agrees there are millions of them and they wound people every day. They are also making life difficult for aid workers trying to help thousands of people made homeless in the northern area of Nahrin by a series of earthquakes (news - web sites) this week.
The tremors brought some mines closer to the surface and rain which poured down on the drought-stricken area Friday was washing the soil off the top of others.
It is often said that the most productive factories in Afghanistan are those run by organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) making prosthetic limbs to replace those blown off by mines.
Hilferty said Bourgeois was on a training exercise, not on an operation in the fight against remnants of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden (news -websites)'s al Qaeda network blamed for the September 11 attacks on the United States which triggered a U.S.-led war on terror.
"They were walking the vicinity of Kandahar area and unfortunately a landmine exploded," Hilferty said.
Hilferty said the area near the city was being combed by Danish and Polish engineers, sniffer dogs and mine-clearing equipment.
Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Singer Emmylou Harris and Commentator Arianna Huffington Call for Mine Ban
Will This President Ban Land
Mines? 3/27/2002 The Boston Globe
I AM A GREAT fan of the television series ''The West Wing.'' Besides being entertaining, it thoughtfully presents both sides of serious and controversial issues, sometimes uncannily current ones, which is the case in this week's episode.
Tonight's show contains a subplot pertaining to US policy on banning land mines, which is now under review by the Bush administration. It happens to be an issue that I have been actively involved in through the prodigious efforts of Bobby Muller and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation since 1997.
Like most Americans, I was unaware of the proliferation of landmines around the globe and unaware of the devastation caused by these hideous weapons. There are an estimated 60 million to 85 million land mines in more than 60 countries around the world. Most of these countries are poor, and they struggle to support their citizens on agrarian economies, which are crippled when the land is littered with mines.
The horrific statistics speak for themselves: Land mines claim a new victim every 22 minutes. They are designed to maim rather than kill their victims, and their victims are almost always innocent civilians - a woman gathering firewood or a child tending a herd. And because land mines remain in the ground years after conflict has officially ended, they continue to hold the land and the people hostage. Refugee populations cannot be safely returned to fields that can no longer be safely farmed. There is no peace for countries littered with the evil of land mines.
The humanitarian side of the issue will, I'm sure, be addressed by President Bartlet's staff. But they might also take into consideration that land mines in today's warfare are not only obsolete but, in the opinion of many experienced and highly respected military minds, militarily irresponsible. They limit mobility and kill or maim indiscriminately. Our own US forces are already suffering casualties from land mines in Afghanistan.
In 1997 the campaign to ban land mines was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, largely in recognition of its efforts leading up to the Ottawa Treaty banning land mines, which has been signed by 142 nations (including our NATO allies). Most Americans assume that the United States has already officially given its support to this worldwide effort, especially since we led the way by being the first nation to enact a one-year ban on the export of land mines in 1992 and have since contributed millions of dollars to humanitarian demining programs around the world. Unfortunately, we have not signed the Ottawa Treaty, making it more acceptable for countries like Iraq, China, Russia, India, and Pakistan to refuse a seat at this most historic and unprecedented table.
So for an hour tonight, the policy debate around land mines will be dramatized for the American people, at least in a fictional context. And I will be watching with interest to see what President Bartlet will do. When the hour has ended, the tragedy of land mines - this plague of terrorism in slow motion - will still loom heavy in a very real world, and the question will still remain: Will President Bush do the right thing and ban land mines now?
Emmylou Harris is a Grammy Award-winning singer- songwriter. In 1998, she launched Concerts for a Landmine Free World to raise money for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's work with land mine survivors.
This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 3/27/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Hollywood
Sends A Message: Sign the Mine Ban Treaty
Lights, Camera.Landmines
Ever since Sept. 11, the Bush administration has been looking to Hollywood for help in burnishing America's image around the world. Who can forget roving ambassador Karl Rove taking a meeting in Beverly Hills with the entertainment industry's heaviest hitters back in November?
As so often happens in the film business, though, the initial pitch generated a lot of buzz, then "Untitled White House Project" found itself languishing in development hell.
This week, however, Tinsel Town has turned the spotlight on the importance of banning landmines -- a move that would help us win foreign friends and influence the widespread international perception of us as unfeeling bullies, thus speeding up the Sisyphean task of re-making America's image.
First, on Oscar night, Bosnia's "No Man's Land" was the surprise winner of the best foreign language film award. A withering anti-war satire, the film centers on the travails of a wounded Bosnian soldier who finds himself, in a post-modern dilemma worthy of Samuel Beckett, lying on a landmine booby-trapped to explode if he gets up.
Then, tonight, "The West Wing" will feature a plotline in which the newly named U.S. poet laureate chastises the White House for not signing the international treaty banning landmines. Her conviction stems from a searing personal experience, watching a father and son fishing in Bosnia. "The kid hooked a piece of garbage," she tells communications director Toby Ziegler, "and when he tried to take it off the line it blew him up. Right in front of his father. And right in front of me."
Hollywood's creative convergence on this issue comes at a time when the real West Wing is reviewing America's landmine policy. As it currently stands, the U.S. has stubbornly refused to join the 142 nations that have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty forbidding the use, stockpiling and production of anti-personnel landmines -- a devastating weapon that has proven far more effective at killing and maiming innocent civilians than enemy troops.
Since 1975, landmines have killed over a million people -- far outstripping the deaths caused by those well-publicized bugaboos, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The buried bomblets claim a new victim every 22 minutes -- that's 24,000 casualties a year. And of those 24,000, 95 percent are civilians. Even more horrifying, 50 percent of those maimed or killed are children.
What makes landmines so repugnant is their lethal and long-lived promiscuity -- they don't care who they destroy. Once sown in the earth, they hold their grudges long after the soldiers who planted them have departed and long after the conflicts that seemed to necessitate their use have withered. Their bloody harvest can sprout days, months, years, even decades after they have been laid. And mines are an equal opportunity killer -- they can't tell to which side the soldier stepping on them belongs or if the footstep setting them off is that of a child.
In an era of ever more precise smart-bomb technology, landmines are the ultimate in imbecilic weaponry. They are the psycho-killers of modern arms: cross their path and they blow you away -- for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
And they are a murderous gift that keeps on giving: landmines never get the word that a ceasefire has been ordered, or that last year's battlefield is once again some family's backyard or some farmer's field or some children's playground.
There are approximately 120 million landmines still buried in at least 90 different countries, including a million in Bosnia, a million in Afghanistan, and 10 million in Angola -- a generous helping of one mine for every person in that war-ravaged country. There are so many unexploded mines spread across the globe, and removing them is such a painstaking (and often deadly) task, that experts estimate it will take over 150 years to get rid of them all. And that's if no new mines are laid. Unfortunately, for every mine that is removed, a staggering 25 new mines are being laid.
For Danis Tanovic, who spent two years documenting real war atrocities as a cameraman in Bosnia before writing and directing "No Man's Land," making the public aware of such carnage is the only way to stop it. "Bosnia was saved thanks to journalists," he says. "People were seeing what was happening; people were embarrassed by what they were seeing."
I had a similar reaction when I met with Jerry White, the executive director of Landmine Survivors Network, who gave my 12-year old daughter and me a simple but powerful lesson. First he handed us a small, round, bright green object -- an actual landmine. Then, without warning, he showed us what that innocent-looking device can do by unscrewing his prosthesis and revealing the remains of what used to be his right leg. He lost it when, as a 20-year-old student on a hiking trip in Israel, he stepped on a mine that had been buried by Syrian soldiers 17 years earlier.
The stories told by Jerry White, "No Man's Land," and this week's "West Wing" should inspire us to do all we can to embarrass the president into action: He should sign the Mine Ban Treaty now.
Coverage
of Recent USCBL Letter to White House in Atlanta Journal-Constitution
As a combat veteran of Korea and Vietnam, retired Army Lt. Gen. Hal Moore of Auburn, Ala., has seen the kind of gruesome damage that warring soldiers can inflict on each other. But Moore says he thinks that some of the most insidious damage comes not from opposing soldiers but from anti-personnel land mines sown indiscriminately around the battlefield.
Moore, portrayed by actor Mel Gibson in the current Vietnam War film "We Were Soldiers," is among eight senior U.S. military officers pushing the Bush administration to sign the international Mine Ban Treaty.
The U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines and 80 humanitarian, religious, veteran and medical organizations issued another call Tuesday for the White House to support the treaty.
The treaty has been signed by 140 other nations and would prohibit the production, stockpiling, use and sale or transfer of land mines. Past administrations and the military have resisted the treaty because they fear it would put U.S. troops at risk.
Moore disagrees.
"I think with the high-tech development we have now, we do not need to have so-called dumb mines out there in defensive positions," Moore said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home. "We can have other technology detecting incoming enemy troops."
Officials with the campaign to ban mines say 15,000 to 20,000 people, most of them civilians, are killed, maimed or blinded each year in the 80 countries in which the explosive devices are a major problem. One of those countries is Afghanistan, where officials estimate there may be as many as 7 million mines, many left over from the 10-year Soviet occupation.
Nathaniel Raymond, spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights, which supports the anti-mine campaign, said the Clinton Administration issued directive that the U.S. would sign the treaty if certain military conditions were met by 2006. Now, Raymond said, "All indications are that [Bush administration officials] are planning to abandon the treaty."
Moore said the problem with land mines first became evident to him during his service in Korea. There, he said, it was not unusual for U.S. commanders to scatter mines around their positions for defensive purposes. If troops had to leave those positions quickly, he said, "Those mines were just waiting out there to blow someone's leg off."
Moore has traveled frequently in recent years to Vietnam and once to Cambodia, where he has seen many civilians who lost limbs because of mines left over from the war that ended more than 25 years ago.
And on a recent trip to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Moore said he was approached by a former soldier who was missing a leg. "When I asked him what happened," Moore said, "he said he had lost it to a landmine in Somalia." Clearing
Up Myths About Mines and Korea
Background: In the early 1950s the U.S. military and the armed forces of the Republic of Korea erected a barrier system separating North and South Korea. The barrier includes an estimated two million antipersonnel landmines in the 2.5 mile wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and an estimated one million landmines in the six mile wide Military Control Zone. The landmines in this barrier would not be affected by the United States joining the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines, and if South Korea joined the treaty the landmines could remain in the ground for up to twenty years. This is the only such static emplacement of landmines used in defense of U.S. forces in the case of a military conflict. Landmines were dug up and destroyed by the U.S. government in the barrier system protecting the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in 1998.
Korea is cited by proponents of landmine use as a "special case" where landmines are necessary for the defense of U.S. armed forces. This suggests images of hordes of North Korean soldiers poised to pour across the border in an attack on outnumbered U.S. soldiers. This argument rests on a number of myths and mistaken assumptions that this paper addresses.
Landmine Myths in Korea
Myth: The 37,000 U.S. troops stationed on the DMZ are the first line of defense for South Korea. Reality:
Myth: The U.S. landmine barrier system is a principal deterrent of an invasion by North Korea. Reality:
Myth: Landmines are an integral part of U.S. battle plans in Korea. Reality:
Myth: Landmines in Korea are not a hazard to civilians. Reality:
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Two
Children Killed in Kashmire Mine Blast
Two schoolchildren were killed and five others seriously injured Wednesday when a landmine planted by militants exploded in Kashmir, police said. Police said the militants positioned the landmine on the edge of a dusty village road at Takipora in the Lolab area of northern Kupwara district.
"When an Army convoy approached the scene militants detonated the landmine, which exploded with a bang at 9:40 am (0410 GMT)," a spokesman said.
The blast seriously injured seven schoolchildren who were walking by the road, he said.
"They were shifted to an Army hospital where two of them died," he said, identifying the two as Reyaz Ahmed Mir, 10, and Hilal Ahmed, 11.
The two children were buried later in the day at a funeral attended by hundreds of villagers. Five other children were being treated in hospital, including one girl, 10-year-old Meema Bano. Police said the mine explosion caused no injuries or damage to Army personnel and the convoy, which belonged to the Rashtriya Rifles. The area was immediately sealed by Rashtriya Rifles personnel and reinforcements that reached the scene.
"The Army has launched a search-out operation in the area to arrest the militants involved in the explosion," the spokesman said. He said senior civilian and police officials had rushed to the spot after the explosion.
Lolab has a high concentration of Army and paramilitary forces as it lies close to the Line of Control. The Army considers the area particularly prone to infiltration of separatist militants and ammunition.
Officials said they saw villagers in Takipora beating their chests and women pulling their hair in displays of grief. It was the second time in two years that schoolchildren have died in landmines planted by militants targeting security forces. Last year four children were killed and three dozen injured when a bus carrying children to a picnic spot ran over a mine in the southern Anantnag district.
Copyright © 2002 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved. 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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