Are we going backwards on landmines?

“For 25 years we were really winning the battle. We were clearing way more mines and way more explosive devices than were being used. And in the last five years, we have seen that reversed catastrophically.”

Those are the words of Paul Heslop, who works for UN Mine Action in Ukraine. He has worked for decades on mine clearance; he is in fact the deminer who accompanied Princess Diana through a mine field in Angola in 1997, as part of her support for the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines. The pictures from that day, of, arguably, the world’s most famous woman walking through a minefield, made global front pages.

Later that same year, after her death in a car crash in Paris, the Ottawa Convention was finally agreed. It’s regarded as one of the most successful weapons’ control treaties in existence, and is credited with saving many thousands of lives.

Paul Heslop, together with other mine experts, is our guest on Inside Geneva this week. They were attending the international meeting of mine action directors at the UN last month, at a time when, as Heslop told me, many fear the achievements of the Ottawa Convention are being rolled back.

Listen to this week’s episode:

The world’s big powers – the United States, Russia, and China – never ratified the treaty, but more than 160 member states did, and that really did change things. Even those who had not ratified began destroying their stockpiles, mines were used less and less, the casualty rate began falling. But now, with conflicts proliferating, landmines, and similar victim triggered weapons, are being used more and often. Meanwhile, the clean-up of countries contaminated for decades has not been completed.

Lethal legacy

‘‘We have at least one casualty every single day in Afghanistan that is killed or injured, and that casualty is most likely to be a child.” That’s Nick Pond, who is head of mine action with the UN Assistance Mission for Afghanistan.

The job is complex; there are classic landmines, the type covered by the Ottawa Convention, but there are also many other unexploded weapons which have lain hidden for decades. Pond told Inside Geneva about a refugee family arriving in Kabul who pitched their tent on a patch of land well-used by the community, “where people play cricket all the time”. But when the family lit a small fire to keep warm and cook dinner they ignited the fuse of a hidden Soviet era rocket, and seven children were hospitalised.

Then there are IED’s (improvised explosive devices), a common feature of Afghanistan’s long conflict, and now, new no go areas because of the most recent flare up with Pakistan. Pond fears multiple areas along the border have been recontaminated. “It is a bit of a Sisyphean task at times,” he told Inside Geneva, made all the more challenging because, amid cuts in humanitarian funding across the board, de-mining is also struggling for cash.

Some joining, others leaving

“It’s rather grim, I would say, a grim outlook. And sometimes, I guess, we probably all feel this is impossible.” Rana Elias, of the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, is originally from Lebanon. Her country has been sucked into conflict so often in the last fifty years that weapons contamination, from landmines, to IEDs, to cluster munitions, is a grim fact of life.

But Elias wants to highlight something positive. Her native Lebanon has just this month ratified the Ottawa Convention, a move that commits it to not using anti-personnel landmines, and to cleaning up those that contaminate its territory.

“This is a massive achievement, and this is a massive push to the convention itself,” she told Inside Geneva. “These are the stories that we should tell, the narratives that we should build, and celebrate.”

But while Lebanon joins Ottawa, other countries, once the treaty’s most loyal supporters, are leaving.

Facing up to Russian aggression

‘‘We did not say yes to landmines, we said no to unilateral disarmament constructs”. Jonatan Vseviov, as secretary general at Estonia’s foreign ministry, is his country’s deputy foreign minister. He knows Estonia’s decision (like Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland) to leave the treaty has caused dismay among weapons control experts and human rights groups.

But he believes countries facing Russia do not really have a choice. He insists his country “has no plans” at the moment to deploy landmines. “We are as opposed to landmines as anybody else”, he told me. “We know the cost of these weapon systems.

We also know that, God forbid, if military force were to be used against us, those weapon systems would be used against us, because the Russians don’t adhere to these limitations.”

His concerns are well-founded. Ukraine is now thought to be one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and as Heslop pointed out, the contamination will have far reaching consequences. “Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe, and the fact that there are billions of square metres of land that are suspected of being contaminated, that means that land can’t be farmed.”

New weapons, more contamination

“The level of proliferation is scary.” Sean Moorhouse of the UN Development Programme is talking about drones. We may imagine them, buzzing overhead and perhaps dropping small amounts of explosives. Moorhouse knows different.

“Everyone thinks about drones as flying, unmanned aerial vehicles, but we have ground drones. We have unmanned surface vessel ships. We have underwater drones, and all of them can be used to deliver explosives.”

Both Russia and Ukraine are using them in vast quantities. Ukraine, Moorhouse told me, produced “2.5 million first person view (small quadcopters with cameras, modified to carry explosive) drones last year.”

Ominously, he adds “70 % of them failed to go off, which means we now have 1.75 million unexploded drones just from the Ukrainian side.” As if that massive future clean up operation was not enough, both sides are increasingly attaching fibre optic “tails” to their drones, in a bid to prevent them being jammed. So much cable is now littering Ukraine (remember, it’s the breadbasket of Europe), that entire villages and vast swathes of farmland are covered in it. “Farmers can’t farm their fields. We can’t even do the demining because we can’t get through these cables.”

It is a fascinating conversation on Inside Geneva, and I learned a lot, some of it dismaying, some of it heartening. I hope you’ll listen to the whole podcast, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with one thought from Heslop, who pointed out that weapons manufacturers tend to tolerate a hefty fail rate – upwards of 10 % – for their products.

So, whether a weapon is banned, like anti-personnel landmines, or not, like weaponised drones, if it fails, and lies waiting for a child or indeed anyone other than its intended target, to be killed by it, it becomes indiscriminate. And lack of discrimination in weapons can lead to prosecutions for war crimes. Heslop thinks that, as well as making armies and states responsible, manufacturers need to be held to account too.

“If an oil tanker spills oil through incompetence” he explained, “the oil company pays for the clean-up. Why do we not see the weapons manufacturers paying for the clean-up of their weapons systems that were legitimately used against a military target, but then failed and then became an indiscriminate tool?”

Now there’s a thought. What do you think?

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