September 1999 No 5 1999

Another CALM year?

The past year has been another active one for CALM, as you can read in the Annual Report on page 2. The report will be presented at CALM's Annual General Meeting in Wellington on 23 September, to which all who can make it are invited (and bring your family, friends and neighbours!). See the notice on page 2.

As well as reviewing the past year, the AGM will look ahead to CALM's aims for the coming year. There is plenty still to do, as other items in this Newsletter clearly indicate. We can be proud that New Zealanders - whether through the outstanding demining work of the Army, the leadership of Lt-Col Flanagan in Kosovo, Lawrence Carter's research work, humanitarian aid, and CALM's contributions to Landmine Monitor and the ICBL - are contributing fully to the international struggle against landmines.

With your support CALM will keep on playing its part. Please stick with CALM, and through CALM we can all help this wholly worthwhile, world-wide campaign.

United States will give US$250 million in mine action support

(Washington DC) The US State Department awarded a contract on August 19 valued up to $250 million over a five-year period to RONCO Consulting Corporation to provide mine clearance and mine detection support, logistics, and supply services to countries around the world receiving US humanitarian demining assistance.

The primary objective "is to provide truly integrated mine action services to mine-afflicted countries around the world," a spokesman said. The United States provides mine action support to some 30 countries already.

Mostly, the United States seeks to reduce civilian casualties, permit the return of refugees and displaced persons, and enhance a nation's stability by assisting countries in establishing a sustainable indigenous demining capability.

CALM Annual Report August 1999

In presenting the 1999 Annual Report of the New Zealand Campaign Against Landmines it is good to be able to observe that New Zealand has continued to make a significant and worthwhile contribution both at the political level and the practical level.

Around the world 84 countries have now ratified the Mine Ban Treaty, and a total of 135 have signed. Regrettably there are still countries holding out. These include Russia, China, India, much of the Middle East and the United States of America.

Our own Government ratified the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, and has continued to provide strong support for landmine clearance work and victim support in a number of mine-affected countries. It has continued to provide strong political support internationally.

CALM has continued its campaign work, maintaining liaison with government departments, MPs, other NGOs, and with Campaign groups overseas and especially the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. A copy of the book "To Walk Without Fear" was presented to Minister of Foreign Affairs Don McKinnon. Neil Mander attended the First Meeting of States Parties in Maputo, Mozambique in May, being accredited to the official New Zealand delegation.

A particular task was the preparation of our submission supporting the Antipersonnel Mines Prohibition Bill last year. We appeared before the Parliamentary Select Committee hearing submissions on the Bill, and were pleased when it was passed with support from all Parliamentary parties last December.

A major task was the gathering of information for the first Landmine Monitor Report which was presented to the First Meeting of States Parties in Maputo in Mozambique in May of this year. CALM members gathered information on all aspects of landmines as covered by the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, for New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and a dozen Pacific Island nations. John Head travelled to Papua New Guinea and Singapore to gather information. Neil Mander attended Landmine Monitor planning conferences in Dublin and Ottawa and John Head attended the Conference in Oslo to present and debate the final reports from Australia and the South Pacific for the Landmine Monitor. Copies of this 1,100 page report and its 4-page Executive Summary were distributed to libraries in New Zealand.

In March of this year church bells from Auckland to Dunedin were rung to celebrate the coming into force of the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty.

A vital task has been the dissemination of information from around the world to our members and supporters in New Zealand. This was achieved by email, by our own Newsletter edited by David Zwartz and by our own internet web site provided by the generosity of Protel and the work of Nick Head.

We have continued to encourage those organisations providing landmine victim support and rehabilitation, and research into better mine location techniques.

More recently CALM has voiced its concern over the many unexploded cluster bomblets which, along with landmines, litter much of the Yugoslav countryside and provide many hazards for peacekeepers and civilians in the wake of the Kosovo war.

We have continued our international campaign with letters to the US Ambassador urging that the USA should sign the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, and liaison with some other embassies and Pacific Island nations.

Special thanks go to those many members who from their own slender resources have contributed to help our meagre finances and provide the vital moral support without which the campaign could not function.

Neil Mander, Convenor

Army News prints letters of appreciation

The 31 August of Army News contained two letters sent to Major General Maurice Dodson:

Dear Major General, I am writing as a member of CALM (Campaign Against Landmines) expressing my appreciation of what the engineers from the Army have been doing in so many countries, clearing landmines and I hope this work can be extended. Thank you.
Yours sincerely, R M Aitkenhead (Palmerston North)

Dear Sir, I am writing to express my appreciation of what engineers from the Army have been doing in so many countries in the highly dangerous work of landmine clearing. I wish to congratulate and thank them on behalf of the many potential innocent victims of these most indiscriminate weapons. It is my longing and hope that this valuable work can be extended.
Yours faithfully, Margaret E Stewart (Rangiora)

Landmines destroyed

Jordan has recently destroyed 4,500 anti-personnel mines from the Kingdom's stockpiles, while Japan's army plans to dispose of its 1 million anti-personnel landmines by 2003. However, the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force will retain 15,000 of the land mines to help GSDF officers learn landmine destruction skills, and to help develop technology to detect and dispose of landmines.

The curse of cluster bombs

CALM has joined a number of national ICBL organisations expressing anger at the excessive use of cluster bombs in Kosovo, Laos and the Gulf War and suggesting future campaign strategies. Canada, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and New Zealand have presented policy papers to be presented to the ICBL Co-ordinating Committee which meets this month in Geneva. CALM's policy paper is available on our website: www.protel.co.nz./calm/ and if you would like a copy, contact John Head (CALM spokesperson).

Most of the national organisations want cluster bombs to be banned as part of the Mine Ban Treaty, but this is not supported by CALM because such a ban would only come after long, protracted and very divisive debate within the ICBL and those countries which have signed the MBT.

We are calling for the ICBL to support a publicity campaign, such as they did for landmines, with the aim of getting those countries that have stocks of cluster bombs to unilaterally withdraw them from service until the producers are able to show that 99.95% of the bomblets will explode before or on hitting the ground.

We are not in the business of banning a specific type of bomb when so many armaments could or should be banned. Although the horrors of cluster bomb use have been publicised and opposed by many over the last thirty years, New Zealanders should be pleased that CALM was one of the first national campaigns to call for a ban. Further details are in our earlier newsletters and on our website.

A message from Mal Ralston of World Vision in Laos [excerpt]

The situation that exists in Kosovo is history repeating itself. Thirty years ago the US deployed large numbers of cluster bombs and other air-delivered ordnance on Laos. It has been estimated by the UN that there are still 1/2 million tonnes of UXO (unexploded ordnance) littering the villages, countryside, highways and byways of Laos. Cluster bombs have accounted for 43% of all UXO deaths in Laos since 1975.

The report from The Guardian of 55 cluster rounds in a school yard in Kosovo is an indictment on those that dropped them, but it is nothing new. On June 7 we took two AusAID visitors to a village in Mahaxay District and walked them through an area of less than 500 square metres which contained 300 BLU 26/36 cluster bombs. These were dropped by the US 30 years ago! One week earlier, World Vision's Asia-Pacific Regional Director was in the same village talking to a villager whose son had been killed by a BLU that he had been handling. This is the reality of countries contaminated with UXO.

Where were the advocates over the past 30 years? Had they been on the job, maybe our pressure now might have some positive result. As it is, the users of these weapons have been getting away with it for years and are unlikely now to see any moral obligation to do anything. Perhaps those who drafted the Ottawa treaty should have considered a broader brush. As it has turned out, the whole world is aware of the dangers of "anti-personnel landmines" but know nothing of the dangers of cluster bombs!

But, it is never too late to educate and to express outrage. We must learn from the tragedies of the past and use these lessons to lobby for a ban on the use of these weapons in the future. We are trying to reduce the impact of this legacy in village and agricultural areas, areas where people live and work, and where they will live and work in the future. But this excludes vast tracts of forest and mountain land where it is unlikely that clearance will ever be undertaken.

Fraud halts Cambodian landmine aid

It is with a mixture of anger and sadness that landmine campaigners learned of the situation in Cambodia, where New Zealanders have been prominent in assisting with mine clearance training:

THE future of Cambodia's mine clearance programme has been thrown into doubt amid growing evidence that large amounts of money donated by western governments have been lost through fraud and mismanagement.

International auditors in Phnom Penh have unearthed details of widespread dishonesty and nepotism at the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), the government de-mining agency. Cases of misappropriated salaries, dubious expense claims, questionable foreign exchange deals and the misuse of official vehicles have been documented.

There is evidence of priority being given to clearing minefields on land owned by corrupt officials, army officers, and at least one former Khmer Rouge commander. Many Cambodian peasants risk injury or death by continuing to live on land littered with explosives.

Foreign donors, appalled at the degree of abuse, have frozen payments to CMAC, raising fears that clearance of mines may halt within months. Western governments and Japan provide about 95% of the organisation's budget, estimated at £8.1m [about NZ$25 million] this year.

A group of donors, including America, Australia, Japan, Norway and Denmark, has laid down 32 demands that must be satisfied before funding resumes. One requirement is that the organisation begin fraud prosecutions by the end of this month.

Foreign diplomats have blamed the organisation's Cambodian administrators. Foreign technical experts working for CMAC are critical of western embassies and UN officials, whom they accuse of ignoring evidence of malfeasance. They said action was taken only after three senior expatriate advisers resigned in protest at the failure to reform.

[Abridged from a report in The Times]

Efforts to encourage NSAs not to use APMs

NSAs refers to Non-State Actors, which means non-government groups such as rebel or guerrilla groups. CALM has received a somewhat lengthy report by Sol Santos Santos (ICBL Working Group on NSAs, Philippine CBL) on the August ICRC Seminar in Sri Lanka. The report also covers other aspects of the Seminar and the problems affecting the region.

The report can be sent by email to any CALM member - send your request to the Convenor at: neilman@clear.net.nz

Nato's deadly legacy in Kosovo will cause years of suffering

A TOUR round some of Kosovo's ubiquitous minefields makes painfully clear that many of the casualties suffered by civilians are being caused by cluster bombs dropped by Nato from the air rather than mines sown by the Serbs or Kosovo Liberation Army.

Since the refugees returned to Kosovo in June there have been 232 casualties attributed to mines, or around 80 a month. It is officially admitted that at least a third of these have been victims of the cluster bomb; and some estimates put it higher.

Nato is known to have dropped a total of 1,300 containers of cluster bombs over Kosovo. Each container carried 208 of these bomblets. So something like 270,000 of these deadly weapons were scattered over the country.

It is not precisely known how many of these failed to explode on impact, but it is accepted that the failure rate was not less than 5 per cent. That would leave around 14,000 bomblets scattered over Kosovo of which some 3,500 have been traced and cleared. However, experienced professionals engaged in mine clearance in Kosovo are positive that the failure rate was a good deal higher, partly because the cluster bombs were dropped from 15,000 feet rather than the optimum height of 9,000. So the chances are that there are considerably more than 11,000 still to be traced and destroyed.

Unlike the countless cluster bombs dropped over Vietnam and Laos by the Americans in the Vietnam war, which are about the size and shape of a cricket ball, the cluster bomb in Kosovo looks more like a long thin beer can. They are yellow, innocent in appearance and, fatally, almost bound to arouse curiosity in the passer-by. They are also highly volatile, and have to be exploded on the spot.

Touring the minefields with two leading British groups, Halo Trust and the Mines Advisory Group, I watched one of these bomblets being expertly detonated. It produced a bigger bang than most anti-personnel mines. Because of its power, it probably causes a higher death rate. The death rate from mines is in the region of one death to three injuries.

The Kfor map of minefields shows the western side of Kosovo to be worst affected, but cluster bombs have been found in most of the country, making a great deal of land too dangerous to cultivate. In consequence much of rural Kosovo will remain dependent on humanitarian feeding for a long time to come.

While these conditions prevail, a number of organisations such as United Nations Children's Fund and Save the Children are making mines awareness propaganda a priority. Save the Children has organised a course of instruction, in which the children participate, which will eventually cover 200 villages.

As winter sets in and the search for wood intensifies, the expectation is that casualties from mines and cluster bombs will rise.

When all the facts become known, the cluster bomb, manufactured in this country as well as America, is likely to arouse controversy. It can be argued that legally it is a weapon exempt from the land mine ban to which Britain is a signatory. Given the high failure rate, the question of whether it is ethically defensible is harder to answer.

[Abridged from a report in the Daily Telegraph, London]

New Zealander heads UN's Kosovo mine clearance

We can be proud that a New Zealand Army Engineer has been chosen to lead the United Nations Mines Action Co-ordinating Committee (UNMACC) in Kosovo:

Pristina, Yugoslavia, Sept 9 (AFP) -- Forty people have been killed and 192 wounded by mines and unexploded bombs in the province of Kosovo in the three months since the end of the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, a United Nations agency said Thursday [9 September].

UNMACC, noting that such incidents had fallen sharply over the past month, said there were 150 casualties in the first month. Bombing stopped on June 12 when Serb forces withdrew, prompting ethnic Albanians to pour back to their homes.

To date, 4,384 anti-personnel mines and 2,300 anti-tank mines had been defused, UNMACC said.

UNMACC said the Yugoslav Army had notified it of 616 mined areas across Kosovo and NATO had signalled 333 sites where fragmentation bombs had been dropped.

According to the British Mines Advisory Group, 40 percent of the explosives found so far were put there by Serb forces, 20 percent by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and 40 percent came from NATO bombings.

UNMACC's programme director, Lt-Col John Flanagan, said several different agencies were training Kosovars in bomb disposal techniques. He said most of the 350 people already under training came from the KLA.

[AFP (Agence France-Presse)(North European Service)]

In a special message to CALM through spokesperson John Head, John Flanagan wrote:

Here is some information on the threat posed by cluster bombs in Kosovo, and more specifically the issue relating to KFOR involvement in the clearance of the weapons. I can thankfully report that the pressure applied to NATO appears to have worked, as they have now announced that KFOR EOD teams will undertake survey and marking activities, although many will actually do more than this and will clear them as well. It is our firm objective to try and eradicate the threat posed from cluster munitions by the winter period.

The Mine Action Coordination Centre (MACC) now has 16 various organisations (NGO and commercial companies) operating throughout the Province. We have also developed an integrated mine awareness campaign and mine victim surveillance system in cooperation with other UN agencies and NGO partners.

Things are going extremely well here, with an unprecedented level of cooperation occurring between all actors, but particularly between the UN and the NGOs. We have entered this operation with a different approach than has occurred in the past, and it is paying real dividends for us. We are assigning a lot of responsibility to the various NGO in the field, and they are responding to the task exceptionally well.

The problem of mine contamination in the Province can be overcome. It is up to us to develop the most effective solution to dealing with the problem, and I am confident that this can be done quickly. I would really like to see the bulk of the contaminated areas cleared by the end of next year, and if the levels of support that we are currently receiving continue, there is no reason why we cannot do this.

International Landmines Campaign condemns recent use of the weapon

(Geneva: 13 September 1999) As key mine action experts of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) came to Geneva to participate in a series of government-sponsored meetings on mine clearance and mine victim assistance, ICBL's leadership condemned Russia's recent use of antipersonnel mines in Dagestan, as well as recent unconfirmed allegations of use in the conflicts between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and between Pakistan and India. Continued use of antipersonnel mines reaffirms the necessity for rapid universalization and effective implementation of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

The ICBL continues to monitor progress and challenges in implementation of the ban treaty via the Landmine Monitor initiative and will continue to speak out and denounce countries which are not honoring their ban commitments, are violating the letter or spirit of the treaty, or are not making sufficient progress.

The ICBL views the intersessional work program as key to ensure that the practical work that needs to be done to implement the Mine Ban Treaty occurs in a systematic, sustained, collective and measurable way. These meetings must spur and assess progress on implementation of the ban treaty which bans antipersonnel mines, requires destruction of stocks within four years, destruction of mines in the ground within the next ten years and continued and sustained assistance for mine victims.

One contentious issue has been funding of mine action programs for governments that violate or have not joined the treaty. The ICBL believes that civilian victims of landmines should not be further victimized because of a government's use of mines or failure to join the treaty. In such cases, the ICBL supports continued funding of NGOs operating in mine affected areas, but not the governments.

The meetings this week are the first in the intersessional work program laid out by the First Meeting of States Parties to the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and On Their Destruction (Mine Ban Treaty) in Maputo in May 1999. The Geneva meetings will focus on mine clearance, mine awareness and victim assistance.

The full text of this ICBL press release can be obtained from CALM Convenor Neil Mander.

Deadly leftover ordnance in Vietnam

HANOI, Vietnam -- Unexploded bombs, land mines and artillery shells killed 38,248 people in the first 23 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the People's Army newspaper has reported.

Another 60,064 people were injured through April 1998, it said, citing statistics from the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs.

The paper estimated there still are 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance around -- 2 percent of the 15 million tons of bombs, land mines and shells used by US forces during the war.

There also are unspecified numbers of land mines planted by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese forces during the 1977-79 border war in southwestern Vietnam and by Vietnamese and Chinese forces during their brief but bloody border war in 1979.

Newspapers carry reports of casualties from war leftovers virtually every week, as many poor villagers risk their lives to scavenge scrap iron for a little cash. [Associated Press report]