More than 130 countries came together Nov. 29 to review a five-year-old treaty banning anti-personnel landmines (APLs) and agreed on a 70-point action plan for further treaty implementation. The United States, which announced nearly a year ago that it would not join the treaty, did not attend the event, but it is promoting other landmine restrictions.
The first review conference for the Ottawa Convention, which concluded Dec. 3, brought together 110 states-parties as well as 25 countries, including China, India, and Israel, not bound by the treaty. The accord bans the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of APLs.
Conference participants hailed past achievements but warned that more remains to be accomplished, particularly the safe disposal of countless landmines sowed in the soil of nearly 50 states-parties.
Attendees reported that more than 37 million stockpiled APLs had been destroyed by states-parties since the treaty entered into force March 1, 1999. The accord requires each state-party to get rid of its APL stockpiles within four years, and all states-parties with lapsed deadlines have completed that obligation. Of the treaty’s 144 states-parties, 18 remain busy eliminating their stockpiles, which combined exceed an estimated 10 million APLs.
States-parties without stockpiles are turning their attention and resources toward clearing mines already planted. The treaty set a 10-year time limit, which can be extended, for all states-parties to make their territories APL-free. Austrian Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch, president of the conference, declared Dec. 3 that “clearing mined areas will be the most significant challenge to be addressed during the next five years.”
Three states-parties—Costa Rica, Djibouti, and Honduras—have completed clearance operations. However, another 47 states-parties still have APLs to clean up. Albania, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Nicaragua, and Zambia are expected soon to finish the task.
Still, hundreds of millions of APLs reside outside the treaty’s reach. More than 180 million APLs are estimated to exist in the non-state-party stockpiles of China, India, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States. Moreover, only three countries in the Middle East—Jordan, Qatar, and Yemen—have joined the Ottawa Convention. For this reason, “the pursuit of universal adherence to the convention will also remain an important priority,” Petritsch stated.
Conference attendees identified another top treaty objective: continued funding for humanitarian mine action such as educating civilians about landmine dangers and providing medical care to mine victims. Most states afflicted with mines are relatively poor, so the treaty calls upon its states-parties “in a position to do so” to help those requiring assistance.
Some conference participants complained about the lack of funding to help landmine casualties. Jody Williams, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping prod governments to negotiate the Ottawa Convention in 1997, warned Dec. 3 that the treaty “will not succeed if assistance for landmine survivors continues to decline rather than rise dramatically.” Twenty-three states-parties claim to have at least hundreds or thousands of citizens recovering from landmine injuries.
Overall global funding for mine action since 1997 has totaled $2.7 billion, of which approximately $800 million has been provided by the United States, the world’s leading mine-action donor. Washington has lent assistance over the past decade to 40 regions and countries, including Ottawa Convention states-parties.
Washington initially refused to join the accord because it wanted a right to deploy APLs on the Korean Peninsula and opposed treaty provisions outlawing mixed systems comprising both APL and anti-vehicle landmines. Although the Clinton administration left the door open to acceding to the treaty, the Bush administration shut it in February. (See ACT, March 2004.)
Instead of joining the Ottawa Convention, the Bush administration aims to end by 2010 the use of all landmines, including anti-vehicle mines, that lack self-destruct and self-deactivation mechanisms. The administration has also banned U.S. forces from using any type of mine that is not detectable. The Ottawa Convention does not apply to anti-vehicle mines.
Washington is urging the 65-member Conference on Disarmament (CD) to negotiate an export ban on all types of landmines without self-destruct and self-deactivation devices. Yet, the CD requires consensus to begin any talks, and Ottawa Convention states-parties in the conference, led by Canada, have nixed such negotiations on the basis that the existing ban is more robust when it comes to APLs and that anti-vehicle mines are being addressed elsewhere. (See ACT, September 2004.)
Thirty governments, including the United States, are pushing a proposal at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), another consensus-based forum, to require all anti-vehicle mines to be detectable and all anti-vehicle mines delivered by aircraft or artillery to be equipped with self-destruct and self-deactivation mechanisms. The initiative failed to advance at a November 2004 CCW meeting due to Chinese, Pakistani, and Russian objections that such measures might impair their border security. Washington is hoping to win over the three holdouts and conclude an agreement this year. Otherwise, the credibility of the CCW process will be damaged, a U.S. government official told Arms Control Today Dec. 13.
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