Banning Landmines

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If anyone wants to help get landmines banned, please click on the link below. http://www.avaaz.org/en/obama_ban_mines ... e75000947e

I know that someone is bound to come on and get all political about this. Personally, I'm not interested in politics, just that these indiscriminate killers stop being put where they can kill and maim civilians... often years after the war is ended.

Modern landmines can be constructed to inactivate themselves after a specified period of time. The old fashioned mines are forever or until the parts rust and rot away which can be decades or even centuries.

ruveyn

Hopefully this will help get them banned.

Civillians do still wander onto them.

In a war, that is collateral damage. In modern wars, collateral damage cannot be avoided. It is just one of the less happy aspects of war. So it goes....

ruveyn

Traditionally deployed land-mines can actually SAVE lives, by effectively "guarding" large areas without the need to use live troops. Anybody sensibly using land-mines in a campaign should be recording the position of minefields because if you lose track of them they become a liability instead of an asset. its possible to even use a "minefield" without having any mines. Anybody who enters a clearly demarcated minefield is inviting their own demise. However, anyone using them should be prepared to render them inert again at cessation of hostilities.

The problem with minefields is the ones deployed as effectively "delayed-reaction bombs", cluster-munitions deployed without a genuine attempt to record positioning, and cynically designed to appear interesting to children.

Banning landmines across the rest of the world hardly prevented their use or the damage they cause. IED (Improvised Explosive Device) is nothing but a euphemism for a land-mine.

Conventions like Geneva look great on paper and work fine if everyone plays to the rules, but as even the signatories often wilfully ignore whatever doesn't suit, adding new "rules" will make little difference. Banning landmines will not prevent their use, it just drives them underground.

This looks like a feel good measure to me. If land mines are considered an effective enough weapon then they are going to be used, legal or not.

This reminds me of something called submunition weapons (at least that's the closest translation i can think of o.O ). The concept is rather simple. When it is launched, it launches lots of tiny little balls of explosives, powerful enough to kill, ofc.Most countries banned its use, xcept most militaristic countries, which includes the U.S.A (ofc).

My information on this is rather old though, so it could have changed in recent years.

In any event, landmines are probably what butchers children in war-torn countries the most. =/

Oh, you mean cluster bombs. Those things have been around for years, and come in a whole variety of flavors now, not just the old school anti-personnel models. We even have one now that drops heat seeking shaped charges that automatically home in on the tops of armored vehicles where the plating is the thinnest, allowing a few of these things to wipe out whole armored columns. They're generally more reliable now as well, not as likely to leave unexploded ordnance for civilians to stumble over at a later date.

The United States has not committed itself and will not commit itself to outlawing landmines because they are the largest producers of landmines. Ban landmines and you put the entire landmine industry out of business. Follow the money...

Well, as an experiment, I found that really depressing.

I knew for a fact that the post would attract people who didn't think that landmines were all bad... but I had rather hoped to find at least one person (from the over 150 who read it) who might agree with me, and say they'd signed the bloomin thing.

I understand all the arguments against and for landmines. But is there really nobody else on this forum who believes as I do that landmines are a weapon too far?

And am I REALLY the only person who signed this bloody thing?

I signed the petition -- didn't feel like getting into the various arguments, and it didn't occur to me 'register' my vote until now.

Having seen, firsthand, the "collateral damage" of landmines in places like Cambodia, it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous to simply gloss over their use with that phrase.

There are two distinct elements to the debate:

1) Landmines historically placed, and not currently under the care or control of the deploying force.

These are the mines that continue to cause significant injury and loss of life in places like Cambodia. No ban, no international convention, no activity short of a complete ground search is going to deal with these devices.

2) Landmines deployed, and under the ongoing control of a military force.

Here we are in a grayer area. If a military force is attempting to secure its presence in a piece of territory, then static devices are one of the possible means for accomplishing this. However, included within their use should be some obligation to clear the devices when the military justification for their use expires.

An outright ban is unlikely to be supported by the United States, nor by numerous countries with border disputes, including India-Pakistan, Egypt-Israel-Lebanon-Syria, Russia-Armenia-Azerbaijan-Georgia-Kazakhstan-Kyrgizstan-Uzbekistan, China-the Koreas, and by countries with internal control issues, such as Sri Lanka.