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Danger sign for landmines

Updated 17:20  Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The goal of the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-free World, meeting in Colombia 29 November to 4 December, is to eradicate the suffering caused by anti-personnel mines once and for all.

Colombia has had the dubious distinction until recently of being the country with the most casualties from anti-personnel mines. It was overtaken by Afghanistan in 2009. Colombia alone counts 8,081 casualties of landmines since 1990, but it also has 6,285 survivors, people who have lost a limb. Landmines caused almost 5,200 casualties worldwide in 2008, one-third of them children. The 2009 Landmine Monitor Report points out that deaths from landmines are steadily decreasing, down from an average of 7,300 a year for the previous 10 years. Landmine ban groups are keen to get rid of the mines but they are also focusing more on helping survivors.

In Colombia, too, the number of casualties has been falling: 777 deaths in 2008, compared to 895 the previous year.

In Colombia, rebel groups such as Farc and the ELN, as well as paramilitary groups, have planted anti-personnel mines on an estimated 60 percent of the territory. Insurgents increasingly finance themselves through the drugs trade, reported Human Rights Watch in a section on Colombia in its World Report 2009, published in January. They have been invading peripheral regions in the south of the country on the border with Ecuador, ejecting the indigenous populations, and protecting their territories from army incursions by the simple means of sowing anti-personnel mines, many home-made and attractive to children.

Frequent massacres of peasants and indigenous groups make the headlines, but the slow migration of people from the countryside to the safety of cities because of the conflict that rarely makes the news, according to the International Red Cross which has assisted 1.3 million internally displaced people in Colombia in the past 10 years. In 2008, ICRC assisted 205 civilian casualties of war, of whom 103 were anti-personnel mine casualties.

States parties to the convention sign up to destroy official stockpiles of mines, as well as to clear the countryside of mines. Zambia recently became the third country in southern Africa to declare itself mine-free, after Malawi and Swaziland.

The summit is officially the Second Review Conference on the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. It was signed in Ottawa in 1997, became operational in 1999 and has been ratified by 156 countries.

Links to other sites: Cartagena Summit, Colombian Campaign to Ban Landmines (Spa), ICRC Colombia (Spa), International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Le Temps, Reuters