Countries’ move towards using landmines appals experts

GENEVA: Moves by five Nato countries to quit a treaty banning the use of landmines has experts worried, ahead of a Geneva meeting aiming to boost efforts on ridding the world of the explosive ordnance.

The decisions announced by Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland over the past three weeks is “a dangerous setback for the protection of civilians in armed conflict,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

The first four countries said in a March 18 joint statement that “Russia´s aggression” -- evinced by its all-out invasion of Ukraine -- forced them to start moves to pull out of the 1997 Ottawa Treaty aimed at eliminating anti-personnel landmines.

Finland followed suit last week with a similar announcement. The steps come ahead of a three-day meeting starting Wednesday in Geneva organised by the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) and the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD). Tobias Privitelli, head of the GICHD, admitted to reporters that the meeting would take place in a “challenging environment”.

Progress made over decades in ridding the world of landmines was at risk, he said. UNMAS´s head of policy and advocacy, James Staples, said nearly 60 countries or territories, from Ukraine to Myanmar to Sudan and Syria, are affected by explosive ordinance, and “millions of people suffer from their impact on a daily basis”.

Adding to the headwinds faced by their two organisations was US funding cuts to foreign aid. While the United States is not among the 160 signatories of the Ottawa Treaty, it had been the single biggest national funder of mine action.

Washington had been providing over $300 million a year, or around 40 percent of total international support, according to the 2024 Landmine Monitor. “The funding that they have provided... has undoubtedly saved lives and made a difference to hundreds of thousands,” Staples said.

While some short-term waivers have been granted to some programmes, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) cautioned that long-term funding was uncertain, with thousands of trained deminers currently sidelined. In the three decades of the treaty´s existence, the number of people killed or maimed by landmines went from 25,000 to below 5,800 in 2023, and millions of landmines destroyed worldwide, according to the Landmine Monitor.

Staples said that, when other types of explosive remnants of war, like cluster munitions and IEDs (improvised explosive devices), were factored in, the number of casualties reached around 15,000 in 2023.

Eighty-five percent of victims of explosive ordnance are civilians, “more than half of them are children,” Privitelli noted. He said that, in many territories, the threat of landmines lingers for decades after the end of a conflict, posing a persistent hidden peril.