A SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT
OF The CAMBODIA DAILY
A SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT |
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OF The CAMBODIA DAILY |
Finding a firm figure for the number of land mines in the world waiting to be cleared is no easy task. Estimates have ranged from 119 million to 20 million.
The most up-to-date addition to the estimates is the US State Department’s land-mine report, "Hidden Killer." It estimates 60-70 million remain to be cleared.
It is generally agreed that there are 63 countries with land mines problems, although the situation is much worse in some nations than others. According to the State Department report, half the mines are in just 12 of those 63 countries.
| Earlier reports by the State department had estimated between
80 million and 110 million mines. The 1998 version drops that figure by 50 percent. More conservatively, a British writer and former deminer, Paul Jefferson, estimates there are around 20 million land mines in the world. His said he believes the State Department’s 60 million figure is high. "I think that’s still an exaggeration," he said. Colonel PW Botha, an official at the UN Mine Action Service in New York, said the much-quoted figure of 119 million, which has been attributed to the UN, was compiled from questionnaires sent out to countries, and is an amalgamation of their estimates. He said it was likely an over-estimate. |
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A 1997 report by the Halo Trust, a humanitarian mine-clearing charity based in Britain, suggested that in the five countries in which it works there are 1.7 million land mines. Earlier UN estimates had placed the number in those countries as closer to 40 million.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that in some of the heaviest mined countries, the numbers are far short of estimates.
Tim Lardner worked as a demining officer in Mozambique, on the southeast coast of Africa, a country that is heavily mined but where clearance programs are well advanced. Original estimates were that Mozambique had 3 million mines; demining activities indicate the reality is 300,000 to 500,000, Lardner said.
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According to the State Department report, land-mine problems
can brought under control by the year 2010 if more money and better technology are applied
to the problem. "While we believe the number is considerably less than the 80 million
to 110 million previously estimated, probably on the order of 60 million, the number is
still staggering," the report stresses. "A more relevant measure of the problem, however, is not the number of land mines per country but the number of square kilometers of land rendered unusable," the report says. This is the measurement system used by the Cambodian Mine Action Center. The CMAC database project measures progress not by the number of mines but by the area of land cleared of land mines. There is presently no worldwide figure for the number of square kilometers infected with mines, however. The International Committee of the Red Cross no longer issues estimates of raw numbers. It has turned to another method instead. "ICRC believes that the number of victims rather than the number of mines is a better indication of the scope of the mines problem," states the agency.
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