Can we ban land mines?

Land mines kill people, or maim them, because they're hidden. Most are buried, some are camouflaged. Step on one of them, or brush past its tripwire, and you're dead, or legless. Land mines cannot distinguish between the footfall of a soldier or a child or an old woman gathering firewood. Land mines recognize no cease-fire; a generation after the fighting has stopped, they can destroy the children of the soldiers who laid them.

Land mines are hidden not only physically but metaphorically; few people in this or other developed countries understand either the scope or the frightfulness of the problem they pose. Tens of millions of mines lie in wait in dozens of countries. According to a 1993 American Red Cross statement issued by Elizabeth Dole, exploding mines kill 800 people every month and injure another 450. Their presence not only endangers lives but makes much land too dangerous for farming or for resettlement of refugees. Yet until recently this enormous and still growing problem has had little attention.

That situation is beginning to change, so much so that one can ponder whether this lasting scourge of war may eventually be controlled and then, over decades, be eliminated. In October of last year a Boston-based nongovernmental organization called Physicians for Social Responsibility, an affiliate of Human Rights Watch, issued a 510-page report, "Land Mines, A Deadly Legacy." A media breakthrough was a comprehensive cover story, "It's the Little Bombs that Kill You," by Donovan Webster, published in the New York Times Magazine for January 24. Thanks largely to the leadership of U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), some progress has been made on the political front as well. Late last year Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill extending for three years a ban on all land mines first enacted in 1992, and he urged forty other states to follow suit. Last December 16 the United Nations General Assembly called for a worldwide ban on the export of these cheap, deadly devices.

Realistically, however, the steps taken to date are feeble compared with the magnitude of the problem. In his Time piece, Donovan Webster reports that in the former Yugoslavia some 60,000 new mines are laid each week, adding to a worldwide total of uncleared mines variously estimated at 85 million in fifty-six countries (the U.S. State Department) to 105 million or more in sixty-two nations (the United Nations).

Previous efforts at control are not reassuring. The first major attempt at regulation was the Land Mines Protocol of 1980, which has now been ratified by thirty-six nations (not including the United States, which has signed but not ratified the treaty). But the protocol stops short of banning the use of land mines outright; it forbids their use for military objectives in ways that violate international humanitarian law. In practice, the measure has proved porous and unenforceable.

In its exhaustive study, Physicians for Social Responsibility concluded that though land mines may be deployed for legitimate military purposes, they pose so catastrophic a threat to civilians that they must be outlawed. The report described the accumulation of the mines as "the equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction in slow motion." Since land mines in vast quantities have been sowed by governments and guerrillas in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Iraqi-Kurdistan, Kuwait, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Somalia, among other nations, the PSR report had reason to declare that the mines are "aimed particularly at the developing world."

Since, by their nature, land mines are incapable of discriminating among targets, it would appear that the PSR analysis is in line with traditional just-war theory. The seven parts of that doctrine make clear that indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants can never be justified.

The United States appears to be moving toward acceptance of that approach. The export ban is one indicator. Earlier--in February 1993--the State Department established a group to collaborate with the Pentagon in developing a comprehensive global strategy to allocate U.S. de-mining resources, and in the following two-month period the U.S. Army conducted its first de-mining training for foreign instructors at Fort Benning, Georgia. To be effective, however, such efforts must be multiplied many times over, and very significant costs must be incurred. Webster quotes a UN source who estimates that cleaning up the mines now in place will cost from $200 billion to $300 billion. Removal can cost from $300 to $1,000 a mine, though the devices themselves cost as little as $3 for an antipersonnel weapon, $26 for an antitank mine.

There is reason for the United States to take the initiative in such efforts, since it was American forces that laid significant numbers of the mines now awaiting clearing. Both sides in the Vietnam war planted mines by the millions. A Pentagon study cited by Deborah Shapley in her biography of Robert McNamara, former secretary of defense, concludes that from one-fifth to a third of all U.S. deaths in Vietnam were caused by mines, many of them laid from the air by American planes but later triggered by American infantrymen as they advanced or retreated through mine-saturated areas: another reminder that mines are indifferent to the identity of their victims.

The United States furnished an estimated 37,000 antipersonel land mines to government forces in El Salvador. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front used countless unsophisticated mines as well, and the State Department now estimates that 20,000 mines remain uncleared in El Salvador. In Nicaragua, though the Sandinistas made much use of land mines in their struggle against the Somoza government, it was the U.S .-financed contras that laid the majority of mines that have killed or injured Nicaraguan civilians. An international effort to clear the mines in Nicaragua aims to remove 60,000 of them--about half the estimated total in place--by August 1994. It is nerve-shattering work, even when carried out by well-trained and well-armored specialists; Donovan Webster reports that some eighty-three experts at the task have been killed in Kuwait since the end of the Gulf War.

Obviously it is work that must continue. The silent menace of unexploded land mines daily creates personal and family tragedies by the dozens, while also posing serious impediments to the repatriation of refugees, the progress of economic development, and the achievement of political stability in scores of poor countries. Even more important than mine-clearing is the development of political will to ban the production and sale of what a State Department report has labeled the "hidden killers." It is time and past time to attach to land mines the stigma that is now shared by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

Robert F. Drinan, S.J., is professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.