After The Guns Fall Silent

by Jody Williams and Shawn Roberts

The topic is important, but this is a dull and bureaucratic book. Landmines are cheap and simple, typically costing £35STG, but they remain active for many years after the fighting stops, waiting unseen in the ground for unsuspecting agricultural workers, women or children to step on. The long term costs of landmines to third world agriculture and health infrastructures far outweigh the short term benefits.

Mines have been buried in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Croatia, Bosnia and many others. As a conscious policy, few forces kept maps and in the confused fighting, minefields were laid over minefields. Mine laying trucks can scatter 1,000 mines per minute. In Afghanistan, Russian jets dropped mines from the air. When refugees return, unaware of which areas are mined, injury and death rates go up. Increased pressure on the remaining cultural land forces desertification. Agricultural land and water supplies as well as paths and roads are often mined, as a form of economic warfare against peasant farmers.

"In Northern Iraq, rural children commonly use mines as wheels for toy trucks and go-carts; in Cambodia they play boules with B40 anti-personnel mines. In Afghanistan, they compete in throwing stones at PFM-1 'Butterfly' mines, the winner being the child whose stone causes the mine to detonate" [page 10]

In Cambodia, there is a kind of dangerous mine black economy, where farmers are paid $4 per hectare for clearing them. The fields are burned, then prodded with hoes. Mines are lifted and resold to the military. There is an illicit trade in dismantling them, the explosives are used for hunting or fishing, their scrap metal sold.

As a typical UN / NGO type product, this book is marred by too many tables and statistics. The explanation of acronyms takes up four pages alone. Its terminology is bureaucratic, robot-American speak 'de-mining' for example. (Why not call it 'mine clearance'?) Often this takes pages and pages to not say very much. Sometimes this lack of thought produces inappropriate howlers: "The explosion of technological sophistication in landmines presents keen challenges" [p 7] is one gem, or how about "Mines tend to be laid in and around the areas that experienced the heaviest fighting during the 14 years of war" [p 52] - Would never have thought of that.

This book was written before the ban on landmines. UN agencies do not have the funding to clear the mines, and in many places the fighting still goes on. Prior to the ban, 100 companies in 55 countries were manufacturing 5 million mines per year. Big business. One of the major faults with this book is that despite its copious tables of injuries, hospital statistics, costs to Third World agriculture, losses of goats, donkeys, camels; these coy bureaucrats give little to no information about who the companies are, and the identities of the individuals responsible for this. Watch out for the thirteenth pillar...

– Steve Booth

Green Anarchist: Front Page Current Articles First 10 Issues See: uk.indymedia.org for more on the university expansion.

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