Government Pressured to Clear Land Mines

Muteber Öğreten from the Initiative for a Mine-free Turkey told bianet that no one can stay silent on the issue anymore:

"As peoples, NGOs, academics, intellectuals of this country, we have to monitor government's compliance with the Ottowa Mine-Ban Treaty, which was ratified by Turkey on March 12, 2003".

The treaty obliges the government to clear and demolish all anti-personnel land mines within a specified time frame. This is to say all stored mines until 2008 and all which are already laid until 2014.

The latest report submitted by the government to the UN quotes 3 million land mines in stocks and further 1 million already laid down.

Öğreten refuses the arguments about the financial cost of clearing land mines, saying tens of thousands of lives are at stake.

the Initiative's statistics show that at least 39 people have died last year in Turkey because of land mines and abandoned military explosives. A further 106 have been injured.

Four of those who lost their lives were children while 25 of them were soldiers.

Originally titled the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer or Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, the Ottawa Treaty is the most comprehensive international instrument for ridding the world of the scourge of antipersonnel mines.

It deals with everything from mine use, production and trade, to victim assistance, mine clearance and stockpile destruction since its implementation in 1997.

The treaty banned the production of land mines all around the world but rights activists say arms producers replaced it by another deadly mass explosive: cluster bombs.

Öğreten explains the situation: "Land mines were invented during the American civil war. since then 350 variants of them have been produced. Now it's forbidden another deadly arms with the same effects, namely the cluster bomb has been introduced. We can't limit our objection to land mines, we've to consider the effects of those weapons on civilians".

The last case of such was seen when the Israeli army occupied Lebanon last summer. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the time Jan Egeland said Israeli forces dropped 90 percent of cluster bombs during the last 72 hours before retreating.

All those didn't explode at the time covered the ground and continued killing civilians long after the end of the occupation. (EÜ)