A better place for land mines
Land mine victims practice walking on artificial limbs at the International Red Cross Orthopedic (ICRC) rehabilitation center on Dec. 10, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan. The country is still littered with the devices. Credit: Getty Images/Majid Saeedi
The immorality of land mines is pretty clear.
The explosive devices buried in war zones around the world serve strategic but brutal military purposes. But they remain a danger to life and limb long after the wars are over.
Land mines have killed thousands of civilians, many of them children, ripping arms and legs from their bodies even if death is avoided. It took some 20 years to de-mine Mozambique. Afghanistan is still littered with the devices. The United States has paid billions of dollars to remove mines from places like Vietnam. Even as American tourists throng there as memories of last century’s conflict recede, unexploded ordnance lurk.
The United States was never part of the 1997 Ottawa treaty prohibiting the devices and signed by over 160 countries. The new policy only makes matters worse. President Donald Trump last month rescinded previous presidential policy on anti-personnel land mines. The devices can now be deployed beyond just the Korean Peninsula, where the United States had confined the practice.
The Department of Defense claims that a new era of “strategic competition” demands that land mines be used again, and says that modern ones can self-destruct. But such fail-safes misfire, and the lack of American leadership may encourage other countries to stockpile the weapons.
America should be a leader on this issue, in the name of every soldier who lost legs to an improvised explosive device and every 10-year-old who came out of playing in a minefield armless. Bury these devices in history.
— The editorial board
