Hom’s story

Vorn was cremated that night. On a pyre alongside his lay the body of another youth, Ngeth Bros, from an adjacent village in Sdao Commune. Bros, too, had stepped on a mine—at more or less the same moment as Vorn, about three miles away in the woods to the south of Route Ten. He and a friend, Horn Hong, and his friend’s teenage brother, Horn Hom, had gone with their ox-cart searching for bamboo and fuel wood. They knew, as all Cambodians do, that stretches of woodland, like dikes between fields, offer cover to advancing troops and so are liable to have been mined. But wood-cutting is almost the only source of income for villagers in the dry season, so the three young men decided to go anyway.

Bros and Hong believed the path they took to be in regular use by their fellow-villagers. Either they were mistaken, or mines had been recently laid there. At a point where the path crossed a stream—with Bros in the lead and Horn Hong and Horn Hom following—Bros trod on a buried mine. It severed his right foot. Hong went forward to help him where he lay, semi-conscious, on the side of the path. He tied his headscarf as a tourniquet on his friend’s leg to stop the bleeding, but then, moving back onto the path, he too trod on a mine, which flung him to the other side, where he lay in a state of shock, like Bros, with his lower leg shattered.

Hom, the last of the three, seeing this, moved forward cautiously towards the two older youths, crouching, looking for tripwires, probing obliquely with a stick for mines that might be hidden below the surface of the ground. In the four metres that separated him from the others he uncovered several more—as many as twenty, he said later. They were Chinese mines, Type 72, one of the smallest in existence, and—due to a very low metal content—one of the least detectable. The Type 72 consists of a plastic drum with a dark-green, rubber pressure pad, about eight centimetres in diameter and four in height—the size and shape of a carpenter’s retractable rule —containing just over 30 grams of high-explosive. The charge is detonated by a convex carbon-fibre diaphragm that buckles under anything over five kilograms of pressure. Cambodians call it ungkaip, the frog, because of the crick-crack noise the diaphragm makes the instant before it detonates.

After a half hour of probing and crawling Hom managed to get close to his brother. He placed the mines he had removed by the side of the path and started towards the place where Hong lay. At that moment Bros regained consciousness. Seeing Hong injured and immobile he thought that his friend had died. He shouted to Hom to stay back, saying he didn’t want to live, not as a cripple, as a beggar, with his best friend dead. He told Hom to say goodbye to his family for him. Then he crawled towards the pile of mines that Hom had collected and threw himself on top of them, taking the full blast in his body.

Bros died. But Hong was not in fact dead. For some time Hom sat by his unconscious brother shaking, blackened by the explosions, poisoned by the smoke. Finally he dragged Hong out of the minefield, back along the corridor he had cleared and pulled him to the road in their ox-cart, and thence in a passing motorcycle taxi to the district hospital at Rattanak Mondul. From there Hong was taken by ambulance to the civilian provincial hospital in Battambang, twenty miles along the dirt surface of Route Ten. That night his leg was amputated below the knee.

I met the two survivors at the hospital in Battambang a day later. Hom was the one who talked, through an interpreter; Hong, hooked up to an unsterilized drip, could barely speak. He lay on a reed mat on a metal bedstead leaning his head against the blood-stained wall; the bandaged stump of his leg raised in the air to ease the pain, his other leg extant but spattered with shrapnel, while his mother sat next to him, an unfilled prescription for painkillers in her hand. If Hong’s leg was not infected he would, with luck, be fitted with an artificial foot at the prosthetics centre recently established in Battambang by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But if the stump turned out to be infected it would need reamputation above the knee, a procedure known in surgeons’ argot as a salami amputation—where slices are removed from the limb progressively until an uninfected area is reached.

As for Hom, he had been luckier than he knew. Several of the mines he moved to get to his brother were double-stacked, one on top of the other, a booby-trap technique designed to prevent clearance: as the topmost mine is lifted, it puts pressure on the one beneath and detonates it. And Hom was lucky in another respect: the mines he and his brothers stumbled on were all 72s, not 72-As, a variant design that is often deployed alongside the 72. The 72-A is externally almost identical, distinguished only by the triangular shape of its safety pin, which is removed when the mine is laid. This version of the mine incorporates an electronic anti-handling device, a mechanism that causes it to detonate if it is tilted more than ten degrees from the horizontal, thus making it virtually impossible to move.

In Rattanak Mondul, a district with a population of 22,000 at the beginning of 1993, constantly swelling with the return of refugees, there were forty-eight recorded mine incidents in a three-month period in 1992, all involving civilians. Twenty-five of the victims died; the rest lost one or both feet, or a leg, or both legs, or an arm or an eye. For every recorded death, there were undoubtedly several others, often children, who died before help came, too badly injured or too deep in the forest to be found. Bros and Vorn, for instance, would never make it to be statistics: they died before they reached hospital. As the number of refugees returning to the province increased, so the casualties were also increasing. The day I happened to be there, the day that Bros and Vorn died and Hong lost his foot, that day was an average day in Beng Ampil.

A hundred million mines?

Cambodia and Afghanistan are the worst cases, but almost any country where there has been a war in the last few decades, particularly a civil war, is now faced with a seemingly intractable mine problem. Laos, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Burma; Iraqi Kurdistan, Kuwait; Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Rwanda, Western Sahara, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique; Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Falkland Islands: one out of five countries in the world now has a significant mine problem. New wars create new areas of mine deployment. A US State Department report suggests that Europe is now the region experiencing the most rapid increase in use. In former Yugoslavia—in Serbia and what remains of Bosnia—and in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, the Yugoslavias of the former Soviet Union, landmines are routinely used by all sides. The July State Department report estimates that that some three million mines have been laid during the current Balkan war.

Of the states that rise from the ashes of Yugoslavia, both Serbia and Bosnia will inherit an advanced mine-manufacturing capacity. Yugoslav factories, for example, make the tiny PMA2, a widely-deployed plastic mine that is even harder to detect than the type 72. (This is a type that posed special problems to mine-clearers in Kuwait after the Gulf War.) But the Yugoslav situation is not typical. Mine manufacturers are not generally located in the countries where mines are deployed. According to a report published by the Arms Project of Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, the three biggest manufacturers of anti-personnel mines are the former Soviet Union, China and Italy. Together these countries are responsible for the greater part of current world output. Official figures put global production of simple, non-scatterable mines at around a million a year. Human Rights Watch estimates that the true figure may be ten times that. No one knows, but it’s not unreasonable to suppose that, cumulatively, in the ground and in factories and armouries, there could be a hundred million mines in the world.

Last year the United States, also a major manufacturer, banned the export of anti-personnel mines. Yet vast numbers of US mines remain in circulation. An example is the Claymore M18, a directional-fragmentation mine (current price $79.29 with carrying case). This has been manufactured since the 1960s by a number of companies under contract to the Department of Defense, most notably Thiokol, in Shreveport, Lousian. It is now copied worldwide. Moulded into its convex polystyrene and glass-fibre casing (which contains seven hundred steel spheres and 680 grams of explosive) is the helpful inscription: “Front Toward Enemy”. Claymores were among the six hundred thousand American antipersonnel mine exported to unspecified parties in Cambodia between 1969 and 1992. The ADAM (area-denial artillery munition) which is delivered by howitzer, and which was used in the Gulf War, is the brainchild of the United States’ leading mine manufacturer—Alliant Techsystems, a former Honeywell subsidiary in Edina, Minnesota.

\American manufacturers have exported about 150,000 mines since 1983; in the fifteen years before that more than four million mines were shipped by US firms to over thirty countries, chief among them Iran, Cambodia, Thailand and Chile. 1975 was the peak in US mine production: in that year over a million mines were exported to US allies and client regimes. And these figures do not include covert US support to insurgents in Central America, South-East Asia, Africa or Afghanistan, or mines used by US troops in conflict.

There is thus a huge backlog of US-manufactured arms in third-world arsenals. The Vietnamese apple mine in Beng Ampil that killed Vorn, for instance, was a recycled bomblet from a BLU-24 cluster bomb, abandoned, probably, by retreating US forces at the end of the Vietnam War. Versions of the Claymore fragmentation mine are made in half a dozen countries; and parts of the circuitry used in the anti-tilt mechanism in the Chinese 72-A are manufactured—though not for this purpose—by Motorola. (The last piece of information, impossible to establish in the field since the mechanism, by its nature, prevents anyone gaining access to it, was ascertained by dismantling unarmed mines from ammunition stores in Cambodia.)

An outgrowth of military technology

The worldwide spread of landmines is a post-World War II phenomenon, an outgrowth of the breakneck twentieth-century expansion of military technology. The first contact-detonated mines were developed by sappers (military engineers) in Europe after World War I to counter a new development in warfare: the tank. But early anti-tank mines were bulky, thus easily seen and removed, so smaller devices, containing a pound or so of explosive and triggered by a footstep or a tripwire, were deployed alongside them. These were the first anti-personnel mines. Two basic designs resulted—fragmentation mines and blast mines—and two methods of detonating them—pressure plates and tripwires.

The Vietnamese device that killed Vorn was a tripwire-activated fragmentation mine, derived from an American cluster bomb, its surface grooved like a hand-grenade to facilitate its instantaneous dissolution into splinters of metal under the impact of the explosive inside it. Other fragmentation mines contain hundreds of ball bearings, or tiny steel cubes, ready-made shrapnel which is distributed at high velocity by the explosion. Fragmentation mines are laid above ground, usually hidden by vegetation, their design itself a form of camouflage.

The Chinese type 72, on the other hand—the mine that killed Ngeth Bros and crippled Horn Hong—is a blast mine, triggered by pressure, in this case just five kilograms (but usually more, so the charge is not expended on small passing animals). Blast mines are usually buried a few centimetres below ground; their destructive effect depends primarily on the direct force of the explosion, with secondary wounds and infections caused by fragmentation of the casing and by small pieces of soil, shoes, clothing and shattered bone driven by the blast up into the victim’s flesh. (Horn Hong was spared the shoe fragments, though; he had no shoes.)

Anti-personnel mines of both types are typically less than a hand’s breadth in size. Some look like tin cans, some like cigar boxes, some like stones. Some, like the US-manufactured M14, known as the toepopper mine, are not much bigger than a roll of film. Spherical, cylindrical, rectangular—nondescript containers made of metal, wood, plastic, bakelite or rubber, they contain something between thirty grams and a kilogram of one or more of a dozen varieties of explosive. There may be a main charge of tri-nitro-toluene (TNT), or tetryl, or hexogen, or picric acid, or old-fashioned black gunpowder, or else an array of mixtures and derivatives with equally enigmatic names: RDX, trialene, tritol, tertritol, hexolite, Composition B, Composition C-4 or Composition A-5. Added to these is a smaller detonating charge of a less stable compound, usually lead azide or fulminate of mercury. The detonator charge is ignited by a stab-pin or percussion cap that is triggered by a footfall or a snagged trip-wire, or, less usually, by remote control, or by a proximity sensor. The latter may be magnetic, seismic or acoustic.

In the second world war mines were laid by the million; in Europe and North Africa they are still claiming victims fifty years later. Beyond their function in guarding anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines were found to have a uniquely demoralizing effect on infantry. A single mine puts several soldiers temporarily or permanently out of action—the victim plus those who come to his assistance—and it brings the survivors sharply up against the reality of the injuries they are liable to sustain if they continue across the minefield.

Thus the aim of most blast mines is, in the phrase of arms manufacturers, to maim not kill. A March 1992 specification sheet for the Pakistani P4 Mk 2, a plastic mine similar to the Chinese type 72, issued by the export division of its manufacturer, the government-owned Pakistan Ordnance Factories, makes this feature the main selling point. “The mine,” it says, “has been designed with a view to disable personnel [sic].”

Operating research has shown that it is better to disable the enemy than to kill him. A wounded man requires medical attention, conveyance and evacuation to the rear, thus causes disturbances in the traffic lines of the combat area. Also a wounded person has a detrimental psychological effect on his fellow soldiers. The quantity of explosive has been precisely calculated to have the blast effect and not the fragmentation effect and to make the man disable[d] and incapacitate him permanently.

The retail price of the P4 mine, which has been exported on a large scale to Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, is $6.75. The manufacturer’s claims are not exaggerated. The victims, though, are seldom soldiers; they are usually civilians like Horn Hong.

The perfect soldier

Paul Jefferson is a plain-spoken bomb disposal expert formerly in the British Royal Engineers Corps, the author of an authoritative manual on Warsaw Pact mines. His book is much in demand in the former Soviet army: a copy of it that I lent to a Russian sapper was never returned. During mine clearance operations in Kuwait in 1992, Jefferson himself fell victim to a mine explosion. Today he walks with difficulty, his face cross-hatched with blue shrapnel wounds. He speaks without rancor about his accident (though he has harsh words for Royal Ordnance, the British defense manufacturer contracted by the Kuwait government to do the clearance).

“We were in a mines dump,” he says. “I thought they were all inert. I was wrong. There was a mine that hadn’t been disarmed, it was covered with sand. And I trod on it.”

“Your basic mine is really the simplest type of weapon,” Jefferson explains. “It’s just a lump of explosive in a box with an initiator. A moron can make one. A moron can use one. And they’re incredibly cheap. A child’s toy car—or a cap gun—is probably more difficult to make. The only difficult part about a mine is the detonator, because the chemistry is trickier. Packing the explosive in the tube is a delicate business. But you can design a mine round a standard general-purpose detonator, such as is used for quarrying. “

“In the second world war,” says Jefferson, “the Russians moved their entire manufacturing capacity from one end of the country to the other. Now there are factories all over Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Mines are practically a cottage industry. Compared to the industrial capability required to make, say, an assault rifle a mine is very low-tech. It’s the only weapon of modern war that requires no advanced machine capability at all. They’re simpler to make than a bullet, because a bullet has to fit very precisely in the breach; there’s much more tolerance when you’re making a mine.

“From a military point-of-view,” Jefferson says, “a mine is a very handy weapon, it fills a role no other weapon can. A Khmer Rouge general called it the perfect soldier: ever courageous, never sleeps and never misses. That means that the more frightened, untrained fifteen year-olds you have in your army the more useful mines are.”

“A mine,” Jefferson concludes, “is guaranteed effective: if it goes off it puts an enemy out of action; if it stays in the ground it acts as a long-term deterrent. In this respect it’s like a thermonuclear device, a poor man’s atom bomb. The economy of mines is very pleasing: they’re a small, simple, cheap weapon with a phenomenal multiplier effect.”

The evolution of the anti-personnel mine

In the decades since World War II the anti-personnel mine has developed away from its origins as a anti-lift device, designed to stop the removal of an anti-vehicle mine, to become a key weapon in its own right. This new ubiquity is the result, in the first place, of a change in patterns of conflict, notably the increasing prevalence of low-intensity civil war.

In traditional military doctrine mines—both anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines—are regarded as a defensive weapon; their function is to protect a position or deflect an enemy, to channel advancing troops and vehicles into a vulnerable position where they can be covered by fire, or delay them by compelling them to breach the minefield ahead of them. In theory, therefore, minefields are clearly marked and mapped—and cleared when they have served their purpose. (This convention, as Paul Jefferson points out, opens up possibilities of bluff and counterbluff: “You can just whack up a fence, stick on a sign and bugger off.”)

In conventional warfare mines are thus primarily a device for gaining time on the battlefield. But in contemporary third-world civil wars, slow insurgencies where small groups of armed rebels operate over large areas, mines are used less as a delaying tactic and more, in military phraseology, as a means of long-term land denial. On the rebel side mines are used to disrupt communications and deny access to government services—to schools and hospitals. On the government side they are used, in a conventional manner, to guard installations, but also as a counter-insurgency tactic, to keep potentially sympathetic civilians away from rebels.

Further to these changes in patterns of conflict, technical advances have made mines more attractive to conventional forces. Laying mines manually is time-consuming and labour-intensive. But remote delivery systems and delay-activated fuses, which were developed first in the US in the 1960s, have made it possible to blanket large areas of land behind enemy lines with munitions, using artillery or mortars, or airplanes. During the Vietnam War scatterable anti-personnel mines were dropped by US forces on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with the aim of cutting supply lines and denying land to the Vietcong. These devices were used in such quantities that pilots referred to them and other ordnance as “garbage”.

Although scatterable mines did not succeed in closing the Ho Chi Minh trail, they still cause casualties a quarter of a century later in the valleys and mountain passes where they fell. Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s also used scatterables, particularly the PFM-1, known as the butterfly mine because of its odd, asymmetrical shape, which is designed to reduce velocity as it falls. The US equivalent, the BLU-43/44/B, was christened the Dragon Tooth. Its makers were unaware, perhaps, of the origin of the phrase in Greek mythology: the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus in Boetia engendered armed men who sprang up to kill him.

Such remotely-delivered mines cannot be accurately mapped and most of them remain where they were dropped. Only latterly have self-destruct and self-neutralizing mechanisms been developed. These are electronic circuits which either detonate or deactivate the mines automatically after a certain period of time has elapsed, but their failure rate is high. Another high-tech sca tterable weapon, the cluster bomb, ejects a fatal rain of bomblets designed to explode on impact or before landing. Cluster bombs also have a high failure rate—10% by some estimates. In such cases the unexploded bomblets become, in effect, anti-personnel mines, joining scatterables in the jumble of live munitions and submunitions on the ground.

Such scatterables and cluster bombs were a crucial part of Allied strategy in the ground offensive in the Gulf War. William Arkin, director of military research for Greenpeace in Washington, estimates that between twenty and thirty million submunitions were expended during the conflict. Five per cent of them, he suggests—something like a million bomblets—are liable to remain unexploded. This war debris was probably ultimately responsible for more deaths among allied soldiers than were caused by enemy action.

From nuisance to terror

At a symposium held at Asheville, North Carolina, in September 1993, former US Marine Corps Commandant General Alfred Gray, Jr. provided graphic confirmation of the unpredictable effects of scatterable mines.

“We kill more Americans with our mines than we do anybody else,” said Gen. Gray.

“We never killed many enemy with mines… What the hell is the use of sowing all this if you’re going to move through it next week or next month ?… I know of no situation in the Korean War, nor in the five years I served in South-East Asia, nor in Panama, nor in Desert Shield-Desert Storm where our use of mine warfare truly channelized the enemy and brought them into a destructive pattern…”

The cumulative effect of these technical and strategic developments has been to shift the function of mines from defensive to offensive action, from nuisance to terror. US government statistics show a striking increase since the Second World War in the proportion of casualties attributable to mines: from 4.4% in the 1944 Italian campaign and 33% in the Vietnam War to 90% in the civil war in El Salvador. Some military analysts, such as Curt Larsson of the Swedish National Defense Research Establishment, argue that the prominence given to land denial means that mines should no longer be considered merely a tactical battlefield weapon; they now serve the function of a strategic weapon in a larger theatre of war.

The aftermath of such a war is a vast amount of unexploded ordnance that remains to constrain the lives of civilians, even when not explicitly directed against them. Increasingly, though, as in Afghanistan and Cambodia and Somalia, it is civilians who are the target, the aim being to empty territory and create refugees. Governments threatened by insurgents in all these countries have used mines as the deliberate instrument of a scorched earth policy.

In northern Somalia in 1990 retreating troops of the old regime of Siad Barre mined entire towns, in particular Hargeisa, the capital, before they withdrew. When I visited Hargeisa in January this year there were still extensive no-go areas in the residential part of the city, despite two years of mine clearing. Houses had been mined and booby-trapped. Wells and other water sources, river crossings, markets, public buildings, the airport, the radio station and the cemetery had all been mined. In the cemetery live Russian shells served as headstones. Outside the city the grazing land of the Issaq pastoralists on whom the economy of the region depends had been mined too. On the road from the port of Berbera our vehicle made diversions round stretches where anti-tank mines, laid by insurgents, were known to be embedded in the asphalt. Sometimes the detours were also mined.

Hargeisa hospital was full of patients injured by mines and fuses from mines that they had found lying on the ground. Three-quarters of them were children. A former commander in the SNM, the Somali National Movement, which played a leading part in the overthrow of Siad Barre, explained to me that government troops, supplied with a plethora of US armaments, had become indiscriminate in their use of munitions, mixing anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines without military rationale, using truckloads where a few hundred would have had the same effect. In the military compound in Hargeisa three rusty Italian-made mine-laying vehicles, capable of seeding a mile of road in minutes, bore witness to the terminal frenzy of the defeated army. Hargeisa is a classic case of terror mining. Even after the city was lost, the mines had been left as a curse, to prolong the suffering of the population. An article on Cambodia in the news magazine Asiaweek compared this use of mines to the Romans who spread salt in the ruins of Carthage to ensure that the city would never rise again.

The multiplier effect

Shortly after I arrived in Cambodia I attended a talk given to aid workers by the director of the Mines Advisory Group, Rae McGrath. McGrath is another ex-soldier, a pioneer in humanitarian mine clearance, that is to say, clearance by private voluntary organizations, as opposed to armies or commercial enterprises. I first met him surveying the ruins of Hargeisa, a piratical figure, with a greying beard and a gold earring, interviewing village elders and former guerilla leaders. As a consultant to human rights groups in Britain and the United States McGrath has documented the use of mines in half a dozen afflicted countries. A former British Army staff sergeant, he is deeply suspicious of the defense establishment and scathingly critical of UN demining efforts. In Battambang, in the house where the expatriate members of his clearance team were living, I watched as McGrath got the room ready for his talk. Like a conjuror preparing for a show, he placed a Type 72 and half a dozen other mines on the table in front of him. Below them he pinned a gruesome poster of an injured Afghan child.

“It doesn’t take much expertise to lay a mine,” he told the aid workers. “You just take the pin out—like this—and put it in the ground. As you know, there are a couple of million already laid in Cambodia. Up the road the Khmer Rouge and the others are still laying them, which makes our job that much more difficult. Meanwhile two or three thousand miles away, in your country or in mine, they’re making more of them and shipping them here.”

“Now maybe,” McGrath continued, “you are thinking something like this: these mines are Soviet, Vietnamese, Chinese. They’re not our problem. But you shouldn’t be so sure about that. In Vietnam and Laos the mines are American. In Kurdistan they’re Italian. And in Somalia there are mines from all kinds of places: Italy, Belgium, Russia, the US, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan. I don’t care what country you come from. Every one of our countries has something to do with the trade in mines. We’re responsible for this. And we’ve got to do something about it.”

“The military say ‘We keep maps of everything we lay’, McGrath told the aid workers. “But it’s a lie. What really happens is this. Say, I’m the good soldier Schweik. Corporal Schweik. I go to lay the mines. I’m being shot at. It’s raining. I put the mines anywhere I can. I come back. The sergeant says: ‘Did you lay the mines in the required location ?’ I say ‘Yes, sir’ and he puts it on the map.”

“But I didn’t. A few months later I’m in my trench, or my tank or whatever and there’s a radio message and I hear there’s a ceasefire. Then the ceasefire becomes an armistice. So I hand in my rifle. It goes in the store. The artillery falls silent. The bombers are back in the hangars. But the mines—they’re still there, wherever I put them—I can’t remember anymore. And no one can turn them off. Mines don’t recognise the armistice. They don’t recognise the Geneva Conventions. That’s where the problem starts.”

The situation facing the UN and new governments in countries like Cambodia, countries in recovery from war, has ramifications in all areas of civilian life. Nothing can work properly while the mines are still there. No one knows exactly where they are. There is no agreement on who has responsibility for demining, or on the best way of doing it. And there is still dispute over the extent of the problem.

Lt-Col George Focsaneanu, a Canadian cartographer with the UN forces, told Paul Davies, author of a book on the Cambodian mine problem, War of the Mines: “It’s said that there are anything up to ten million mines in Cambodia. Some people say that’s rubbish, there’s less than a million. Well a million would be bad enough. But there’s a single minefield with half a million mines in it. I believe there are at least four million mines here…”

The single minefield is the K5 barrier, laid by forced labour under the occupying Vietnamese forces in the mid-1980s and stretching six hundred kilometers from the Laotian border to the coast. (It crosses Route 10, the road to Battambang, at the Thai border.) There are, according to Lt-Col Focsaneanu and others, hundreds of thousands of mines in the K5 barrier, something like three thousand for each kilometer. But known minefields like this, even unmapped, are less of a problem than tens of thousands of smaller areas all over the country, which have been mined and then forgotten. A large proportion of Cambodia is now, in effect, a giant minefield, sown and resown over two decades.

In his memoir A Cambodian Odyssey Haing Ngor (the Cambodian doctor who later played the role of his compatriot Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields) recollects how, in the early 1970s, troops of the US-backed Lon Nol government would be lured by the sound of noisy Khmer Rouge meetings in the countryside to find loudspeakers and a tape player hanging from a tree—and landmines buried all round it. Like Siad Barre’s forces in Somalia, Pol Pot’s troops used mines as a universal terror weapon. So did their successors. Nowhere was exempt. In February 1993 I tried to visit the temple of Banteay Srei, a Khmer monument considered by architectural historians to be the paragon among the temples of Angkor (in 1923 André Malraux, later de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, tried to steal its priceless pink sandstone bas reliefs). But it was unapproachable. In Cambodia, the temples, too, are mined.

The number of mines in Cambodia amounts, by Col. Focsaneanu’s lowest reckoning, to more than one for every two Cambodians. But the point is not so much the number of mines; it is the quantity of roads and arable land they put out of commission. From the peasant farmer’s point of view, mined land is barren land. A small number of mines in a few strategic locations can have a crippling effect. To the suffering directly caused by mines—to the numbers of the dead and bereaved and disabled—must be added the stumbling block to economic rehabilitation that they represent: the inaccessibility of vital farmland, the destruction of livestock, the cost of health care for their victims, and the debilitating restrictions imposed on the movement of goods and people.

In this way the effect of mines extends beyond those who are killed and injured to embrace the entire population, particularly the rural population. Mines drive people into cities; they impede the restoration of trade necessary for economic recovery. To use the mine designer’s expression, they have a multiplier effect on existing afflictions. In Cambodia, in Battambang, this cycle of deprivation was palpable: returnees were forced into mined areas to get land to live; once there they were liable to lose the animals they depended on for their livelihood. Cowherds, often children, were particularly at risk, but in order to cultivate, to get water and firewood, entire families, men and women, adults and children, put themselves in danger.

An arm and a leg at a time

Despite their disagreements, everyone I met in Cambodia—aid workers, UNTAC officials, representatives of the Ministry of Defense—agreed that mines were the paramount problem the country faced. Their ubiquity both impeded physical rehabilitation and defeated its purpose. But who was to remove them? Mines are easy to lay, but hard to clear. In the aftermath of the Gulf War the Kuwait government put out contracts estimated at $700 million for demining. This was more than has been spent on mine clearance in the whole of the rest of the world. At least sixty mineclearers, local and expatriate, have been killed in Kuwait. The task there is still far from finished.

In the Falkland Islands, where the permanently sodden terrain makes detection particularly difficult, the British Royal Engineers Corps, which trains NATO forces in explosives disposal, has abandoned the attempt to clear remaining minefields. They have simply been fenced off.

Paul Jefferson, the former British army landmine specialist, who worked on the operation, told me “In the Falklands, Stanley Common and a lot of grazing land and some of the best beaches are off-limits. The mines are still in place there.”

“I used to tell the Island Defense Force when I was training them ,” Jefferson joked, “that these areas were their armoury, their stockpile if they were ever invaded again.”

Based on their operation in Afghanistan, the UN has estimated the average cost of detection and removal of a single mine—including the training of mine-clearers—at an astonishing $1,000, something like a hundred times the average purchase price.

It can come as a surprise to civilians that demining is not something that soldiers are very good at. Soldiers are trained not to eradicate mines, but to breach minefields, to make a passage wide enough for infantry and armour to get through. Mine clearance in battle is rough and ready; many of the mines remain; casualties are tolerated. Soldiers in conventional armies, moreover, have little experience of the kind of low-intensity warfare that has been endemic in Cambodia, where irregular, ill-equipped, untrained troops move back and forth using mines almost at random. The Cambodian problem is one that no army, no international body, has ever tackled—an entire country littered with unexploded munitions. And UNTAC, the only body capable of organizing country-wide eradication has proved notably reluctant to take it on. It could hardly ignore it, however: by mid-1993, in addition to the daily toll of Cambodian lives, more than a dozen UNTAC personnel had fallen victim to mines in the course of duty; it was the principal cause of death and injury among UN troops. In her frustration at the slow pace of mine clearance an aid worker remarked that the mines in Cambodia were being cleared “an arm and a leg at a time”.

Mapping the minefields

An UNTAC-sponsored organization, the Cambodian Mines Action Centre (CMAC) in Phnom Penh, is responsible for coordinating available information about the location of mines. This involves eliciting and reconciling accounts by officers of four different armies—very few of whom kept any records—of mine-laying that has been taking place over a period of two decades. The information is combined with the recollections of local people and incident reports by UNTAC units in the field—over fifty a week—and plotted on the relevant sheet out of three hundred-odd in the 1:50,000 series covering the country.

When I visited the Phnom Penh office of the Interim Director of CMAC, Sergio Vieira de Mello, I noted that he had the map of Rattanak Mondul, the district that includes Beng Ampil, hanging on his door. Mr de Mello, a Brazilian, had also been responsible for overseeing the repatriation program for Cambodian refugees returning home from camps in Thailand. In this capacity, he told me, he had tried, but failed, to keep returnees away from Rattanak Mondul.

“You can see why, I think,” he said, pointing to the map.

Where he was directing my gaze the fertile green of the Battambang plain and the blue of the Sangke River as it approached Route 10 were thickly overlaid with the red of minefields and suspected minefields. This was where Vorn and Bros had met their deaths. But the map would not have saved their lives; on this scale almost the entire area where they lived was mined. Here a Khmer Rouge general’s broad red felt-tip strokes had been converted into neat cartographic symbols gracefully following the curves of the river and the line of the road: dots and cross-hatching and tiny skulls. A recent mine explosion marked on an overlay confirmed a government army commander’s recollection of a ring of mines laid round the base of one of the limestone hills that rose from the plain.

The map was a striking attempt to reduce the chaotic archaeology of war to a two-dimensional diagram. But CMAC, Mr de Mello explained, was only coordinating the information at this stage; it was not actually clearing any of the mines that it was mapping. Eight of the thirty-two national armies represented in UNTAC—the Bangladeshis, the French, the Indians, the Dutch, the New Zealanders, the Pakistanis, the British and the Americans—have specialist explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams engaged in training Cambodians in clearance techniques. But owing to the reluctance of governments to put their nationals at risk in supervising the work hardly any live demining has taken place. No one wants to take the almost inevitable casualties. And no one wants to pay the insurance premiums. Mr de Mello had been reduced to advertising in the International Herald Tribune inviting proposals from commercial mine clearing companies. By early 1993 the only groups regularly engaged in systematic clearance in Cambodia were three private voluntary organizations. Two of them were British—the Halo Trust, and the Mines Advisory Group—and one from Scandinavia—Norwegian People’s Aid. Later they were joined by the French Foreign Legion.

Those hoping for a technical fix from army engineers were likewise disappointed: mechanical devices for mine-clearing—rollers, ploughs and flails—turn out to be severely limited in their usefulness. Effective high-tech devices for comprehensive demining do not exist. In the words of the US Army’s bulletin for engineers, “a counter-mine ‘silver bullet’ is nowhere in sight”. The State Department report notes that the United Kingdom made a standing offer of a million pounds to anyone developing a machine or device capable of removing the mines from the Falklands. There were no claimants.

In 1992 UNTAC spent $1.5 million dollars on three colossal armour-plated D8 mine-ploughs for the Cambodia operation. They turned out to be a white elephant. Such machines can only operate effectively on level terrain with soil of a certain consistency. Furthermore, rather than destroying mines, they rebury them in earth each side of the machine. Now they sit unused in a corner of the UN base. An alternative device, the flail, a set of whirling chains mounted on a heavy-metal version of a combine harvester, misses, or only half-destroys, a significant proportion of the mines in the ground, particularly small, anti-personnel devices like the type 72. The flail also creates a dust storm which frequently chokes its own engine.

Other technical fixes have failed in their turn. Explosive slurries and foams pumped over minefields leave many mines intact. Fuel-air explosions—themselves a terrible weapon when deployed on the battlefield—have been used in clearance to create a massive downward pressure above a minefield with the aim of detonating mines laid below, but they are outwitted by newly designed mines with pneumatically protected fuses. And airborne or remote mine detection, using infrared, lasers, biosensors, differential heat-detection and ground-penetrating radar, is still a gleam in the eye of US and European defense contractors. Mine clearing technology has not kept pace with mines. The only way, specialists agree, of completely eradicating mines in a given area, so that farmers can safely return to the land, is inch by inch, by hand, one man wielding a metal detector and the other on his knees, prodding with a stick.

An explosive pastoral

This was the scene on Route 10 in Cambodia when I returned the day after the mine incident at Beng Ampil with a team from Rae McGrath’s Mines Advisory Group. A safe lane marked with red and white parti-coloured plastic tape led down from a footpath on an earth berm into a field. Half a dozen cattle had died in explosions here in the past year; the farmer whose land it was had picked up some surface-laid mines himself, but there were buried ones too, and the minefield extended an unknown distance from the road. There was plenty of dead ground—the berm, a clump of trees—where more mines were likely to have been laid.

Two of MAG’s Cambodian employees, wearing black flak jackets and Kevlar helmets with perspex visors, were moving very slowly across the dry pasture. One held a pair of gardener’s secaturs and twelve-inch steel probe, like a miniature version of a fencer’s sword; the other had a green $2,000 Schiebel metal detector, a high-sensitivity model developed for the Austrian army. The detector consisted of an antenna—a foot-wide double ring of plastic-coated metal—mounted on a broom-length handle. It was attached to the operator’s arm and powered by four D-cells. Every so often it would emit an urgent electronic chirp; then the kneeling man would probe the earth below it, at an angle of about thirty degrees to the horizontal, to see if the metal that had broken its magnetic field was part of a mine.

Metal detectors are the indispensable tool of professional mine clearers. They are the one technical fix that works. But there are difficulties associated with their use. One problem is that they sense every single piece of metal in the ground, whether or not it is part of a mine: bullets, buttons, nails and tin cans all generate the same warning cry. Though mines have subtly different electronic signatures, all signals from the metal detector necessitate careful prodding until the object is found, or shown to be too small to be dangerous. War zones are littered with shrapnel, with cartridge cases and fragments of spent ammunition. The metal detector is reading a long history of conflict inscribed in the soil; live mines are only a part of it.

The other problem is that, increasingly, mines are made, in defiance of UN Conventions, with a metal content so low that it is difficult for the detector to pick up the signal at all. The lower the metal content the higher the sensitivity of the detector has to be; the higher the sensitivity the more it picks up other stray signals, and the longer the whole process takes. The next generation of plastic mines is likely to be undetectable by the present generation of electronic mine detectors.

The mine clearers moved across the landscape silently, in slow motion, like zen gardeners, or truffle-hunters, probing the soil at five centimetre intervals, two fingers’ width apart, just less than the diameter of the smallest mine. From time to time the metal detector mewed like a sea-bird.

After one such alarm-call the man with the probe straightened up and cried out “Min-a-a!”. Then he began to excavate in earnest, with a trowel. Gradually the dark green polycarbonate casing of a Soviet PMN-2 pressure mine was revealed lying sidelong in the ground. The PMN is a saucer-shaped mine slightly bigger than the Type 72, with a charcoal-coloured cruciform pressure plate that has earned it the name Black Widow. Roots of grass had grown round the mine and were slowly crushing it, a green fuse that in a few more months, or a year, or more, could have caused it to detonate spontaneously. At this point the two supervisors, veterans of the Territorials, the British Army Reserve, who had been overseeing the process, moved in. They clipped away the roots round the mine and lifted it up gently by its sides, like surgeons removing a cyst, or archaeologists unearthing an ancient artefact.

Over the next few hours the demining teams, working in rotation, found eight or nine more, which were placed together on the berm. They were all PMN-2s, manufactured by Soviet State Arsenals, a type which, with its precursor the PMN, is probably the most widespread anti-personnel mine in the world. Their route to Cambodia can be guessed at with reasonable confidence: they would have been supplied, in this case, via Vietnam to the Hanoi-backed regime in Phnom Penh (while Type 72s were supplied by China to the regime’s opponents, the Khmer Rouge).

The distribution of the mines in the ground became clear: they were laid in a regular repeating diamond pattern along the berm. The supervisors showed surprise at this. It was a textbook case, but mine-laying in Cambodia is not generally done by the book. More often than not deminers find—and for safety’s sake have to assume —that mines have been laid erratically, randomly, without rhyme or reason. They might be close together, scattered, in stacks, upside down, on their sides (particularly difficult and dangerous for the man with the probe). In fact any way at all. And of course they might be booby-trapped.

“When you’re looking for mines,” one of the deminers said, “you have to think like a soldier. Think like a frightened, nervous soldier, like a soldier who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“And at the same time,” he added, “like a really devious bastard who knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Quite often,” he added, “you see mines that haven’t even had the pin pulled—a minefield where every tenth mine, say, is unarmed. You can see that tenth soldier saying to himself ‘I’m not going to pull this fucking thing out’. He probably associates it with the pin on a hand grenade, so he’s too frightened to pull it.”

With a sufficient number assembled for demolition, the deminers left the field; and the two supervisors placed 400-gram explosive charges tight against each mine, a greater amount than in the mine itself. It is an irony of mine-clearance is that in order to destroy the mines and ensure they can never be reused, even more explosive is required. UNTAC had shipped 1000 tonnes of TNT into Cambodia for this purpose. The demolition charge was three times the weight of the explosive in the mine. If the charge was too low there would be a danger of deflagration: the mine blown apart but not detonated, leaving live fragments littering the ground.

The supervisors lit a generous length of fuse and withdrew two hundred yards. Nothing happened. Cursing the low-grade Indian cord they had been provided with by UNTAC, they tried again. This time the mines went up with a flash and a sharp report, leaving a cloud of smoke folding in on itself in the air and a blackened area on the side of the dike.

Dozens of spectators had gathered to watch this explosive pastoral: small children with buckets of eels, palm wine sellers on bicycles, with bamboo cylinders hanging from their handlebars like tubular bells. They laughed as the mines went up; it was nothing new to them. Land near the road got priority; and today one farmer had got lucky, but most would wait a long time for the mine clearance teams to come. It had taken a dozen trained men the best part of a day to clear ten mines, ten out of the million or more in Cambodia. A day to clear half a hectare of land, half a hectare out of a million that might or might not be mined. And this was the dry season, and the terrain was comparatively easy. The only other option for the farmers of Battambang  was to demine their own land, as Vorn had been doing when he died at Beng Ampil. Or else to pay someone else to do it.

Vernacular demining

In the towns and villages along Route 10 a number of local people offer their services to their neighbours as deminers, making their living in no man’s land, working without tools, training or safety equipment. I travelled to Kilo 38, the last settlement before the militarised zone, to meet one of these indigenous deminers, a 26-year-old former soldier, whose name was also Vorn. We spoke through an interpreter.

The tiny eight foot by eight foot single-storey stilt-house Vorn shared with his wife and small son and daughter was readily identifiable: it was a miniature museum of mine design. Against one of its corner posts were stacked a dozen of the bifurcated metal rods that support the tripwires of the B-40 apple mine. Next to them the thick wooden stakes of the Russian POM-Z 2; beneath the hut lay their crude grenade-like metal fragmentation cases, cross-hatched like the corncob towers of Angkor Wat. Mixed in with these were the cylindrical canisters of two bounding mines, fragmentation devices with a subsidiary charge that is designed to eject the mine precisely to genital level before it explodes. Nearby was the wooden casing of a PMD-6 pencil-box mine. This is the most primitive anti-personnel device of all, a Russian World War II design which remained in production in Warsaw Pact countries up to the end of the Cold War and is still in common use in the third world. This is the kind of mine that the Warsaw Pact weapons specialist Paul Jefferson described as easier to make than a toy car.

The commune policeman, Chem San, a comrade-in-arms from Vorn’s days in the government army, joined us; he was an amputee, another mine-victim, invalided out of the army after an attack on a Khmer Rouge position on a neighbouring mountain four years previously. Vorn’s son ran round the tree blowing silk cotton blossom in the air; his wife sat weaving a reed mat in the shade. Two bulging calico bags were hanging from the roof beams of his house above the head of his sleeping daughter; one contained detonator assemblies; the other, seventy-five gram cylinders of bright yellow TNT.

“There is nowhere without mines.” Vorn told us. “There are mines from here to the hills. The land has become narrow. So people pay me to clear fields for them.”

In two years, Vorn calculated, he had cleared about a thousand mines; for each one he was paid three hundred riels, about 10 cents (a contrast with the UN figure of $1,000 per mine, when international safety standards are observed). He had inherited some land from his parents, he said, but because it was in the military zone beyond Kilo 38 he could not go there. He had never been a refugee and had no UN ration card. Clearing mines was his only source of income.

Most recently Vorn had removed twenty-eight PMN-2s from one farmer’s land. “The PMN is easy,” he said. “You take it and throw it and it explodes. Or you burn it. The explosive is not so strong. With the POM-Z you go with a bamboo stick and lift the wire and cut it, then take the fuse out. But sometimes the wires come from above your head, so you have to be very careful.”

For a prodder he used the bayonet from an AK-47 automatic rifle, the gun with the forward-curving magazine, global emblem of third-world clients of the former Soviet Union. Vorn told us that he kept the casing of the POM-Zs to sell to scrap metal merchants from Battambang. The scrap merchants melted it down to make agricultural tools. There in Battambang, on a small scale, it seemed, swords were being beaten into ploughshares.

Mines have entered the culture in Cambodia; fishermen use them instead of bait; political rivals use them to assassinate one another; villagers use them as burglar alarms; poor men risk their lives to dig them up and recycle them. Before we left Kilo 38 I asked Vorn if there were others in his line of business there.

“There used to be more,” he said. “Two years ago there were nine people here who cleared mines. Five were killed and two got injured. Now there are just two. Me and another man. But I do more work. I tried to persuade my brother to help me, but he’s too lazy.”

His friend Chem San, the commune policeman, smiled in agreement. It seemed that Kilo 38 was a place where a one-in-three chance of getting killed within the year was considered an unexceptional risk. Cambodians of Vorn’s generation, I reminded myself, had lived their entire lives in a state of civil war, or subject to the antinomian violence of the Khmer Rouge. Their survival, and that of their families, was the most that they hoped for. They were actuaries of the everyday: the danger they faced from mines was subsumed in an array of other risks of disease and destitution.

A Via Dolorosa of mine warfare

After Cambodia, Afghanistan, four thousand kilometers eastwards, may be the country that is most affected by landmines. The road from the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, to the Afghan border, a 220-kilometre stretch of the trans-Asia highway, runs the whole gamut of the mine problem, from production, through sale and use, to mine clearance and the medical crisis created by mine injuries. It is a Via Dolorosa of mine warfare.

Just an hour out of Islamabad, at Wah Cantonment, are the Pakistan Ordnance Factories. This is where the P4 mine is manufactured—the blast mine whose maim-not-kill capacity is specified so precisely in its sales literature. Low brick buildings protected by high walls and concrete tank traps sprawl north and south of the road. (“If you manage to get in,” the mine clearance specialist Rae McGrath had said to me, “please blow it up on your way out.”) The factories employ forty thousand workers and manufacture half a billion dollars worth of armaments per year.

A few hours further up the road, just beyond Peshawar, the Khyber Agency begins. Here, on the North-West Frontier, is Pakistan’s wild west. There is a time-honoured free market in weaponry, sanctioned by the Pakistan government, where it is possible to purchase not only mines, but an entire range of small arms and other weapons, imported, domestically manufactured, or hand-cast in primitive foundries in the tribal areas. Immediately beyond the city limits of Peshawar is Jam Kor Khono, the administrative centre of the North-West Frontier Province. Here, after a cursory police check and a sign that says “Foreigners Are Not Permitted”, the arms bazaar begins: glass-fronted stores with racks of automatic rifles, anti-tank rockets, sword-sticks and pencil guns. Anti-personnel mines were not on display when I was there, but this seemed to be due only to lack of space. Four hundred rupees ($8) was the asking price for a Soviet PMN. This was a tourist price: at the arms markets in Miranshah and Landi Kotal, deeper in the tribal areas, PMNs are available for half that sum.

Mines have entered the consciousness of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan as much as they have that of the former refugees in Cambodia. In the market in Peshawar you can buy ashtrays and snuff boxes made out of butterfly mines, old Soviet scatterables drilled and drained of explosive. Their vendors are liable to have fingers missing as a result of this version of Russian roulette. Representations of POM-Zs and PMNs have displaced traditional geometric motifs in the intricate hand-knotted rugs woven in the refugee camps and sold in the downtown carpet shops. And mine clearance has become one of the few sources of salaried employment for demobilized mujaheddin, who are paid $220 per month (plus per diems) to risk their lives in the minefields where they formerly did battle with the Russian occupying forces and the Communist government that succeeded them. These mine-clearers are among the few Afghans with life insurance.

The boss of the major mine-clearance organization in eastern Afghanistan is Kefayatullah Eblagh, a former Colonel in the Afghan Signals Corps who joined the Mujaheddin in 1982. Since 1990 Mr Eblagh has been the director of Afghan Technical Consultants, which, with UN and EC funding, employs eighteen 30-man mine clearance teams in seven locations inside Afghanistan. It is the longest-established of the UN clearance programs.

I went to their office in Peshawar to arrange a trip to see one of their teams in the field, working across the border in Afghanistan. Cut flowers lay languishing in a POM-Z fragmentation casing; suspended on the wall was an illuminated scroll with verses from the Koran and a letter of commendation from USAID. Mr Eblagh, a sleek, bearded figure, immaculately dressed in a grey woollen tunic and highly polished black shoes, a string of red glass prayer beads in his hands, offered me sweetmeats from the previous night’s Iftar, the breaking of the daily fast of Ramadan. He had recently returned from Afghanistan, where one of his deminers had been injured in an explosion. The garden of his own house in Parwan Province, Mr Eblagh told me, was still full of Soviet mines.

“The jihad against mines is harder than the jihad against the communists,” he said. “In three years we have had nine shahiddin (martyrs). The communists were an enemy you could see. But now we are fighting an invisible enemy, little Russians that were left behind to fight after the real Russians were gone.”

In October last year, the UN representative for Afghanistan forwarded Mr Eblagh a letter from Moscow, from a former officer in the Soviet army of occupation in Afghanistan. “Dear Sir,” it began

I am ashamed that during mine clearance operations many volunteers of all countries all over the world already perished and continue to perish, excepting volunteers from Russia and other countries of the former USSR, though many mines were loaded by Soviet troops…. I having known the real face of war and death don’t want to wait when the Soviet and other mines take new lives…. I am ready to create a group of field engineers/volunteers from Russia and other countries of the former USSR… Only Soviet field engineers have such immense practical experience in this kind of mine clearance, and their participation will diminish the risk of these operations considerably. As for the group’s safety I studied Afghan usages and I am sure that nobody will touch former soldiers ordered by their conscience to return to the combat field…

I reminded Mr Eblagh of the letter. He laughed.

“Yes. The Russians are now looking for work clearing mines. Life must be hard for them. I haven’t replied. I was worried about it, actually. I don’t think a Russian soldier would last very long in Afghanistan today, do you?”

The road to Afghanistan

Mr Eblagh arranged for me to travel with a mine-clearing team that was returning to Jalalabad. At first light the next day we left Peshawar in a UN car, decals stripped off and gears stripped down. We sped through the arms bazaar and over the Khyber Pass, overtaking polychrome coaches bound for Kabul, picked up an escort at the border, then descended through a series of narrow rocky defiles. There were deep potholes where the demining team had lifted six anti-tank mines a few months before. The driver sang as he drove. In the late afternoon, with the sun catching the snow on the encircling hills, we arrived on the green plain round Jalalabad. I had last been to this place twenty years earlier, before the war began. Now, in the dust-laden light of evening, it seemed to lie under an evil spell.

Once the winter capital of the Afghan kings, Jalalabad is surrounded by a huge ring of defensive minefields laid during the Soviet occupation. Mr Eblagh’s 30-man team were working in one of the many deserted villages west of the city, along the road to Kabul. The village was a huddle of fortress-like adobe houses, their walls pitted with rain and rifle-fire, set in ruined apricot orchards and abandoned terraces, where a few brave returnees were cultivating scallions and wheat.

“When we came the mines grew here like flowers,” said the team leader as we surveyed the village the next morning. Now the walls of the houses had white paint marks indicating where the harvest of mines had been reaped. Before that day’s work began the team leader led his colleagues in prayer, reading the sura from the Koran for the twenty-sixth day of Ramadan, but his words were scattered by the high wind from the mountains.

The deminers had brought a USAID dog team with them in a converted military shower-truck: a handsome pair of Belgian Malanai. Dogs are used intermittently in mine-clearance; they can sniff out mines that metal detectors might miss, but unlike mine detectors they are liable to get tired and distracted, and they can only work in certain weather conditions. Earlier I had watched the dogs training at a Pakistan army base near Peshawar, a dozen Malanai and German shepherds padding back and forth in a eucalyptus grove, their names reflecting the places where they had worked: Rosa, Ringo, Zomba, Sheba, Ralmatullah, Abdulah, Nazir, Screamer, Flash and Rambo I, II and III. These were five-thousand dollar dogs, trained to detect both explosives and opiates. Their trainer, a ex-US Army veterinarian named John Ottenberg, explained that they were particularly useful in unearthing mines made of plastic, or mines in places so heavily polluted with shrapnel that the metal detector never falls silent. There are others, though, who argue that in mine clearance dogs are really only useful when mines are newly laid and the explosive trace still fresh.

The use of dogs was controversial for a more curious reason. The previous UN Representative for Afghanistan, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, had vetoed the US Ambassador’s offer of the dogs: it was men who laid the mines, said Prince Sadruddin, and men should clear them. He might also have added that mines already claim more than their share of non-human victims. Globally, at least as many cattle, sheep, goats and camels are killed and injured as people; sometimes livestock are deliberately driven over minefields by desperate farmers in an attempt to clear them. So it was not until 1990, after Prince Sadruddin’s departure, that USAID established the dog training program. Now in the morning chill in Jalalabad I saw the Afghan handlers put the animals through their paces, slapping their thighs to reinforce their commands, letting the dogs run on their thirty-foot leads, rewarding them with a rubber ball carried in a bag at their waist. “Vooruit! (Go on !)” they cried. The commands were in Dutch, the only language the dogs understood.

Sniffer dogs like these, however, need still, undisturbed air to work effectively. The wind from the mountains showed no sign of abating; and their handlers eventually decided it was too blustery for them to continue. The remaining deminers returned to their perilous ritual of steel probe and metal detector, the procedure that I had witnessed in Cambodia, a slow dance over an invisible abyss.

Crossing the minefield on the far side of the village I was struck, not for the first time, by the courage of the mine-clearers, and by the strangeness of their occupation. Walking in a minefield is like being blind. You enter a world of invisible danger, a magical world of prohibitions and sudden disasters. You are dependent on those whose senses have been extended—by probes, by dogs, by magnetic fields. Following them, you walk lightly, as though the earth, if it detected your presence, might rise up and swallow you. You are vividly aware of gravity, of your own weight, how much it exceeds the few kilograms that would detonate a mine if you stumbled or fell from the safe path. You are blind. And so are the mines. They could be the answer to an ancient riddle: what strikes blindly but never misses?

At Jalalabad hospital

That afternoon I visited the hospital in Jalalabad. The decrepit surgical facilities had recently been taken over by the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose mandate includes the care of war-wounded. Their half-dozen staff were the only foreigners remaining in Jalalabad. The ICRC Surgical Coordinator, a British surgeon named Robin Coupland, had flown in the day before; I accompanied him and the resident surgeon on a ward round. Over half the admissions at the hospital were mine injuries; most were non-combatants; many were children. This was a pattern, Mr Coupland said, that repeated itself at ICRC hospitals and rehabilitation centres worldwide. Over the years in all these countries there had been a continuing increase in the proportion of mine injuries over every other kind. Existing medical facilities were overwhelmed with an influx of mine victims. Each spring brought a further surge as farmers returned to their fields and pastoralists to their grazing grounds.

Half a dozen of the patients in the hospital at Jalalabad were young boys, goatherds and shepherds who had been injured clearing pasture for their livestock. One of them explained that he had been trying to cut the tripwire of a POM-Z when the detonator went off. The mine itself remained intact, so the damage was limited: he lost only two fingers of his hand. With the Afghan doctor interpreting for me, I asked the boy if he would try to defuse a mine again.

“Of course,” he said, “All the boys do it. We’re nomads. We do it all the time.”

“Mines,” said Mr Coupland as we elbowed our way through the crowds of patients, “are designed to create a complex medical problem. They’re designed to make work for doctors. Of all casualties that survive to hospital they cause the messiest wounds, and they make corresponding demands on the time and skills of surgeons.”

“Amputation after a mine injury isn’t straightforward,” he continued. “The blast tends to go up inside the leg, fill it with dirt and shred the muscle, so it has to be amputated higher up.”

There is an analogy between the work of surgeons like Mr Coupland and the work of mine clearers: surgeons have to clear the fatal debris from the bodies of their patients as the mine clearers clear the land.

“I feel pleased as a surgeon if I get the stump closed,” Mr Coupland continued, “But for the patient the problem is just beginning. They have to get to somewhere they can have a prosthesis fitted and then learn to walk again.”

As with mine detection, prosthetic technique has struggled to keep up with the gruesome effects of weapons technology; and the cost of it, as with mine detection, is hundreds of times the cost of the mine itself. It is another case of the multiplier effect. To put a total price on the impact of mines on civilian life, adding the expense of medical services and rehabilitation to the cost of demining, would produce a figure still higher than the UN estimate of $1,000 a mine. It would be six or seven times that, more than a thousand times what a mine costs to make .

In Jelalabad that morning a woman had been admitted to the hospital who had lost half her face to a bounding mine, the kind that leaps from the ground before exploding. Her brain was full of shrapnel. Such patients gave a terrible meaning to that phrase of the arms manufacturers, maim not kill.

“When you tread on a blast mine,” said Mr Coupland, “losing a leg is the simplest thing that happens. Severe damage to the head and eyes and genitals is also common.”

“There are some things,” he added as we left the ward, “that are simply unacceptable.”

The birth of the campaign to ban landmines

In international law the use of mines is governed, in principle, by a 1980 UN Convention entitled “Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects”. Protocol II of the 1980 Convention, subtitled “Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby Traps and Other Devices”, proscribes, in accordance with the general laws of war, the indiscriminate use of such weapons and their use against civilians.

Minefields, it stipulates, must be recorded, and civilians are to be given warning of remotely-delivered mines. But the stipulation applies only to “pre-planned” minefields and it does not apply at all when “circumstances do not permit”. Mines with self-neutralizing mechanisms are exempted from the Protocol, and it contains no allocation of responsibility for mine-clearance. And the Convention contains no provision for its own implementation, neither for monitoring nor for sanctions.

The thicket of limitations in the 1980 Convention makes it subject to endless legalistic interpretation. Ten years on, moreover, it has been ratified by only thirty-two of eighty-five countries that participated in the drafting. (The thirty-two do not include the United States, though this is likely to change soon.) Even if all countries ratified and observed the Convention, it would not cover internal conflicts—civil wars—or be binding on non-governmental forces. In real world terms, in the words of Human Rights Watch, the 1980 Protocol is “an utterly ineffective document both in theory and practice”.

Some legal specialists, like Louise Doswald-Beck of the ICRC, argue that anti-personnel mines are already unlawful under international customary law, which has an umbrella prohibition on the use of weapons that are indiscriminate by nature, or that, according to an infelicity calculus known as the St Petersburg Rules, are held to cause “unnecessary suffering or superfluous injury”. Others, such as Kenneth Anderson of Human Rights Watch, argue that a law that attempts to put limits on the use of mines can never be effective; the only possible way to control them is to impose prohibitions at the production and transfer end.

For the last two years a global alliance of human rights groups and other non-governmental organizations has been campaigning to put mines back on the international disarmament agenda; their aim is to update the international laws of war to reflect the new reality of use; to put mines in the same legal and ethical category as chemical and biological weapons, to stigmatize them in the public imagination, and to press for a global ban. Spearheaded in the United States by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, the campaign includes Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, the Mines Advisory Group and two medical aid organizations, Handicap International of France and Medico International of Germany. Working with these groups to introduce new controls on mines are the ICRC and World Vision International, the world’s largest non-governmental aid organization, which is backed by evangelical Christians.

Last year the anti-mine coalition achieved a remarkable and unheralded victory. In July 1992 the US Senate passed legislation unilaterally imposing a one-year moratorium on the sale, transfer and export abroad of anti-personnel mines. The Senate’s version of the moratorium was agreed to by the House and was signed into law the following month. On September 14 this year, by a unanimous vote, the Senate passed a three-year extension of the moratorium, which is due to be signed into law by President Clinton soon. The sponsors of the legislation were two Democrats, Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont senator who is chairman of the Agriculture Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, and Lane Evans, a congressman from Illinois.

Earlier this year, 1993, Leahy told the Senate: “I remember how outraged everyone was in this country when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds. But how many people realize that all the deaths from chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons are only a fraction of the number who have been killed or maimed by land mines?”

The moratorium, said Leahy, “shows that the United States intends to be a leader in stopping the spread of these insidious weapons.”

In October 1993, after wrangles with the Defense Department, the new Clinton-appointed head of the US delegation to the United Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, tabled a motion calling for all member states to impose similar moratoriums. On Armistice Day, Senator Leahy went to the United Nations to introduce the resolution. As of the end of 1993, forty-five states have agreed to sponsor it. President Mitterrand of France, on a state visit to Cambodia, announced that he had asked the Secretary-General of the United Nations to convene an International Conference to revise the 1980 Convention and called on other mine-manufacturing countries to join France in an export moratorium

The breakthrough on the part of the anti-mine coalition was facilitated by a convergence of interests among non-governmental organizations. The coalition included aid agencies that found their relief work obstructed or made ineffective by mines, human rights activists who recognized the grievous effect mines were having on civilians in war-affected and post-conflict countries, arms-control lobbyists who sought a clear-cut campaigning issue in the aftermath of the cold war and, finally, health-workers who saw their facilities overwhelmed by a huge increase in mine injuries.

It was this last factor that propelled the International Committee of the Red Cross, the discreet and sedulously neutral guardian of the Geneva Conventions, into its unprecedentedly high profile position on the issue. And Bobby Muller, the director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, told me that it was the experience of establishing a prosthetics program for Cambodian mine victims that led the VVAF to put its weight behind the campaign

In order to get the moratorium through Congress, however, the VVAF and allied organisations had to compromise.

“The original language of the moratorium was to include anti-tank mines, which also kill a lot of civilians,” Jody Williams, the coordinator of the international campaign told me.

“In our discussions with the military, they indicated, off the record, that they might accept losing antipersonnel mines, but they wouldn’t even discuss antitank mines, because they still consider them to be critical for national defense. So we excluded them in drafting the moratorium.”

Alliant Techsystems of Minnesota, the former Honeywell subsidiary, one of whose principal stockholders is the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, would like its mines—and those of other American manufacturers—exempted from the moratorium on the grounds that they incorporate self-destruct mechanisms and therefore do not represent the enduring threat that other mines do. But campaigners take issue with their argument.

“US producers support the ban on non-self-destruct mines because they stand to make more money from mines with self-destruct mechanisms,” says Kenneth Anderson of the Arms Project bluntly.

“Driving the price of mines up might be a good thing,” says Anderson, “in that it would slow their spread. But there are several objections to Alliant’s position. The first is that their self-destruct mechanisms are simply not reliable enough. The quantity these things are used in means that even a one per cent failure rate will leave tens of thousands of unexploded munitions on the battlefield.”

The second objection, Anderson explains, is that if self-destruct mines are exempted it will be perceived by third-world countries who lack the production capacity to make them that it’s a restrictive measure enabling the West to go on doing business while others are prevented from doing so.

“And not only that,” he says, “it would look like a move that is designed to force them to buy mines from us. That way we would have zero chance of getting, say, Egypt, to support the UN resolution. It would become a north-south argument, which is exactly what we don’t want.”

A designer mine

Banning the trade in landmines, even just anti-personnel mines, is, everyone in the campaign acknowledges, a long-term goal. Mines are too easy to make: they are manufactured in nearly fifty countries and exported from more than twenty. Although they represent a very small proportion of the world traffic in weapons systems, anti-personnel mines are worth something between fifty and two hundred million dollars a year to the arms industry, most of it in in the big four producer countries.

“There is very little published information,” says Steve Goose, the Washington Director of the Arms Project, “but there are a host of reasons for believing that the use of mines—and the trade in them—is increasing. And that the rate of increase is increasing.”

For every mine in the ground, Goose stresses, there is another in store; and for every one in store another on the production line.

The most aggressive mine-exporting country today is Italy. Two of the three Italian manufacturers, Valsella meccanotecnica and BPD Difesa e Spazio (formerly known as Misar), which market mutually interchangeable weapons systems, are half-owned by the automobile giant Fiat. It was a corruption case in Italy that let some light into this aspect of the secretive international arms trade.

In the early 1980s Valsella sold seven million mines to Chartered Industries of Singapore, a conduit for sales to middle eastern countries. Then, in 1991, seven Valsella employees were convicted of an illegal sale of $180 million worth of munitions, a sale that included nine million mines. The client, in this case, was Iraq. A US army intelligence report on the eve of the Gulf War noted that these state-of-the-art landmines were “indicative of the seriousness of the mines threat”. About a third of the uncleared Argentine mines in the Falklands, according to Paul Jefferson, are also Italian-made. Recently, US intelligence sources noted a shipment to the Armenian enclave in Nogorno-Karabakh.

Italian landmines are among the world’s most insidious: Valsella was one of the first manufacturers to incorporate automatic boobytraps in anti-personnel devices and, along with producers in China and Belgium, has taken the lead in marketing low-metal plastic mines that impede detection and clearance. The Misar (BPD) SB-33, is an Italian-made blast mine that is littered across Iraqi Kurdistan, Kuwait and the Falklands. It is the acme of the mine designer’s art, a representative of the next generation of landmines, the generation that the campaigners are trying to put a halt to.

The SB-33 weighs six ounces, is almost all plastic, blast-resistant, and can be equipped with an anti-tamper device (ie a booby-trap) similar to the anti-tilt mechanism on the 72-A. The mine is made in a range of colours designed to blend with any terrain: desert sand, camel dung, jungle, shingle or swamp. It has a special finish resistant to infra-red sensing. It can be buried or scattered from the air and it is waterproof and functions upside-down. A US army report describes it as “effective against all countermeasures” including flails and fuel-air explosions.

To look at, the SB-33 is a startlingly seductive object: palm-sized, pebble-shaped, subtly asymmetrical, with a synthetic skin shagreened like leather. The neoprene pressure-plate is elastic to the touch, with the user-friendly bounce of computer keys. It is truly a designer-mine, the Sony Walkman of weaponry. Millions have been manufactured, not only in Italy but also, under franchise, by companies in Portugal, Greece and Spain. The plastic that makes a mine like this so troublesome to detect in the ground makes it seem innocuous to the eye. It does not look like a weapon. It looks like a toy, as children in war zones throughout the world have discovered to their cost. Even when you know what the SB-33 is, there is a powerful impulse to cradle it in your hand and gaze at it, oblivious of the fact that this paradoxical object is designed not to be seen until the instant of detonation, when it destroys both its onlooker and itself.

A weapon that hides from view

For a device that is manufactured in almost every industrialized country, there is remarkably little awareness of the existence of mines. Hidden in use; they are also absent from public discourse. Most people, says Rae McGrath, have no idea what an anti-personnel mine looks like.

“Especially,” he says, “people who live in countries where they are made. I often travel with dummy mines in my luggage and I’ve never been stopped at customs.”

“Customs officers,” he adds, “have a problem detecting them, just as mine clearers do.”

The names of a multitude of other kinds of weapon—guns and missiles—are familiar to us from television coverage: Uzis, AK-47s, Stingers and Scuds. Few people, though, have heard of the Claymore, the PMN or the butterfly mine.

And in the world of mine design there is no Colonel Kalashnikov, no John Moses Browning, no Samuel Colt, no Horace Smith or Daniel B. Wesson. No one is proud of making such a thing. Hidden in use, covert in sale and transfer, mines are absent from the public face of war.

In campaigning terms mines are thus the opposite of nuclear weapons, which have arched over the public imagination for two generations. One of the remarkable things about the recent US landmine moratorium was that it was entirely a lobby victory, achieved without any pressure from public opinion. On this question, campaigners will tell you, the public, by and large, has no opinion.

“We did it without any media at all,” says Bobby Muller of VVAF. “There hasn’t been a documentary. We had a couple of editorials, a little coverage in reports on Cambodia. That’s all.”

An article about the ban in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists declared: “If the horrific effects of land mines do begin to penetrate the public mind, these weapons may become symbols of the cruelty and chaos of the post-Cold War world just as the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals symbolized the Cold War.”

Mines, the article pointed out, are a democratic weapon, cheap and freely available. To establish effective controls on them it will be necessary to mobilize a corresponding popular revulsion against their use.

In the complex tactical logic of the lobbyists, the argument for an outright ban is not necessarily that it will work, but that it will begin a longer process of making landmines unacceptable to the public, a process of stigmatizing them in the way that mustard gas was stigmatized by the Geneva Convention after the First World War and dum-dum bullets (bullets that explode on impact) in the Hague Convention of 1899.

“This is the way that it has been possible to prevent the use of chemical weapons,” says Aryeh Neier, the Director of Human Rights Watch.

In Bobby Muller’s view stigmatization is not enough. “We’ve got to demonize them,” he says. “If we can demonize them then we can be sure individual soldiers will think twice about using them.”

While they may be unfamiliar to the public, for soldiers mines are a routine weapon. As a former military officer, Paul Jefferson believes that the campaigners don’t take this sufficiently into account.

“From the military point of view,” he says, “banning mines is like trying to ban hand grenades. Or assault rifles. They’re an irreplaceable weapon. In this respect they’re not like chemical weapons at all. Chemical weapons are unwieldy and expensive and unreliable. The military would really rather not use them. But mines are a normal weapon. It’s hard to explain how normal they are.”

“What isn’t normal,” says Jefferson, “is this global proliferation of use against civilians. But then you might argue that the global proliferation of assault rifles is having an equally bad effect. It’s just that people who are shot usually die, while people who tread on mines tend to have horrific injuries and live to bear witness.”

“On the other hand,” says Jefferson, “it must be acknowledged that the moratorium has had a remarkable success. Everybody has been surprised by that.”

At a conference on mines organized by the ICRC earlier this year in Switzerland I asked Kefayatullah Eblagh, the Afghan demining specialist, who had flown in from Peshawar, what he thought about the moratorium.

“If you like human beings,” he said, “you must oppose such weapons,”

So would he ban them?

“No,” he said. “We are poor and we might need them in our next war.”

The automatic terrorist

“Securing a prohibition on mines may seem a formidable task,” says Aryeh Neier. “And it is a further formidable task to ensure that the prohibition is observed. Another problem is to eradicate the vast number that have already been made.”

“But,” he says, “these arguments against a ban collapse in the face of the extraordinary cost mines represent for the countries where they are used.”

Neier compares the case of mines to torture. “There are always arguments that torture should be legitimate in certain circumstances. But we can all readily understand that if we were to permit torture even in those special circumstances the stigma would then disappear. Torturers would be, in effect, licensed. It is the same with mine manufacture.”

Mines are a peculiar weapon. Victims are picked at random without regard for who they are or what they represent. The essentially indiscriminate nature of mines, the fact that, once deployed, they are not bound by time or human agency—the indefinite hazard that they represent—these are the characteristics that qualify them for inclusion in the narrow category of weapons whose use incurs international opprobrium. They may seem anachronistic, crude and archaic, like a mantrap, but they also carry an alarming suggestion of the future, a science fiction future of maleficent robots, of automatic terrorism. The possibility of a ban on landmines depends on stressing their peculiar features, on differentiating them from other weapons, on convincing the voting public and the military establishment that they are both abnormal and dispensable.

Today, for the anti-mine campaigners, after their unexpectedly early diplomatic victory, the long, slow road of arms control lies ahead, the road of advocacy and negotiation, of review conferences and verification procedures, the lengthy process of establishing and promulgating the egregious moral peculiarity of these weapons and enacting it into law.

Meanwhile for the mine-clearers in Cambodia and Afghanistan, and other affected countries, the colossal task of mine removal continues, a dangerous and expensive process that is slower, even, than arms control. And for the victims of landmines, for those who live in the rural areas of such countries, the mines remain as a noose round their lives, the most brutal and unpredictable of their multifarious afflictions. ★