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It’s a firm belief of mine—and I can’t help but believe that my Berkeley neighbors share it as well—that people in neighborhoods other than where I hang out are as entitled to walk down their neighborhood streets in safety, as I am in my neighborhood. If that other neighborhood happens to be located in Kabul’s busy streets, or near Cambodia’s rice paddies, or in any of the thousands of neighborhoods in the 71 countries around the world where over 100 million landmines are buried, that doesn’t change my far-off neighbors’ entitlement to walk in safety. It’s just that in fact they can’t—and don’t—not in their neighborhood.  

The problem for my far-distant neighbors is nothing less than the imminent possibility of death or a diminished life. Dismemberment may permit survival but not much more than that of what’s considered a decent life. Dismemberment happens often, especially to my neighbors’ kids—in Mozambique, for example, where my neighbors’ kids who are just old enough to tend the family cow are not quite old enough to keep the cow from wandering into tall grass where left-over landmines still lurk. In Bosnia, an 8-year-old came into this world after the war ended in 1995 and so was never shot at by snipers when she walked through her neighborhood to buy the day’s bread; these days in her neighborhood, if she makes a wrong step, she stands the risk of getting blown up by a leftover stray mine. 

Danger signs with skulls and crossbones often warn people and animals to stay away from unexploded landmine sites in their neighborhood. But the signs are aged and fading, and they command less attention than they did when everyone’s body-memory of armed conflict was fresh. My friend’s neighborhood in Angola has had those scary warning signs for years—for decades, even—and she’s feeling mighty frustrated and discouraged about the toll that landmines continue to take of her neighbors and how little anyone seems to care. She wonders how much she can do, what steps she can take, to ensure that neighborhood kids stay safe and whole now, when the enemy is no longer formally the enemy, the war has been declared over, but the mines near their neighborhood go on wreaking terrible damage. 

Landmines maim or kill approximately 26,000 civilians every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of those victims are children. The victims who survive endure a lifetime of physical, emotional, and economic hardship. In mine-affected countries, medical care is expensive and often unavailable; most countries are able to fill less than one-fourth of their annual prosthetic requirements. Landmine victims who end up unable to work become a financial burden on their families. Some are ostracized by their communities. As for their ability to make a living, mine-infested land is unusable for agriculture or habitation. 

From January 2002 to June 2003, there were new landmine casualties in 65 countries. The majority (41) of these countries were not even at war; only 15 percent of reported casualties were military personnel. The number of injured survivors continues to grow in every affected region of the world, yet the assistance available for the rehabilitation and reintegration of landmine victims into society is hopelessly inadequate. 

The Bay Area has for a long time attracted refugees fleeing for their lives. My Afghan neighbors in Fremont know about that, with relatives still being dismembered or killed in their neighborhoods in Afghanistan. My Serb friends, living still in the neighborhood where they were born and went to school and where their parents were born and went to school, received a small ray of hope last June. The parliament of Serbia and Montenegro passed legislation to accede to the Mine Ban Treaty. My Sudanese neighbors still in their old neighborhood in Khartoum were glad to hear that in May 2003, the Council of Ministers officially and unanimously endorsed the Mine Ban Treaty transmitted it to Parliament for ratification. And in Iraq, U.S. soldiers have perished in these months since the “major fighting” was declared over. Peace accords, cease-fires, humanitarian pauses—none of those procedures can guarantee safe passage across a field being farmed for the family’s basic food needs. 

What about getting rid of the mines? No single technology is able to detect all types of mines, because landmines come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, and are made from a variety of materials. The international community, including both public and private sectors, is working to improve current technologies to make the mine clearance process safer, faster, and more effective. Here in our Northern California neighborhood, Rep. Woolsey announced the introduction of legislation, the Roots of Peace Act of 2003 (H.R. 2299), that would authorize $10 million to help defuse unexploded mines in agricultural lands of formerly war-torn countries. The Bush administration just announced a new landmine policy, but has not changed its policy of staying aloof from the rest of the countries committed to abandoning the use of landmines. 

Wars make headlines, but the continuing curse of landmines goes unheralded and will persist in our global society’s neighborhoods until we eradicate all landmines, present and future. 

Rita Maran, Ph.D., is president of the United Nations Association-USA East Bay Chapter . 

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