PAKISTAN: Agencies urge rethink on border landmines plan
Source: IRIN
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QUETTA, 19 February (IRIN) - Anti-landmine activists are concerned that a proposal, made in December by the Pakistani government, to mine its western border with
Afghanistan will increase the landmine casualties and have called on the government to drop the plan. However, a military spokesman told IRIN the matter was still "under consideration". "The
government's position on laying landmines is a great source of concern," said Muhammad Imran Khan, deputy director of the Sustainable Peace and Development Organisation - a Peshawar-based
non-governmental organisation that serves as a focal point for the Geneva-based International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) in Pakistan. Scores of Afghans and Pakistanis have fallen victim to
anti-personnel mines laid along the border during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s. Should the contentious plan go ahead, communities on both sides of the border will see many more victims, given
significant population flows. According to Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, more than 14 million people cross the border annually. Pakistan's decision followed international
criticism that the country had failed to do enough to prevent alleged cross-border movements by Taliban insurgents to and from Afghanistan. Riaz Muhammad Khan, the Pakistani foreign secretary,
defended the move, saying that "safe transit passages would be established along the fortified stretches of the more than 2,400km border, and mining should be done with great care in areas that
require monitoring". "We urge the government to drop the idea of mining and use alternative means to secure the borders and restrict cross-border militants' movement," Khan said. According to the
Landmine Monitor Report for 2006, at least 214 casualties were reported in Pakistan in 2005, while 263 people were killed by mines in the first five months of 2006 alone. "Almost 75 percent of the
victims are innocent civilians, mainly women and children, including Afghan refugees," Khan maintained. However, Major-General Shaukat Sultan, director-general of Inter-Services [military] Public
Relations, told IRIN in the capital, Islamabad, that no decision had yet been made about mining the border. "The matter is still under consideration and we are looking forward to the international
community's response and suggestions in terms of alternatives to mining," Sultan said. Islamabad is not a signatory to 1997 Ottawa Convention, an international agreement prohibiting the use,
stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and their production. "The regional security environment and its military requirements have constrained Pakistan from joining the Ottawa
Treaty," a Foreign Ministry official told ICBL's Landmine Monitor in February 2006. "Since our long borders are not protected by any natural obstacle, the use of landmines forms an important part of
our self-defence strategy given the nature of our security compulsions [to the east]." Pakistan remains among a handful of countries that still produce mines. It is estimated the country has
stockpiles of at least six million anti-personnel mines, the fifth-largest stockpile in the world, according to the Landmine Monitor Report, although no official confirmation of these numbers has ever
been given. ts/ds/at/ar/bp/mw
