LIES

The following article appeared in the Machester Guardian in September 1997 at the time of the Oslo conference on the land mine ban. Since I have analysed statistics on mine clearance in Afghanistan, I know that the number of mines which need to be cleared is much smaller than the 10,000,000 figure often quoted in media reports.

The 100,000,000+ estimates on land mine numbers are all derived from a report to the US State Department in 1994. Statistics for this report were gathered in extreme haste, and in most cases were guesses enlarged my large uncertainty factors because no one wanted to be accused of under-estimating the magnitude of the problem.

This article sums up the situation quite well. The money available for clearing mines on the ground has been shrinking because of many factors, not just what we see here. In Afghanistan, they very nearly ran out of many in September '97 and would have had to close down for 3 months. Fortunately, money was forthcoming at the last minute.

Update: January 2000

The Department of State in the USA have updated their estimates of mine contamination in many countries, but still use the rather misleading method of simply presenting an estimate of the number of mines to be removed.

For example, estimates from Lebanon suggest about 8000 mines need to be removed, but this information is based on very incomplete statistics, and in any case there is no way of knowing the extent of the problem in Lebanon since no one has been able to gather any comprehensive technical survey information - even the Lebanese National Demining Office.

Dear Mike,

Paul has asked me to email the original of his Guardian article to you. I also have it on disc if that is easier. Let me know if you need it.

Best wishes

Marina

LANDMINES, DAMN LIES AND STATISTICS

By PAUL A.S. JEFFERSON

The Oslo Conference, the penultimate staging post of the Ottawa Process to ban anti-personnel (AP) mines, is now over. The ban-the-landmine media circus has moved on. The workshops on "Women's Issues in Demining", on "Landmine survivors describing new Skills Training Programmes", on"Better Sharing of Information on Mine Victim Assistance", on"Using the International Campaign as a model for other issues and future possibilites for global and civil society networked action and cooperation", are now thankfully over.

Remarkably, most of the major mine clearance organizations were not invited and their opinions were not sought, which is odd considering that these are the people who deal with the mines problem daily,who put themselves at risk, and therefore presumably know what they are talking about. However it was seen as necessary to fly a number of mine victims to Oslo, including the "proffessional victims" of the Land Mine Survivors Group, no doubt to get the message across. Emotive knee jerk responses, as ever, counting for more than rational informed opinion.

On the diplomatic front, the Americans have insisted on exceptions to an outright AP mine ban in the case of South Korea and for mines with self-destruct mechanisms. The lobbyists of the ban campaign regard this as a setback as they do not recognise the legitimacy of any security or military considerations and overemphasise the significance of the Americans in the mines problem. I presume they are more concerned by the political kudos of having America comply with a ban than by any practical impact it may have on the world's landmine problem. Other than America's reasonable security considerations, a mine ban will not work because the major producer and user nations will not subscribe to it. A ban could not be effectively policed. Also, the technology to produce mines cannot be denied even to the most industrially backward nations. And the logic of the victim operated trap as a weapon is so simple as to be undeniable. But notwithstanding these points, even if a mines ban were successful, fulfilling the wildest dreams of the lobbyists, it would not even begin to reduce casualties for fifteen years or more, by which time concerted and properly funded clearance could have removed 80 per cent of the problem. As mine casualties are a function of the density of mine contamination, the density of population and the time the population is exposed, the longer a population is exposed to mines the higher the casualty figures. Since population densities cannot be reduced, except by establishing large refugee camps, it must be the density of mines that is dealt with. Only clearance can do this in the forseeable future.It is argued that a ban will stop vast numbers of mines going into the ground, but in reality there are nothing like as many mines being laid as is claimed - certainly nothing even approaching the figure of 2,000,000 a year commonly quoted. Deminers on the ground in Afghanistan now estimate the number of mines in that country to be around 600,000 (as opposed to the official figure of 10 million), after eighteen years of fighting. Do the lobbyists seriously suggest that the equivalent of nearly four Afghanistans is happening every year?

So what has been achieved: what is the real impact of the staggeringly successful campaign to ban AP mines? The problem with AP mines is not the mines themselves: it is the casualties they cause. Beyond medical attention and rehabilitation of the injured, any action taken must be measured by its effectiveness in reducing casualties and returning land to the population. Anything else is wasted effort.

After five years' successful campaigning, a ban on AP mines will, I am sure, be ratified - by all but the major producer nations, such as Russia, China and North Korea. But the campaign, the ban, the lobbying, the media and celebrity involvement and the heightened public awareness will not have reduced the landmine casualty count by one leg. Indeed, rather the opposite.

The reason for this is that the problem with AP mines casualties is an entirely practical one which can only really be addressed by mine clearance. A landmine is removed from the ground by one of two methods: it is either trodden on and detonated, or it is cleared.

The ban campaign and all the lobbying and publicity associated with it have succeeded in hijacking the issue of demining, turning a practical problem into a bureaucratic, legalistic and media gravy-train. As Tore Skedsmo, head of U.N. demining, says: "Sometimes I am frustrated at being among all these people who have made theoretical demining a nice way of living." The landmine issue provides a wealth of employment for bureaucrats, aid workers, lobbyists, lawyers and administrators, which would not matter were it not for the counter productive aspect. It diverts resources and attention from the real problem. Crucially, by distorting statistics, it presents the landmine problem as being too vast to be addressed by clearance. I will explain.

It is repeatedly stated that there are 119 million mines laid around the world, and it is therefore worked out that at the current rate of clearance it will take 1000 years to clear them. This figure needs to be looked at closely; its acceptance is one of the central tenets of the ban campaign. The figure is often heard quoted by Mike Whitlam of the Red Cross, and other such luminaries of the ban campaign, who have no on-the-ground experience (although they may imagine that the odd "fact-finding" visit qualifies them to speak authoritatively) and who rely on lobbyist briefing sheets. hese figures gain currency, and government ministers, public funding bodies and the general public believe them. The issue is thus presented as intractable - like flood management in Bangladesh, something beyond our capabilities to address. Who wants to get involved in a project that will take hundreds of years to bear fruit? Instead, people support a landmine ban, feeling that at least they are doing something. Typically, George Soros's foundation, The Open Society, has put three million dollars into the ban campaign but, understandably, will not fund clearance mainly because it is seen as too big an issue to get involved in. Thus a whole industry is generated - a displacement activity which avoids addressing the real issue.

However, the figure of 119 million mines, along with the claim of 2 million mines going into the ground each year, is a gross exaggeration, possibly by the order of as much as tenfold. In the seven countries in which the HALO Trust works, the official UN figure for the number of mines is 40 million. But their deminers on the ground estimate that the total for these seven countries is 1.7 million. This does not reduce the mines problem, statistics are irrelevant to demining on the ground - but the exaggerated figures do discourage funding bodies from supporting them.

I predict that during the next year we will see bodies such as the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross backing down from these figures in the face of criticism by many deminers on the ground. They will come to recognise they have been misled by the ban campaign, and that their inadvertent scare tactics are unhelpful to mine clearance, so they will take refuge in non-specific "millions".

If the lobbyists can be so wrong, so inaccurate as to the figures upon which their appraisals are based, why should we have faith in the other planks of their argument, such as the feasibility of enforcing a ban? The other downside of these exaggerated statistics is that when more realistic estimates are arrived at, the general public and funding bodies can be excused for thinking: "Ah, so the problem isn't as big as we thought." Wrong. The problem is just as big as it ever was - namely the casualties. And the only thing that has addressed this problem during the past five years is mine clearance.

Where concerted clearance has been undertaken, casualty figures have fallen off dramatically, noticeably in parts of Afghanistan, Cambodia and Mozambique; more clearance could have been going on and would be going on if the quick-fix, feel-good solution of the ban lobby did not divert attention and resources.

Heightened public awareness of the mines issue has not resulted in a major increase in funding for demining. Lobbyists always pay lip-service to the idea of clearance, but only as secondary to their main bureaucratic and legislative initiative. Of course: there are no careers for them in practical demining. I would estimate that for every European mine clearer there must be 40 or 50 lobbyists.

At the end of the Second World War, Europe was more heavily contaminated with mines and ordnance than the entire world is today. Ninety per cent of the problem in Europe was dealt with in 10 years because there were the financial resources and the political will to deal with it. At the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwait was also heavily mined. It was cleared within about two years. Of course, like Europe, it is a valuable piece of real estate. Effort was put into demining - not into displacement activities. But the professional carers of the aid world have jobs to keep and those jobs are not in minefields.

Marina de Alarcon
Pitt Rivers Museum,
Curatorial Assistant
University of Oxford,
South Parks Road,
Oxford OX1 3PP.
telephone: 01865 270928
fax: 01865 270943
marina.dealarcon@prm.ox.ac.uk

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