I am grateful to the Chair for giving me this opportunity to raise this issue. The deaths and injuries caused by land-mines is now one of the most serious problems facing a range of developing countries which are in or have just emerged from conflicts. Yet, it is an issue which has received scant attention in this part of the world.
Like many other Members it was a problem on which I had little knowledge until I attended a press conference yesterday organised by Pax Christi Ireland. "Shocking" is a word over-used by politicians but there is no other word that can adequately describe what I and other Members of the House saw and heard at that press conference yesterday. No words can ever convey the horror of the broken bodies, severed limbs and maimed children which we saw on the slides shown by Pax Christi.
The scale of the problem is almost unimaginable. Nobody knows how many land-mines have been planted but it is believed that there are approximately 100 million mines still scattered around the world taking their terrible toll. In the last 15 years there have been 1.5 million casualties, the majority of whom were civilians. Seventy-five per cent of survivors require amputations while approximately 200 people die and many more are injured by land-mines each week. Sixty-two countries are affected by land-mines. Africa is the most mined continent with between 18 million and 30 million mines scattered throughout 18 countries.
There is a severe problem in countries such as Cambodia which has the unfortunate designation of amputee capital of the world. Of Cambodia's population of approximately 8.5 million some 30,000 people have lost a limb after stepping on a land-mine. This represents one out of every 236 of the population. In 1990, land mines in Cambodia caused 6,000 amputations and approximately 12,000 deaths.
The land-mine is the most indiscriminate of weapons. It acknowledges no ceasefire and remains a killer long after hostilities have ceased. Invariably laid by military personnel its most frequent victims are civilians. The land-mine does not differentiate between combatant and non-combatant. It responds in the same lethal way to the pressure of the bare foot of a child as to the wheel of an armoured personnel carrier.
Apart from the death and the human suffering, land-mines are wreaking a terrible economic toll on developing countries which can least afford the additional burden. Entire areas are taken out of production because of the dangers posed by land-mines, thus affecting food production and adding to malnutrition. They kill and maim workers upon whom rural economies depend to sustain themselves. The cost of treating and caring for victims is very high as land-mine victims require more attention, money and nursing than other war victims.
Action is required on two fronts: more assistance from developed countries to remove existing mines and measures to seek the eventual phasing out and banning of these weapons. Ireland can play a role in both. There are particular problems in detecting and defusing mines, especially as the majority of modern mines are made from plastic and do not show up on detectors. A high level of technical expertise is required to deal with them which is not always available in the countries most affected.
Members of our own Defence Forces have experience of dealing with land-mines from their service with the United Nations in the Lebanon and elsewhere. I hope the Government will consider ways in which this technical knowledge could be made available to those countries which can benefit from it.
Ireland should also take a leading position in seeking to ban these weapons. I understand that our Defence Forces purchase land-mines from the Swedish manufacturer, Bofors, which is one of the major profiteers from this evil trade. I cannot see any military circumstances which would require our Defence Forces to have land-mines. We should give an example to the international community by announcing that we will buy no more.
I hope that Ireland will also give a lead to the rest of the world by ratifying the UN Convention on prohibitions or restrictions on the use of certain conventional weapons which may be deemed to be excessively injurious or to have indiscriminate effects, flawed and inadequate as this Convention may be. I understand that discussions are under way to identify means of improving the Convention but Ireland is not a party to these discussions. I hope Ireland will join these discussions, that it will consider sponsoring motions at the United Nations seeking to end this trade and to make producers of land-mines responsible for the devastation they cause and for the cost of rehabilitation and mine clearance.
Nothing can be done to restore the lives lost and only a certain amount can be done for those who have lost limbs but we must now begin to take steps to ensure that there will be no more victims. Let me give one graphic example. One of the slides showed a child with part of his foot missing sitting in bed with his mother. As the father has disappeared, the mother must go out at night through the land-mines to find food to feed the child. The presenter for Pax Christi made the point that this child will almost certainly die as one night his mother will not return and he will not know why. He will did from starvation and gangrene. That is how serious the problem is.
