Nicaragua Finishes Clearing
Mines Left Over From Contra War
MANAGUA - Nicaragua is said to be soon
announcing that it has removed all known
landmines from the civil war in the 1980's
between the U.S. backed Contras and the
Sandinistas. There were more than 180,000
mines in over 1,000 minefields.
The international community has applauded
the Nicaraguan effort.
During the long slow process many were
maimed or even killed. There may be a few
mines remaining in unregistered minefields
and some mines moved in floods and
mudslides.
The Ottawa Treaty* bans land mines.
And unregistered minefields and movements
due to flooding and mudslides caused by
Hurricane Mitch in 1998 mean that some mines
may remain.
*The Ottawa Treaty or the Mine Ban
Treaty, formally the Convention on the
Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling,
Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel
Mines and on their Destruction, completely
bans all anti-personnel landmines
(AP-mines). As of April 2010, there were 156
States Parties to the treaty. Two states
have signed but not yet ratified while
thirty-seven states are non-signatories to
the Convention, making a total of 39 states
not party.
Through 2008, eleven states had cleared all
known mined areas from their territory:
Bulgaria, Costa Rica, El Salvador, France,
Guatemala, Honduras, FYR Macedonia, Malawi,
Suriname, Swaziland, and Tunisia. At the
November-December 2009 Cartagena Summit for
a Mine-Free World, Albania, Greece, Rwanda,
and Zambia were also declared mine-free.
Thirty-seven countries have not signed the
treaty. The list of about three dozen states
that have not signed the treaty includes a
majority of the permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council (People's
Republic of China, the United States and
Russia), India, Israel and both Koreas,
where landmines remain active in the
Demilitarized Zone. List of
non-signatory states can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Ottawa_Treaty#Non-signatory_states
Source: Wikipedia |
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