Related Stories
Why Do Land Mines Still Kill So Many?
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: February 27th, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/ban-land-m...
The world is rolling backward, and at a disturbingly faster pace, in the struggle to limit carnage from land mines and other booby-trap explosives. The most recent numbers, covering 2016, are appalling. Known casualties that year came to 8,605, including 2,089 deaths, according to a new report by Landmine Monitor. The toll was nearly 25 percent higher than the 6,967 maimed and dead counted a year earlier, and more than double the 3,993 in 2014. Much of the 2016 mayhem stemmed from conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen, but people in 56 countries and other areas were killed or wounded. Nearly 80 percent of the victims were civilians; children accounted for 42 percent of civilian casualties. One subset of the menace, cluster munitions, is singularly vicious. Cluster munitions alone caused 971 known casualties in 2016, more than twice the toll of the previous year. Most victims were Syrians ... but Saudi Arabia has also used American-supplied cluster bombs in Yemen. Thanks to an international treaty that came into force in 1999 - now signed by 163 countries and banning the production, stockpiling and transfer of land mines - casualties ... reached a low of 3,450 in 2013, compared with 9,228 in 1999. Nearly all that hard-won progress has been erased. Land mine and cluster munitions treaties are undercut by the refusal of some of modern warfares most powerful players to sign them. Among those countries are China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia. And the United States.
Note: The international cluster bomb trade is funded by world's biggest banks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
Related Stories
Latest News
Key News Articles from Years Past
