So, I believe that if Americans knew that children and others in Afghanistan were often blown to bits by land mines, there could be a public outcry against the United States for its manufacture and sale of land mines, especially when only two other countries refused to
sign a treaty that would ban land mines.
With Mines, 'No Real Peace'
By Letta Tayler
Staff Correspondent
Jalalabad, Afghanistan -- The strange toy Rahmatullah's brother had found in a field was green and conical -- something to toss or shake like a rattle, the boys thought. So did one found by a third brother, who began tapping it with a stone.
"It exploded,” Rahmatullah recalled. "Seven of my relatives died.”
One at a time, the 13-year-old ticked off the dead relatives on his fingers: His mother. One brother. Two sisters. One cousin. Two aunts.
The blast also blew off Rahmatullah's left leg. For the seven years since then he's used a prosthesis. "Every time I look down at my leg,” he said, "I remember what happened to my family.”
Rahmatullah, who like many Afghans uses only one name, is among an estimated 400,000 people who have been injured by land mines in the 23 years that this country has been at war. Nearly half those people have lost one or more limbs. Rahmatullah's relatives are among more than 350,000 people who have died in land mine explosions in Afghanistan during the same period.
Though the war is over, those numbers are expected to keep rising for the foreseeable future:
Afghanistan, according to land mine experts, harbors the highest number of unexploded land mines in the world.
Now that tenuous peace and a new interim government have been established in Afghanistan, clearing land mines is one of the most pressing priorities. More than 90 percent of the land mines are concentrated in villages, farms, grazing lands and other civilian areas. As a result, three-fourths of land mine victims are civilian, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. As up to 4 million war refugees and internally displaced Afghans return to their homes, the potential for additional mine-related injuries and deaths is enormous.
"Until we clear the mines, Afghans can't return to their homes and start redeveloping abandoned areas,” said Fazel Karim, director of the national Organization for Mine Clearing and Afghan Rehabilitation, or OMAR. "And until Afghans return to their homes, there can be no real peace.”
An estimated 5 million to 7 million land mines and other unexploded ordnance are scattered and burrowed throughout this country the size of Texas, Karim said.
Mine clearing programs ground to a virtual halt after the United States began bombing Afghanistan Oct. 7. Many of those programs are only now resuming, and the last round of conflict has increased their work.
The risk of maiming and death from mines and unexploded ordnance "is much, much greater since Sept. 11,” said Dan Kelly, program manager for the United Nations Mine Action Center for Afghanistan, an umbrella group of 15 mine-clearing programs. Kelly attributed the increased risk not only to the Taliban, who set additional mines before fleeing, but also to U.S. bombing of military compounds that spewed unexploded ordnance within 3-mile radii.
In addition, U.S. use of cluster bombs, which can scatter through an area of 900,000 square yards, has created "a real increased risk to civilians,” Kelly said.
Cluster bombs are 1,000-pound explosives that each contain about 200 bomblets. Though they aren't technically land mines, they pose a similar risk to civilians, as about 10 percent of the bomblets don't explode upon impact and remain dormant until touched again, Kelly said. Based on reports that the United States has dropped about 350 cluster bombs in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch estimates there may be almost 5,000 unexploded bomblets there.
The bomblets dropped in Afghanistan were yellow, the same color as some of the food packages being dropped from planes as part of U.S. relief efforts, adding to the risk of civilians accidentally setting them off, according to mine experts.
After the U.S. airstrikes began, the UN Mine Action Center had to pull nearly all of its 4,900 land mine surveyors, de-miners and trainers from Afghanistan.
From a satellite the de-mining convoys and encampments "looked like training camps and could become bombing targets,” Kelly said. Since then the UN group has been spending most of its time training its mine clearance teams to identify and deactivate cluster bomblets, he added. The umbrella group has resumed de-mining in key areas of the country and hopes to have its programs back in full swing by mid-January.
Throughout the latest conflict many other programs continued to operate for mine victims, including the Afghan Amputee Bicyclists for Rehabilitation and Recreation, which is funded by UNICEF. On a recent day at the program's Jalalabad office, a half-dozen boys who had lost a leg to a land mine or to polio were learning to ride bicycles. Those with amputations below the knee learned to use both pedals; those with amputations above the knee rigged a bungee cord from the handlebars to the pedals they couldn't use.
The cyclists included Ajmal, 16, who lost most of one leg eight years ago in Bisout, a village north of Jalalabad, when he stepped on a mine while working on a farm with his father. When he walked, Ajmal leaned on a metal, two-legged cane on which he rested his stump. On his bicycle, he was unstoppable.
"I use my bicycle like a bird, flying freely,” Ajmal said. "When I take my bicycle home, it will be as if I have four legs instead of one.”
Each child receives a bicycle to bring home at the end of the month-long program, which has taught 2,700 amputees over the past nine years. Directors said they could easily quadruple that number if they had the funding. They are impatient to extend the program to girls, who under the Taliban couldn't participate because they were banned from sports. Girls and women also weren't allowed to attend mine awareness classes because they were barred from all educational activities.
Directors also would like to resume teaching adult amputees as they had in the program's early years.
"Today an adult male came from North Kabul, 100 miles away, but we had to turn him away,” said Abdul Baseer, the program's executive director.
If the boys looked happy with their bikes, the faces of amputees were uniformly grim at a nearby Red Cross center that fits amputees with prosthetic limbs.
"I feel like maybe my life is finished. I can't do anything any more,” said Gul Wazir, 15, who rested the stump of his left leg on a pillow in a hospital bed as he waited for a medical technician to make a cast.
Wazir's foot was blown off when he stepped on a mine seven months ago while harvesting wheat in his family's fields. Shrapnel struck his boyish face, permanently twisting his mouth.
"The patients are filled with despair when they arrive,” said Mohammed Ayoub, the Red Cross clinic's director, who like all other staff members is an amputee. "The first thing I do is show them my own amputated leg and say, ‘We can work like normal people.' ”
In war-wracked Afghanistan, however, even the most able-bodied or educated people have a hard time finding jobs. Among amputees the most common profession is begging. For female amputees the prospects are particularly disheartening.
"I am ashamed to beg, but what else can I do?” Sherbano, a woman who lost her right leg to a land mine 10 months ago while collecting hay for her cattle, asked as she sat on a dirt road and seeking handouts in Jalalabad's bazaar.
Sherbano, a mother of four, was widowed shortly before she stepped on the land mine. Had she not lost her leg, she might have been able to find a husband to support her and her children, she said. "But who would marry me like this?” she asked, pointing to her missing limb.
It will take at least a decade to clear all land mines from high-priority residential areas and farmland in this country, said Karim of Omar.
Meanwhile, estimated Kelly, another 150 to 300 people are injured or killed every month by land mines and other unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan.
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