Anti-landmine drive failing, Axworthy says
Former Liberal minister claims Syria, Yemen, Burma laying deadly new weapons
The treaty to ban landmines once stood as one of Canada’s proudest diplomatic accomplishments. But the man who played an instrumental role in one of the world’s most successful international agreements says the goal of ridding the planet of these “diabolical” devices is now under threat.
Former Liberal Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said that after a decade during which landmines became “taboo,” new pariah states, such as Syria, Yemen and Burma, have emerged and are laying new landmines.
At the same time, Canada, which once led the world on humanitarian initiatives, now not only lags behind, he said, “We’re worse: we’re actively getting in the way.”
“Here is this very rich, smart country with an incredible generation that wants to work internationally, but they’ve been shut down,” Axworthy told the Star in an interview. “We’re just not in the game anymore.”
In 1996, Axworthy issued a challenge to world leaders to ban landmines within a year. The call resonated widely and 122 countries came to Ottawa in 1997 to sign one of the world’s first comprehensive conventional weapons bans.
The OECD estimates that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, foreign aid has been cut by more than10 per cent, or over $700 million a year. And domestic organizations, such as Axworthy’s Canadian Landmine Foundation — which sponsored a documentary that was screened at HotDocs this week — have had their funding slashed.
Canada now narrowly targets certain development objectives — such as newborn and maternal health — but Axworthy says this approach ignores important issues and can be self-defeating.
“Harper can be very committed to newborn and maternal health, but what happens two years later when that woman and child step on a landmine looking for firewood?” he said.
Under Harper, Canada has also failed to join newer treaties conceived in the spirit of the landmine ban. While Ottawa signed the treaty banning cluster bombs, more than five years later it still hasn’t been ratified. When the treaty regulating the small arms trade came into force last year, Canada stood on the sidelines after having refused to sign. (Both the United States and Israel are signatories.)
But this doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made. One hundred and sixty two countries have now signed and ratified the landmine treaty, and none of them are using landmines anymore. Annual death tolls from landmines have dropped from 18,000 when the treaty came into force in 1998 to less than 3,000 last year, Axworthy said.
While the U.S. hasn’t formally signed the treaty, President Barack Obama has indicated that it will voluntarily follow all of its provisions except those that relate to North Korea. Axworthy is hopeful Obama will opt to sign the treaty as a legacy initiative at the end of his presidency.
“Even the Chinese and Russians don’t trade landmines anymore,” he said. “The world has changed: we’ve established a new standard of norms.”
But while there’s hope the landmine treaty will become universally ratified, Axworthy laments that some states have started laying new mines for the first time in decades.
“Syrians are now laying new landmines and I suspect others are doing it as well,” he said, citing Yemen and Burma. “But it’s almost impossible to monitor now . . . Why aren’t we holding them accountable?”
While Axworthy always knew of the horrors that landmines caused for decades after they were laid, it wasn’t until a trip to Managua, Nicaragua, in the 1980s that he really understood how they destroyed lives.
There, he came across a group of children and young people carving their own prosthetic limbs out of bamboo. When he asked how they persevered, they told him they were the lucky ones, at least they hadn’t been killed.
“These things are so diabolical: they’re designed to kill civilians,” Axworthy said.
Technological progress, however, has dramatically sped up demining operations. While it was once thought that clearing every landmine in the world would take more than1,000 years, advances in satellite mapping technology and remote demining robots mean the job could now be done in a generation.
But this can only be accomplished, he said, if countries like Canada again take up the mantle of pushing for human rights on the international stage.