This would make it virtually impossible for such mines to explode more than 120 days after being laid, sources at a United Nations conference on land mines said. The measure will not apply to mines laid in clearly marked fields guarded by military personnel.
The International Campaign to Ban Land mines, representing more than 450 separate organizations, said the agreement would not go far enough to ban these indiscriminate weapons, which kill or maim about 500 people in developing countries each week. Since the conference on land mines last met in Vienna, in October, and failed to reach an agreement, mines have claimed 13,740 new victims, the campaign said.
“If our children in the West were stepping on land mines, they would have been banned yesterday,” said Ken Rutherford, a former U.S. relief worker who trod on a mine in Somalia. More than 30 countries, mostly in Europe, have followed Sweden’s lead in banning the manufacture and sale of indiscriminate land mines.
The protocol will do nothing about the estimated 110 million mines already laid, which have turned huge swaths into no-go areas for humans. It will be neither enforceable nor verifiable, hut there will be an annual review.
According to the scores of anti-mine campaigners who flocked to the treaty negotiations in Geneva, many of them on crutches and in wheelchairs, the new agreement will be little better than a fig leaf behind which governments will continue to produce ever more sophisticated weapons.
The conference chairman, Johan Molander of Sweden, acknowledged that the pact was “the lowest common denominator.” But at least, he said, it was an “an honest compromise,” which was “significant.”
Mr. Molander, who hopes the 53 nations at the conference will vote for the measure unanimously, spent much of the day Thursday trying to persuade Pakistan to agree to the provisions. It objected to a clause banning the transfer of mines to areas of civil conflict, apparently fearing that this 9ould apply to other conventional weapons and put it at a disadvantage in any conflict with India over Kashmir.
The United States, Russia and China are to be among the accord’s signatories.
The agreement requires remotely scattered mines to be constructed so that at least 90 percent of them self- destruct after 30 days. To deactivate mines that fail to destroy themselves, the weapons must also contain batteries that run for no longer than 120 days, the protocol states. The agreement also bans the indiscriminate use of booby-trap weapons.
Although soldiers will be allowed to continue to use existing “dumb” mines in conventional mine fields, they must remove them when hey leave, according to the protocol.
The pact also states that all mines must contain a strip of metal enabling them to be detected, starting in January. But countries have nine years to convert existing stockpiles, a condition sought by China.
The text commits signatories not to transfer to other countries any mine not fitted with these safeguards, nor to sell mines to countries that have not signed the protocol.
The protocol is an addition to the 1980 UN convention on “excessively injurious” conventional weapons, and is a human rights measure rather than an arms limitation measure.
The 10 days of negotiations in Geneva have focused international attention on a weapon that kills and maims “not only citizens, but entire economics in the developing world.” according to Caleb Rossiter, director of a U.S. group called Demilitarization for Democracy.
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