Tara Ashtakala

Mahatma Gandhi often used the following metaphor to explain the logic of non-violent struggle to his followers: "... means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree: and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree."

In other words, evil means cannot bring about good ends. This view finds resonance in a principle of the modern law of war, which all those who engage in battle are required to follow, regardless of the reasons for starting the conflict in the first place. This precept states that the methods of warfare to which an army can resort are not unlimited, and that any weapon that cannot distinguish between a civilian and a combatant must not be used.

Land mines are arms that make no such distinction: any foot that triggers a tripwire lying across a path or that steps on a mine planted in the soil causes these armaments to kill. Yet they are not used to eliminate individual soldiers; rather, wide areas of land are sown with mines prevent enemies from advancing or to render an adversary's territory unusable. Their low cost and high abundance makes them the weapon of choice of sophisticated superpower armies and amateur armed groups alike.

Notwithstanding this military value, though, land mines cause disproportionate harm to civilians because they can lie dormant in the ground, continuing to claim unintended victims long after the conflict in which they were used is over: mines that were used in the Second World War are still being found in Europe, for example, and every month, someone is injured or killed in Vietnam by a landmine planted during the conflict with the Americans over thirty years ago. Be it a farmer tilling his fields, or a child on his way to school, the basic human act of walking upright becomes a source of extreme terror for those trapped in a land full of these weapons.

The indiscriminate way in which land mines kill makes them one of the most serious threats to the health and well-being of individuals and entire communities around the world. With much leadership and material support from Canada, with the presence of influential and compassionate public figures like Diana, Princess of Wales, and with the determination of an unprecedented collaboration of civil society groups that formed an International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, a treaty to banish these terrible weapons from the arsenals of the world's armies soon came into being.

Diana and Jody (AP)

On the 3rd of December, in 1997, representatives of 122 countries gathered in Ottawa to sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. One week later, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines and its founder Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This past December 3rd, the fifth anniversary of the creation of the Ottawa Treaty (as it came to be known in honor of its birthplace) was celebrated around the world. To mark the event, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade organized an international symposium reviewing the impact the Convention has had in the past five years and discussing the challenges to be faced in the next half-decade.

One of the major challenges remaining is universalization of the Treaty, that is, getting those countries that have not yet signed the document to do so. The number that have joined the Convention has today risen to 146; that figure comprises most of the nations of the world. But a number of States, possessing some of the largest armies on Earth, have not adhered to the Ottawa Convention, including India and Pakistan (which find themselves in this regard in the company of countries like the United States, China and Israel).

The repudiation by India and Pakistan of a treaty that seeks to bring a measure of humanity to the conduct of war is an act that stands in sharp contradiction to the civilized history of our peoples, and one, unfortunately, that has recently become part of a familiar pattern of eschewing measures of multilateral cooperation that seek to combat common threats to the security of all human beings.

Once again, Delhi and Islamabad did not limit their opposition to an international treaty to simply not signing it; they further acted against its spirit and intent, actually using land mines in their most recent conflict and thereby going against the international moral consensus that has evolved against the use of such an abhorrent weapon. It is ironic that both nations are claiming to be key actors in the international war on terrorism, but the minefields they have newly created are causing more terror for their own people.

With human security and regional stability threatened by another confrontation between India and Pakistan, encouraging these two countries to accede to the Ottawa Treaty is a high priority for the land mines movement. Mines Action Canada (a coalition of non-governmental organizations comprising the Canadian branch of the International Campaign) used the fifth anniversary of the Convention as an opportunity to raise awareness of the mine situation on the subcontinent, by helping to organize a series of public lectures given by the heads of the Indian and Pakistani national anti-land mines campaigns. Dr. Faiz Mohammad Fayyaz, the coordinator of the Pakistan Campaign to Ban Land Mines and Dr. Balkrishna Kurvey, the coordinator of the Indian Campaign, started their joint cross-country speaking tour in Ottawa on the day of the anniversary.

As the presentations of these two activists revealed, the nature of the problem is the same in both countries. Civilians continue to fall prey to mines deployed in the previous conflicts. On top of that, the renewal of tensions between India and Pakistan last December sparked fresh mine-laying operations along the entire border. This concentration of new land mines is unprecedented in recent history in South Asia, and the numbers of people now living along the frontier is higher than at any time since Partition. The potential loss of life is therefore very high; casualties among women, children and even soldiers have been trickling in every week since the start of the hostilities. Yet there are many more injuries and deaths that go unreported.

The Indian and Pakistani national campaigns seeking to ban land mines are each trying to document the numbers of victims in their respective countries, but they encounter the same resource and personnel challenges. Securing funding for land mines work in both nations is no easy task when faced with competition with development needs and governmental suspicion of any kind of advocacy resembling arms control.

Public awareness of the problem among ordinary citizens needs to be raised as well, but this requires media exposure. Stories of women widowed by land mines being ostracized from their communities or of maimed children being forced to beg by their families do not reach the corridors of power in Delhi and Islamabad. What politicians do hear are the criticisms of international public opinion condemning the use of mines, on the one hand, and the voices of their military commanders extolling the strategic value of the weapons, on the other hand.

Given the current environment, then, activists in India and Pakistan trying to get their governments to join the land mines ban definitely need help from outside. A huge but until now relatively untapped source of potential allies can be found in the South Asian diaspora. As important as it is for the general public to learn more about the role of land mines in one of the world's most dangerous conflicts, Drs Kurvey and Fayyaz think it is even more crucial to recruit allies for their cause from the expatriate population living in North America, with its considerable wealth and influence.

There are many professionals in the South Asian community in North America who have returned to India or Pakistan to volunteer their skills for the betterment of their country of origin: doctors perform cataract surgery for the poor, high tech specialists have started highly successful companies that employ thousands of locals and even aspiring actors have brought their talents and ideas to the indigenous entertainment industry. Yet neither Dr Kurvey nor Dr. Fayyaz have so far met any non-resident Indians or Pakistanis working on the land mine problem in their countries.

Particularal as their origins are in two countries, with huge land mine problems, which refuse to sign the Ottawa Treaty for the exact same reason, Indo- and Pakistani-Canadians and Americans are uniquely positioned to help on this important issue. "Of course, we don't expect people to come and clear mines from the land", cautions Fayyaz. "This is dangerous work that must be done by trained professionals".

Where organizations like the Pakistan and Indian anti-land mine movements would most welcome the assistance of emigres is in capacity-building for their campaigns. In addition to financial and moral support for political lobbying and victim survey efforts, orthopaedic surgeons who can provide emergency care to those injured by land mines, medical engineers who design prosthetics and aids, physiotherapists who can help victims with rehabilitation, civil engineers who can help communities rebuild the infrastructure on land cleared of mines and social workers who can help amputees and indirect victims of land mine injury overcome the social stigma and accompanying economic hardship their condition brings, could lend a helping hand to the non-governmental organizations within the country land mines campaigns that work on these individual issues at the grassroots and community levels.

Whether or not that outside help comes, the resourcefulness of the local population must never be underestimated. As they have for decades, concerned, ordinary Indian and Pakistani citizens have realized the common human impact of the political disputes of their governments and have found ways around the military and diplomatic impasses to address it.

Due to visa restrictions, Drs Kurvey and Fayyaz have never been able to meet bilaterally to discuss the land mine issue, but they have done so in the context of regional meetings in Dhaka or Colombo, and have taken every opportunity at international meetings of the other States parties to the Convention to exchange data and share ideas. Especially now that Bangladesh has ratified the Ottawa treaty and Sri Lanka has stopped using the weapon, discussions are intensifying for organizing a network of all the South Asian country campaigns to put pressure on India and Pakistan to join the ban.

Indians and Pakistanis are working together on other common problems. Nuclear weapons are seen as a much larger threat to human security on the subcontinent than land mines, so groups that advocate on the nuclear question attract much higher levels of general awareness, governmental funding and public donations in both countries.

However, the land mines campaign has enjoyed a success not seen by almost any other world cause. The extremely short period of time in which the Ottawa Treaty came into force, and in which the moral repugnance toward using land mines as a weapon has become a matter of custom for most of the armies and armed groups of the world, is unprecedented in the history of international law and diplomacy.

This success was due to the intense commitment of civil society to rid the planet of these indiscriminate killers. Thus, the credibility that the land mines movement now enjoys can be used to lend support to other issues. Individual country campaigns have written letters expressing solidarity with other groups advocating for peace and human security matters, and the Indian and Pakistani Campaigns are eager to share their experiences in achieving the land mines ban with their colleagues in the anti-nuclear camp.

Another related issue that has captured the attention of the land mines community is the devastation caused by weapons that have a similar effect to anti-personnel mines, such as explosive remnants of war, including cluster bombs. The latter made news during last year's Afghan conflict: the Americans, trying to mitigate the collateral damage to Afghan civilians caused by their revenge against the Taliban for the September 11 attacks, had started air-dropping food parcels for the populace. The trouble is, the bright yellow packaging made these packets closely resemble the murderous cluster bombs that the US army had dropped by air to completely wipe out any trace of Taliban fighters over huge swathes of land.

Cluster bombs are made up of hundreds of small submunitions, called bomblets, covered in a metal shell. When the canister is released from an airplane, ground artillery or missile, the casing falls apart in mid-air and releases the bomblets, which are then supposed to detonate on contact with the ground or whatever human target they fall upon. They are designed to cover a wide area, which renders them ideal for killing large formations of enemy soldiers; however, their poor ability to target selectively practically ensures that unintended victims will be hit as well.

Cluster bomblets also have a high failure rate; a large percentage of them, sometimes as high as thirty percent, do not do what they are supposed to. These unexploded bomblets then lie dormant on or under the soil, and when the unsuspecting footfall of a child or civilian running to retrieve a packet of American peanut butter makes contact with them, they explode and cause injury and death in a manner similar to that caused by an anti-personnel land mine.

More and more quarters are recognizing this weapon to have humanitarian consequences as grave as that of land mines and there is growing support in the international community for a moratorium on their use. Unfortunately, there is no global treaty regulating cluster bombs. Other moves are afoot to rehabilitate cluster devices, that is, to correct the problems in design that cause a failure to explode.

But even if the technical fixes were to be made to this armament, there is no provision in international law that requires a country to replace its existing arsenals of a weapon when a more humane version of that weapon is produced. In the meanwhile, the simple, but deadly, clusters are still being used by nations with the most technologically advanced armed forces. The Americans have openly admitted to using this weapon in Afghanistan and plan to continue doing so. Canada has publicly stated its intention to ban this arm eventually, but is silent on the possibility of cluster bombs being deployed in joint military operations with the United States.

The contributions of people of Indian and Pakistani origin to foreign policy in North America have traditionally been limited to matters of trade and investment in the subcontinent. Our voices have been absent, though, from debates on broader questions of the role Canada and the United States should play internationally; as immigrants with roots in the developing world, do we want our adopted country to champion the unique concerns of the underprivileged peoples of the planet, or do we want to further ensconce ourselves in the increasingly isolated circle of the sole superpower?

As citizens of the West, are we prepared to unquestioningly help America protect its interests by what so ever means it chooses? Or, as people with ties to India and Pakistan, are we willing to turn a blind eye when those countries empower themselves, through methods that threaten others, in the name of rectifying the imbalances of colonialism?

The land mines issue offers our community an opportunity for input in this regard: as North Americans, we can offer our praise for Canada's work on bringing the land mine treaty to fruition and we can encourage Washington to genuinely demonstrate its alleged commitment to the security of innocent people around the world by rejecting the use of other indiscriminate weapons like cluster bombs; as expatriates, we have the power to influence the governments of India and Pakistan as well, to support the humanitarian motivation behind banning land mines, irrespective of the political disputes between the two countries; and, as two peoples who inherited the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, persons of Indian and Pakistani descent everywhere have the moral authority to do their part in ensuring that the seeds planted by the societies in which they live are as pure as the trees they desire; this includes upholding the view that evil means of waging war, like using land mines, do not justify the ends of war.

Copyright ©2003 Tara Ashtakala. About The Author