Improvised explosive devices have killed hundreds [?] of NATO soldiers - including Canadians - in Afghanistan. They have also been used with devastating effect against American and coalition forces in Iraq. As IEDs are, for all practical purposes, anti-personnel land mines, banned by most countries since the Ottawa Convention of 1997, how is it that there has been no outcry from the non-governmental organizations that spearheaded the 1997 convention against their recent use?..
...IEDs, particularly victim-activated ones, can be exploded by anyone - a child, a pregnant women, a donkey or a soldier. They do not discriminate, and many of the 25,000 civilians killed worldwide each year by mine strikes are, in fact, killed by IEDs.
So where are the NGOs? It was the NGOs, notably the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, that mobilized public support for the Ottawa Convention. It was politicians such as Lloyd Axworthy, Canada's foreign affairs minister under Jean Chrétien, who used the pressure created by a very large coalition of NGOs to secure the ban on anti-personnel mines. This was a major achievement, one that has bound 155 nations not to employ, stockpile, produce or transfer land mines and, indeed, to destroy their stockpiles. When Pakistan suggested earlier this year that it might mine its border with Afghanistan to prevent (or slow) infiltration of Taliban insurgents into Afghanistan, there were quick protests from NGOs and from nations such as Canada. That these border measures could have taken some pressure off Canadian troops in Kandahar did not appear to matter - to the Department of Foreign Affairs, mines are worse than dead Canadians, or so it seemed. No one, however, is speaking out against the use of IEDs by terrorists in Afghanistan or Iraq...
IEDs are so similar to land mines in their use and effects that only those who split hairs can argue they ought not to be banned. The Taliban insurgents who have wreaked havoc in Kandahar province might not be embarrassed into stopping their use of IEDs if the NGOs took the field against them, but at least the NGOs could claim they were being consistent. The widespread sense that anti-American or anti-capitalist sentiments, rather than humanitarian motives, drive them today [emphasis added] might be dispelled. That would be useful. And if, by chance, the Taliban felt obliged to follow their 1998 statements that land-mine use was against Islam, the effects might be profound in Afghanistan.
Will the NGOs at last speak out against IEDs?
) can figure out the EN doesn't play by conventional rules.
