Land Mine Casualties Jump 75% as Funding for Their Removal Declines
Source: New York Times
Despite a global treaty that bans land mines, casualties from those weapons and other unexploded munitions lurking in current and past war zones rose sharply last year to the highest point in a decade, a monitoring group said Tuesday in its annual report.
The group, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, also said that financial contributions toward efforts to remove land mines plunged by nearly a quarter last year. It was the third consecutive annual decline in funding, imperiling a pledge by treaty members to complete mine clearance by 2025.
In another setback to the treaty’s goals, the number of countries and areas where land mines are known to exist rose to 64 last year, from 61 in 2014, the report said. It attributed the increase to the use of antipersonnel mines in Nigeria, including improvised mines, and to new data on mines that had already been present in Palau and Mozambique.
The casualty increase was primarily from the armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, according to the report, which said better availability of data on victims was also a factor.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/world/land-mine-casualties-annual-report.html?_r=0
