Magazine Issue 3 - Spring 1997
Landmines - Hidden and Deadly

"Queen of Hearts", "Loose cannon" or unwanted princess - nevertheless she drew the world's attention to an issue that some groups such as The UK Working Group on Landmines (UK WGLM) have been campaigning on for years: the production, stockpiling and sale of landmines. Xanthe Bevis finds out that as the voice calling for a global ban gets louder, there are still loopholes for the industry to carry on its deadly trade ...

Is it personnel?
Campaigners have had particular difficulty when calling for a ban on landmines with the question of definition - NATO, the UN, national governments and arms manufacturers don't always classify weapons the same way. Whether or not a landmine is designated anti-personnel (AP) or anti-tank (usually 5 times bigger) has been crucial: it has been easier to create "moral outrage" about AP mines under the terms of international humanitarian law about the consequence of weapons on civilians. Most arms manufacturers probably realise that within the next few years there will be an outright ban on the manufacture of AP landmines in the "western" world, with around 80 states due to be signing a treaty to that effect in Ottawa at the end of the year.

But some landmines not designed or marketed as AP have an equally devastating effect on their victims. If one sort is banned, manufacturers can redesign or redefine their product as being the sort which isn't banned. The UK WGLM - a coalition of over 40 organisations - has recently published a detailed report on British landmine manufacture. A draft of the report was sent to all the companies mentioned to give them the opportunity to comment or correct errors and omissions, on the assumption that if they didn't reply by the middle of August last year, they had nothing to add.

Some companies replied and some didn't. The managing director of ML Aviation Co Ltd (664 Ajax Avenue, Slough, Berks. SL1 4BQ), R.C. Bolter told the UK WGLM in a letter of 16th August last year that, "There are a number of inaccuracies in your report, and I would just like to point out that a large proportion of the equipment produced by this company is used by the British Armed Forces to ensure the security of the Nation - much of it in a defensive role." But unfortunately it seems Mr Bolter forget to mention what these inaccuracies were, so the UK WGLM were unable to revise text which linked his organisation's subsidary, M L Aviation Company Ltd (same address) with the production of carriage and release technology used in the HADES and JP233 delivery system for the HB876.

The HB876, a particular bone of contention for the UK WGLM, is a collaboration between a number of leading arms and related technology manufacturers: other companies whose technology is said to feature in the HB876 mine are Hunting Engineering Ltd (Reddings Wood, Ampthill, Bedford, part of the Hunting Group), Irvin Great Britain Ltd (Icknield Way, Letchworth, Herts, also part of the Hunting Group), Ferranti Instrumentation Ltd, Venture Technology Ltd and Royal Ordnance plc.

The 1980 UN Inhumane Weapons Convention says that an AP is "a mine primarily designed to be exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons". It was the British government who pushed for the insertion of the word "primarily" - thus providing a loophole for the arms industry.

The HB876 is just the sort of weapon has defied classification as an AP mine and slipped through the net of international law. The official line from the British government has been, "It is not classed as an anti-personnel landmine". David Davis MP has said in his capacity as Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs that the HB8876 is "designed specifically to destroy military airfields and prevent repair. Not the place where you would expect to find ordinary civilians". But there's no guarantee that airfields are the only place that such a weapon would be used: Ferranti's own advertising literature apparently states that the "HB876 can be used wherever there is a concentration of troops or vehicles in the open". "If anyone went up and touched it, it would go off," Ferranti's own marketing man told The Observer in 1995. More menacing still is the reference to "multiple 'P-charge' fragments for disabling personnel and soft-skinned targets", also in the advertising literature. Say the UK WGLM, "It is surprising to learn that, for the Ministry of Defence, the promotional literature issued by Ferranti ... is 'a matter for the company', meaning, one assumes, that the MoD ignores what a company says about the weapons it produces."

If landmines such as the HB876 are to be defined by governments as not being AP, then this will increase the potential for manufacturers to state that the primary purpose of a mine is something other than the destruction of human life, even if that is a possible effect of it, in order to circumvent any legislation - so they can carry on making their profits.

Facts and Figures
  • Around 1000 to 2000 people are killed or maimed by landmines every month - usually civilians.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross has estimated that around 100 million landmines are lying in wait somewhere in the world; communities trying to rebuild themselves after conflict are hampered by the fact that acres of land around them is often either fenced off or potentially lethal; many minefields are unmapped.
  • Those communities that can't afford to lose farmland that may be a minefield, or have no idea where mines have been planted, have an increasing population of amputees (about 1 in 236 people in Cambodia for example)
  • A further 100 million of these relatively cheap weapons are said to be stockpiled.
  • 5-10 million landmines are produced every year.

Not so Smart - Death into the next century
Britain has now agreed a moratorium on the export of their definition of AP landmines, but the production, assembly, import and use of all other landmines by Britain, except non-detectable AP landmines, is still permitted. The British Government has been undermining steps to restrain landmine production with international law by stressing that there is a new type of landmine around containing complex fuse technology that causes the mine to self-destruct after a given period of time - aka the "smart" mine. It can be no coincidence that British industry has the expertise to specialise in the production and development of "smart-mine" fuse technology, although as yet they are only supposed to be manufactured in the US and Italy and they are included in the British export ban. It looks as if the government has restarted its "Mines into the Next Century" programme (MINX), which is likely to focus on self-destruct technology. However, so far there has been no conclusive evidence available to show just how reliable such self-destruct mines would be. The introduction of self-destruct landmines onto the agenda has provided the government with a useful distraction in international negotiation, while meanwhile the arms industry can exploit the opportunity to develop more lethal technology in the name of progress.

Report on British Landmines", Nov. 1996. Available from UK Working Group on Landmines, 601 Holloway Road, London N19 4DJ Tel/Fax: 01296 632056. Price £3.

Other sources:
The Independent 6th June 1994
Defence Manufacturers Association List of Member Companies, March 1995, p. 47
The Guardian 3rd Oct. 1995,
The Observer 9th July 1995,
CAAT, World Vision Canada, UK Working Group on Landmines' Briefing Papers, "UK blocks progress towards anti-personnel mine ban", "Britain's HB876 landmine", 1996.

Further reading:
"Landmines: a deadly legacy", 1993. Human Rights Watch ".
Double Dipping
Landmines require expensive operations to be cleared from land - the government spent about a billion pounds on clearing up Kuwait after the Oil War with Iraq - so it is hardly surprising that it seems that some arms manufacturers such as British Ordnance should now be branching out into mine clearance. In the summer of 1994 there was scandal when it was discovered that the United Nations awarded a contract worth £3.3m to a consortium that included Royal Ordnance, Lonrho and the South African firm, Mechem. It has been pointed out that Mechem were involved with supplying mines to the Mozambique National Resistance Movement - the UN contract was to clear mines from 2000 km of Mozambique roads. This practice is known by campaigners against it as "double-dipping", as effectively the land mine manufacturer gets paid twice - once to construct the mines and once to deconstruct the mines. UN officials have now said that it is their view that "no arms producer can ever again receive a UN mine clearance contract." A spokesperson from Human Rights Watch's Arms Project has said, "Double-dipping is a problem because it sends the message that making mines is OK as long as you clear them up afterwards. But the truth is that more mines are laid than are ever picked up." In any case there are some types made of plastic that are virtually impossible to detect.