Secular Café: Why Landmines Should be Banned

Secular Café For serious discussion of politics, political news, policy, political theory and economics and events happening round the world

Why Landmines Should be Banned Aug 17th 2012, 17:20 link Quote: The last clothes that 6-year-old Tarik Bijelic wore hang on a line in his yard: a red "Miami" basketball jersey, a pair of gray pants, blue size 2 sneakers. The blood has been washed off. But the jersey carries the mark of tragedy: a long incision between the "i" and the "a" where doctors tried to get to the boy's shattered chest. Tarik was hit by a land mine last week as he scavenged in the forest for firewood to help his family make ends meet. He died in his father's arms. Under an international treaty, Bosnia was supposed to be free of mines by 2009. Instead, it has quietly obtained another decade to clear the estimated 1,300 remaining square kilometers (500 square miles) of mine fields. In the 16 years since Bosnia's three-year war ended, mines have killed 591 people. So far this year, seven people have been killed and 3 maimed. Tarik had been looking forward to starting school wearing a backpack stamped with his favorite cartoon character. Instead, he became his village's sixth land-mine victim — the casualty of a war that ended a decade before he was born. Living next to mine fields is accepted as a fact of life here. The village was a front line during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and when the residents returned to their homes in 1996, they found their houses devastated, surrounded by mine fields. The Bijelic family, like many others in the village, makes a living by selling wood from nearby forests, ignoring signs bearing a white skull and the warning "Attention Mines."

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at blogtrottr.com. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions