Rights groups have expressed alarm and warned of a slippery slope of again embracing one of the world’s most treacherous weapons, after five European countries said they intend to withdraw from the international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines.
In announcing their plans earlier this year, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all pointed to the escalating military threat from Russia. In mid-April, Latvia’s parliament became the first to formally back the idea, after lawmakers voted to pull out of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which bans the use, production and stockpiling of landmines designed for use against humans.
Campaigners described the decisions – the first reversals among its more than 165 signatories – as a shocking step backwards.
“It feels like a punch to the face,” said Zoran Ješić, who lost his right leg to a landmine in Bosnia and now works with UDAS, a Bosnian organisation that supports landmine survivors. “Antipersonnel landmines do horrible things to innocent people. They belong to a small group of weapons, including chemical and biological weapons, that are so abhorrent they must never be used again.”
Ješić was a 21-year-old soldier for the Serb army when he stepped on a mine in a forest, leaving him grappling with a lifetime of trauma and disability. “As I later heard, it was our mine,” said Ješić. “The point is that when you put a mine in the ground, you never know what will happen. Will it wait for your soldiers, your civilians or the enemies? Usually, it hurts your people.”
His view is backed up by statistics. Each year between 70% and 85% of those who are killed or injured by landmines around the world are civilians. Nearly half of these victims are children, hinting at the indiscriminate nature of these weapons.
Campaigners had long assumed that there was little probability of countries reversing their stances against landmines, said Alma Taslidžan of Humanity & Inclusion, which works to help disabled and vulnerable people around the world. “We really thought this kind of movement could never happen with landmines, because who wants landmines?”
Instead her organisation and many others have been left scrambling to again warn of the overwhelming dangers of these weapons.
“This is really a tipping point for us,” said Taslidžan. “It’s not only about landmines. It is about the norms that are written for the situation of wartimes – we’re afraid this is going to create a wave of weakening the international humanitarian law that has the first obligation to protect civilians.”
The first public hint of the reversals came in March, when the defence ministers of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland published a joint statement explaining their interest in leaving the treaty.
“Military threats to Nato member states bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased,” the statement noted. “With this decision, we are sending a clear message: our countries are prepared and can use every necessary measure to defend our security needs.”
Russia, which is not a signatory to the 1997 treaty, has used landmines extensively since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in-turn helping to make the country the most heavily mined in the world.
Soon after, Finland, whose shared border with Russia runs for more than 800 miles, joined the list of countries threatening to leave the treaty. Doing so, the country’s prime minister, Petteri Orpo, told reporters, would give the country “the possibility to prepare for the changes in the security environment in a more versatile way”.
Taslidžan stressed that there was little argument about the threat the five Nato countries were facing. “The security situation is real, it is a problem,” she said. “But choosing the most indiscriminate weapon amongst all to say that you are going to defend your country, that is wrong. Security cannot be built on a weapon that kills indiscriminately, that remains in the ground long after the conflict has ended and that specifically maims civilians.”
Some of these countries’ readiness to embrace these long-banned weapons was likely due to misinformation that had circulated about “smart landmines” capable of curtailing civilian harms, she said. “It’s just bizarre information. There is not a smart landmine that can think for itself and say ‘Oh oh, civilians, we won’t explode now.’”
While some landmines come with self-destruct mechanisms that enable them to detonate after a set period of time, campaigners have pointed out that they remain incapable of distinguishing between civilians and soldiers and that malfunction rates can run as high as 10%, meaning a significant number may fail to destroy on command.
At the International Committee of the Red Cross, the potential reversals were being seen as “extremely alarming,” said Maya Brehm, the legal adviser for the organisation’s unit focused on arms and conduct of hostilities.
“From our perspective – and this is also a perspective shared by military authorities – whatever limited military value anti-personnel mines may still have in today’s conflicts, it is vastly outweighed by the appalling and long-lasting humanitarian consequences,” said Brehm.
The reversals come at a critical moment. Conflicts in Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine have led to an uptick in the number of landmine victims, while funding cuts threatened by US president Donald Trump’s administration have left mine-clearance projects around the world facing uncertainty.
Brehm worried that the withdrawals could set a wider precedent by suggesting that states could adopt rules in times of peace and later abandon these rules in times of conflict. “These treaties are for the protection of people, they’re humanitarian treaties. They are meant to be upheld at the darkest of times, when civilians depend on their protection for their very survival.”
The concern was echoed by Norway’s foreign affairs minister, Espen Barth Eide, in explaining why the country, which also borders Russia, was opting to remain in the treaty.
“This particular decision [by Finland] is something we regret,” he told Reuters this month. “If we start weakening our commitment, it makes it easier for warring factions around the world to use these weapons again, because it reduces the stigma.”
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where conflict in the early 1990s left behind an estimated 3 million unexploded landmines – amounting to about 152 mines per square mile – landmines continue to be a threat for many, said Ješić from the Bosnian organisation that provides support to landmine victims.
“We’re not even close to having a land free of mines,” he added. “This is not just something that you can put in the ground and then you take it out when the war finishes.”
As a result, three decades after the factions had put down their weapons, the lingering landmines had perpetuated the violence, killing and injuring hundreds across the country.
Ješić described it as a cautionary tale for any country thinking about scattering these weapons across their lands. “Tens of decades will probably be needed to clear the land of mines,” he said. “And in the meantime, who knows how many civilians will be killed and hurt by this terrible weapon.”
