Impact of the Ottowa Treaty Impact of Ottawa Treaty (60086) The use of lan

Some accounts place the origin of land mines in China in the third century A.D. In ancient Rome and Medieval Europe buried spikes were used in warfare. The first modern subsurface, fused, high-explosive anti-personnel landmines were created by Imperial Germany in 1912 and were soon copied by all the combatants of World War I.

Mines have been used frequently in conflicts throughout the world in the 20th and 21st centuries because they can deter invaders and channel the enemy into pre-planned fire zones. They are designed to be triggered by a variety of mechanisms, which includes pressure, movement, sound, magetism, or vibration. They can be buried by trained engineers, fired by artillery, ejected from cruise missiles or dropped from airplanes or helicopters.

The statistics reveal the depth and extent of the problem. "Landmines have killed or maimed one million people since 1975" (Bourrie 2003). After twenty years of war, Cambodia remains one of the world's most heavily mined areas. As many as 150 to 300 people a mont

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e it would not be hard to disguise stockpiles of these weapons. Therefore once again the treaty sounds better than it actually may work in practice. A final problem is the murky relationship between countries accepting and those rejecting the ban on landmines when they are allies. Canada had a clause entered into the agreement that permitted signatories of the treaty to engage in military action with non-signing nations. The reason became clear after the invasion of Afghanistan, when Canada acceded to U.S. insistence that a jointly operated military base be surrounded by landmines. When one keeps in mind the fact that much of the impetus for this international agreement came from that country, the hypocrisy is rank. The slow, tedious, dangerous, and expensive efforts to remove mines and unexploded ordinance from an area are known as mine action programs. Mines don't just kill and maim their victims. They also have a great effect on land use, public health issues, and even national priorities. Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, with up to 50% of the nation's land potentially affected. Although there have been hundreds of thousands of mines removed and destroyed, as well as a declining rate of acci
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2194
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)