By Sandra
Prufer, Translation by Stefan Meuser Rotary International News
3 May 2007
They are buried in fields,
roads, and footpaths. In more than 70 countries, land mines – remnants of
forgotten conflicts – have become slow-motion weapons of mass destruction.
According to the United
Nations, between 15,000 to 20,000 people are maimed or killed by mines every
year. More than a fifth of the victims are children. Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Angola, and Iraq are the most affected countries. In Afghanistan alone, an
estimated 10 million mines and other ordnance are hidden in the ground.
Convinced that it required
more than words to fight the problem of land mines, Rotarians from Switzerland
and Germany started MINE-EX, a project to help victims of mines and to work for
a worldwide ban of the terrible weapons. (Learn more at www.mine-ex.ch and www.mine-ex-rotary.de).
MINE-EX is based on the initiative of Swiss Rotarian Hans Stirnemann, who
worked as a surgeon for the International Red Cross in Asia and Africa in the
1990s. Devastated by the suffering he saw caused by the equally cheap and
devilish devices, he took action. “I can still see these people, their torn-off
limbs and tormented bodies, silently and desperately looking to me, the doctor,
for help. And there was not much I could do,” remembers Stirnemann. “That’s
when I learned to hate these weapons.”
“Anti-personnel mines are
not designed to kill people, but to seriously injure and to permanently
disable,” says Gerhard Selmayr, MINE-EX chair.
The organization pursues
four goals:
1. Medical and orthopedic
care of mine victims (production and fitting of implants, artificial limbs, and
so forth)
2. Training of local prosthesis technicians
3. Support of activities for a worldwide ban of the production and distribution
of anti-personnel mines
4. Support for the removal of land mines
Since 1997, MINE-EX has
worked closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to
equip thousands of injured people with artificial limbs and to train local
technicians – many of them amputees themselves. While the Swiss Rotarians concentrate
their work in Cambodia, German Rotarians provide help in Georgia and Central
Asia.
“Wissen gegen Minen”
(Knowledge against Mines) is another association fighting against land
mines. This group, also supported by Rotarians, concentrates on knowledge
transfer, which they do by using the Internet to teach mine removal methods. One
focus of the organization is to provide information in regional languages. In
cooperation with the Institute of Technology in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for
instance, the information is distributed in the country’s main language, Khmer.
Despite extensive mine
removal programs, says Selmayr, it will take decades to clean up the soil in
war and post-war regions, a tedious – and dangerous – task carried out with
metal detectors, search dogs, and removal devices. There is a lot of work
waiting for MINE-EX.
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