US Urges Agreement to Restrict Deadly Anti-Vehicle Mine Use

, WASHINGTON: Mines designed to explode when a vehicle passes over them continue to maim and kill innocents around the world long after conflicts have ended, and they pose a particular problem for international relief organizations. 
 
No existing international treaty satisfactorily addresses either the long-lived nature of these hidden anti-vehicle killers or detection measures for them, since they contain little metal. These types of mines can pose just as much of a threat to civilians as anti-personnel land mines (APL). The anti-vehicle mines also are not covered by the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning APL. 
 
For this reason, the United States and other supportive nations in 2001 proposed negotiating a protocol agreement tied to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, also known as the CCW. It is designed to regulate the use of conventional weapons that indiscriminately harm civilians. 
 
The United States has been working with other nations for the past year in an attempt to achieve consensus on a text for an anti-vehicle mines protocol that could be endorsed during the November Review Conference on the CCW in Geneva, Switzerland. A State Department fact sheet, issued November 3, said the document under negotiation would complement an existing 1996 CCW Amended Mines Protocol regulating the use of land mines, booby-traps and other similar devices. 
 
Anti-Vehicle Mines Disrupt Peacekeeping, Humanitarian Relief 
 
The purpose of the effort is to reduce the impact of these mines, which are sometimes referred to as