Landmines never leave the battlefield

The history of man is one of aggression. This could have begun after man learned to gather food and became a hunter: you don’t have to kill berries, or the leaves of plants. You do have to kill animals in order to eat them. And eat or die is the law of nature.

Then man discovered that at the end of a day’s work it was somewhat relaxing to work with nature, sowing seeds, setting our plants and seeing things flourish and grow. Using his ingenuity, he erected fences and marked his livestock (for he found he also had to protect what was his). With this husbandry came the growth of civilisation and all the problems and joys associated with it. And in the process the weaponry he used advanced as well, from a single arrow shot from a bow, to the Kalashnikov rapid fire AK47 rifle of today.

I don’t know who it was who thought of packing explosives inside a metal casing and then connecting it to a trigger mechanism to set it off. Now men drop them from the sky, from above and below the surface of the sea, and in many other ways to seed planet earth with their deadly menace.

The most devilish and indiscriminate of these is the landmine. Today, according to the UNICEF pamphlet in our local library in Morrinsville, there is one landmine for every 20 children around the world. They’re produced for as little as $3, and remain active for decades. They’re extremely difficult to detect and cost between $300-$1,000 to remove. Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country, with 10-15 million units covering their land. Angola is next in line, then comes Cambodia, with one in every 230 Cambodian’s an amputee. Landmines continue to claim about 300 victims each month.

No matter where your caravan might rest as you travel this world, somewhere close by there’s some child, teenager, man or woman, crippled, hurt or deformed. False limbs of a sort will enable them to shuffle through each day but it’s not the same as having their own limbs, is it?

A number of years ago a young woman in Canada wrote a song which struck a blow at the heart of all this madness. I forget her name, but not the title of the song, ‘Universal Soldier,’ and I remember one line that went something like:

If every soldier refused to fight, all wars would end.

More people are adding their note of protest now. I’d like to add my protest with this suggestion: each person greedy for wealth who shuts their mind to horror and their heart from mercy, and orders landmines to be laid – along with those who paid for them and those who bury them in the ground – should take their own children to test these landmines. They could then pick up the pieces, take them home and for those still alive, fit them with artificial limbs. Perhaps then they would see the madness of their work…

Dennis Crompton © 1997

“Universal Soldier” is a song written and recorded by Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. The song was originally released on Sainte-Marie’s debut album It’s My Way! in 1964. “Universal Soldier” was not a popular hit at the time of its release, but it did garner attention within the contemporary folk music community. Sainte-Marie said of the song: “I wrote ‘Universal Soldier’ in the basement of The Purple Onion coffee house in Toronto in the early sixties. It’s about individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal thinking kills us all.” (from Wikipedia)