Economic social and ecological consequences

From Wiki Against Mines

Land mines, cluster bombs and uranium munition are classified as a war necessary by war leading Countries. These weapons have, especially after the war, a huge impact to the local population. They seem to demoralize equally to the victors and the vanquished. The results are to health problems and urban and economic impairments.

Health impairments and mutilation

Land mines and cluster bombs and depleted uranium bombs also act against the civil society, which must accommodate a large number of seriously injured people. Medical care and social rehabilitation is often not sufficiently available. The result: millions of people mutilated by war episodes or impaired, need to spend their lives in inhumane conditions.

The high number of mine victims burdened the healthcare system. Some hospitals lack essential things. Often the roads are in bad conditions and the next hospital is very far. For example, in Cambodia 31% of victims die before they have seen a doctor, whom are children affected three times more than adults.

The victims come through their misfortune to be stepped on a mine, in addition to significant financial exposure. The amputation rate is for example in Cambodia 100 times higher than in Europe and the USA. Every 236th Population is amputated. The prostheses have every six to twelve months to be replaced. In adults every three to five years and in children because their growth. The new prostheses and related operations pollute the victim for a lifetime.

More than 20,000 people are injured or killed each year by landmines and unexploded ordnance explosions. The United Nations estimates that every third or fourth victim is a child. Children are especially vulnerable because they can not read or recognize warning signs. But they are also more affected, because injuries heal in adults, children often have fatal consequences. A child loses his limbs by a mine, it takes six to nine months a new prosthesis that can be adapted to the growing body needs. Children are often hit by mines, because they consider them as toys. 85% of mine victims are children which died on the way to hospital. Children, when they are injured by mines, often cant efford going to school anymore. They have no way out of poverty to come.

The psychological consequences are frightening. 25% of the victims perceive their appearance as intolerable. Many are hidden by relatives, because disabled people are regarded as "the shame of the family. " Victims often lose their jobs and the respect of others. The injury site as a nursing care a great burden on the communities dar. After further operations occurs, a phantom pain, a life-long pain in a limb that is no longer 10 is present.

The "Miss Landmine" project held each year Schöhnheitswettbewerb for women who were mutilated by a mine.

Urban impairments

The battlefields of the world will be devastated for years, contaminated by radiation and by residual munitions left lying around into dangerous debris fields. Stale by landmines, cluster bombs and other explosive remnants of war and radioactive uranium munitions (since the first Gulf War in 1991) is almost the whole of southern Iraq contaminated. The population is suffering serious illnesses and disabilities. In Cambodia, the mines are laid precisely there where the land is most fertile. 50% of agricultural land are not available in this way and that with a population in which 71% are employed in agriculture. Also, irrigation systems by mining is no longer usable. Public institutions like schools are mined as well as roads. As a result, some parts of the country are not receiving food. Sometimes cities are surrounded by mines. The city of Luena in Angola is within a mine belt, which extends into the city.

economic & agricaulture impairments

The mining has fatal economic consequences. Prevent the weapons for years that a country is allowed to settle back agriculture to be operated, working and living spaces can be used. People have to starve in a rich environment of agriculture, the few available areas are ecologically destroyed. This often can be a part of the fields no longer be ordered. Food and forestry production are going back. Due to the poverty of the population in some countries, people still cultivate on these mined areas. The results are many people which are injured or killed. This problem arises particularly in poor countries where food is scarce. Reconstruction after war is delayed. Refugees who have left their country because of war, can not return.