BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

16/01/2007

Belarus plans to destroy land mine stocks delayed

Minsk - Belarusian plans to destroy millions of land mines have been delayed owing to a lack of cash, the Belapan news agency reported Tuesday.

Belarus is a member of the Ottowa Covention, a treaty group obliging signatories to destroy their stocks of land mines, starting in March 2004.

A European Union-sponsored tender to collect and render safe four million of the former Soviet republic's land mines failed to attract bidders, stalling Belarusian plans to eliminate roughly half of its land mine stocks by the end of 2008, said Sergei Luchin, a Belarus engineer troops spokesman.

The EU offered the equivalent of 3.9 million dollars for the project. Brussels in December upped the number to the equivalent of 5.2 million dollars, but the date of the next tender has not been set, Luchin said.

'The delay is not the fault of the Belarusian side,' he said.

More than 7.5 million anti-personnel land mines are believed to be held in Belarusian army munitions dumps - the seventh largest such stockpile in the world.

More than four million are PFM-1 mines, often called 'dragons' teeth' for their wedge shape, and the fact that they can be dumped in an area by aircraft.

Dragons' tooth mines are designed to injure rather than kill by blowing off a victim's hand or foot. They are responsible for the maiming of thousands of Afghan children, who sometimes pick up the plastic mines thinking they are toys.

Limited disarmament and cultural exchange programmes form the bulk of relations between the EU and Belarus, whose authoritarian leader President Aleksander Lukashenko is a pariah in most developed nations.

c 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Source:

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/news/article_1247156.php/Belarus_plans_to_destroy_land_mine_stocks_delayed

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