Published by The Daily Signal
By Ted Bromund
Every year, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) publishes a report on the number of casualties caused by land mines—or so it says.
And every year, gullible journalists take the report’s headline figure at face value.
But this year, the worst offender is a particularly prestigious outlet: The New York Times, whose Editorial Board authored a column titled, “Why Do Land Mines Still Kill So Many?”
The Gray Lady writes:
The world is rolling backward, and at a disturbingly faster pace, in the struggle to limit carnage from land mines and other booby-trap explosives. The most recent numbers, covering 2016, are appalling. Known casualties that year came to 8,605, including 2,089 deaths… .
According to the Times, 8,605 people were injured or killed in 2016 by land mines and “other booby-trap explosives.”
Well, 8,605 is the ICBL’s headline figure, no doubt about that. But were all those people actually injured or killed by land mines?
Absolutely not.
If you turn to page 57 of the ICBL’s report, you’ll find that only 732 people were injured or killed by an anti-personnel land mine, another 495 by an anti-vehicle mine, and another 538 by an “unspecified” mine.
That’s 1,765 people, not 8,605.
The Times says that casualties to land mines are rising. But the ICBL’s report says that in 2015, 2,002 people were injured or killed by these kinds of mines. So casualties are actually down by 237, not up.
You’d think this would be a cause for modest celebration—but no, apparently it’s not.
True, measuring casualty trends by using the latest ICBL press release is a fool’s errand, because its own reported numbers fluctuate. A lot.
Last year, the ICBL asserted that 2015 saw 6,461 casualties. Now, it says that 2015 had 6,967 casualties.
I don’t object to updating these figures over time as better information becomes available, but comparing this year’s casualties to last year’s based on the latest ICBL report is not going to produce reliable calculations.
The Times’ Obsession With Cluster Bombs
The Times goes on to claim that “[o]ne subset of the menace, cluster munitions, is singularly vicious. … All too often, they fail to detonate right away and thus become time bombs…. Cluster munitions alone caused 971 known casualties in 2016.”
Clearly, the Times asserts that dud cluster bombs are responsible for those casualties.
But the ICBL’s report contradicts this claim, saying that the number of people killed and injured by dud cluster munitions was 114—not 971. The 971 figure includes the people who were directly and immediately killed by cluster munitions that exploded on impact, mostly dropped by the Syrian Air Force. That’s completely different from dud munitions.
The Times’ fixation on cluster munitions is puzzling to me. I don’t see how being killed by a cluster bomb is any worse than being killed by a 500-lb bomb. In fact, the bigger bomb would probably cause more damage, and casualties, than the smaller ones.
Let’s go back to those 8,605 casualties. Where does the Times get that number from?
Well, what the ICBL has done is the same thing they do every year: combine all land mine casualties together with all casualties from improvised explosive devices and all explosive leftovers (known as “explosive remnants of war”).
And then, journalists come along and report that all those casualties were caused by land mines.
Don’t believe me? Well, it happened in 2014. And in 2015. And in 2016.
Now, it’s true that some improvised explosive devices do qualify, legally, as land mines. But that’s not what caused the big jump in 2016 casualties, when casualties from improvised explosive devices increased by only 257.
The casualty increase came almost entirely from the “Unknown mine/explosive remnants of war item” category, which leapt from 1,410 in 2015 to 3,843 in 2016.
We can’t say whether these casualties were caused by land mines and, in fact, it’s likely that most of them were caused by dud bombs, not land mines at all, as almost all these casualties came in Yemen and Libya. Both of those countries saw heavy fighting in 2016.
The Times then moans that “perhaps the saddest part of all this is that for well over a decade the world seemed to have gotten a grip on what are referred to generically as the ‘explosive remnants of war,’” for which it thanks a 1999 treaty banning victim-activated anti-personnel land mines.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. That 1999 treaty isn’t about explosive remnants of war. It’s about anti-personnel land mines only. If casualties from explosive remnants of war are going up (and they seem to be), it’s got nothing to do with the treaty.
There is, however, an explosive remnants of war protocol, adopted in 2003. Too bad the anti-land mine activists hate the process that produced it. Why do they hate it? Because they don’t want agreements that control weapons. They just want to ban them.
Of course, the Times doesn’t know that context. It also doesn’t seem to know the context on funding for land mine clearance—even though they reported on it in 2016.
Back then, the Times cheered, “32 donors, led by the United States, contributed nearly $480 million … for mine clearance and victim aid. That was an increase of 22 percent from the year before.”
But the year before, funding dropped by 14 percent. So actually, funding—after a three-year drop that began in 2013—is now almost exactly where it was back in 2010. U.S. funding did fall slightly, but most of the decline came from Japan, the European Union, and especially Norway.
Now most of those donors have restored or increased their funding. There’s not much of a story here.
See the full story here.
January 11, 2018
Link: http://dailysignal.com/2018/01/11/new-york-times-gets-facts-wrong-land-mines/
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