Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Each year an estimated twenty-six thousand people are killed or maimed by land mines - more than 100 million of them sown like the mythical dragon's teeth in over seventy countries. These weapons are designed to maim soldiers, but instead, most victims are civilians, especially the rural poor. Antipersonnel land mines represent an expensive legacy of twentieth-century warfare - one we have not yet eradicated: More than a million new mines are laid each year, far more than can be removed with today's technology. Philip C. Winslow draws on his years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa to show us the human effects of this calamity. Winslow also writes about the Campaign to Ban Landmines and the ways in which the dragon's teeth might finally be pulled from the earth so that it can be restored to those who live on it.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Compared to their WWII predecessors, modern land mines are cheap, easy to lay down, reliable, long-lived and highly effective. This makes them particularly desirable for low-tech, low-budget forces and movements, like those in Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Winslow, a long-time foreign correspondent, uses his experiences in Angola ("the highest number of amputees per inhabitant in the world") to make an increasingly familiar case against anti-personnel land mines, which, when left behind, have had a devastating effect on civilians. Mine fields are often poorly marked, or are simply forgotten. The result is death or mutilation for hundreds of civilians annually, like Chisola Pezo ("a double handicap: a woman amputee"), who was driven into mined territory in a desperate search for food. As Winslow tracks Pezo's rudimentary care and struggle for survival, he relays much about Angola's civil war, which ended uneasily in 1994, and about what the government and advisory groups are doing to clear the mines and get the country going again. It is a nearly impossible task. Mine-clearing is always a slow and painstaking process, as dangerous as it is expensive. Winslow is eloquent and compelling in presenting the case of those who believe the production and export of anti-personnel mines should be both legally banned and morally condemned. In the interim, crutches will remain basic necessities and fields will lie fallow in areas that have been war zones. (Sept.) FYI: For each copy sold, Beacon will donate 50 cents to the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation for their work in providing artificial limbs to land mine victims in Angola.

Kirkus Reviews

A globe-trotting journalist's harrowing rundown on the horrific toll taken by land mines long after the wars during which they were laid have ended.

Drawing largely on his own experiences in Angola, Winslow provides both big-picture perspectives and anecdotal evidence on this ghastly threat afflicting much of the Third World. All told, roughly 110 million mines (anti-tank and anti-personnel) remain buried in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Israel, Korea, Mozambique, Somalia, Vietnam, and scores of other countries. Every year, these devices kill or maim 26,000 people, virtually all of them civilians. Worse yet, the lethal legacy continues to grow; guerilla forces are laying one million new mines each year, according to UN estimates. Thanks to their capacity to channel and contain enemy troops in combat zones at a comparatively modest cost, land mines have become weapons of choice for regular and insurgent armies. But as the author explains in his reportage on clearance crews dispatched by humanitarian organizations, it's a lot easier and cheaper to put sensitive packages of explosives below the surface of the ground than it is to remove or disarm them. Nor, as he documents in bleak detail, are the doctors and nurses posted to battlegrounds by private relief agencies able to do much more than perform basic amputations for those who survive a land-mine blast. Covered as well is the indifference of corrupt governments to the plight of innocents crippled or dismembered by accidental detonations, the dearth of crutches (let alone prosthetics) in areas where the need is desperate, the chilling effect of live minefields on once-bustling population centers, and the emergent Canadian-led campaign to ban the use of land mines.

An eloquent case against ordnance that was characterized by no less an authority than William Tecumseh Sherman as "not war, but murder."