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MOD opposes mine-ban treaty ratification
Implementation of a 10-month-old Cabinet decision that Sri Lanka would ratify the UN convention banning anti-personnel mines is being blocked by the Defence Ministry (MoD) which insists that mines are essential to protect its military camps.
On March 2, Cabinet approved a joint proposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Rehabilitation and Resettlement to accede to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention—commonly called the Ottawa Convention. Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva also announced it at the First International Pledging Conference for the Implementation of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.
But the matter has ended there. One reason is Cabinet also decreed that parliament must approve its decision. However, parliamentary sanction is not required for ratification of international conventions—and submitting just this one to the assembly would have set a precedent.
The bigger impediment, though, is the MoD’s stance. “We need a little time, a couple of years, to acquire equipment and technology to protect our military installations,” said Karunasena Hettiarachchi, MoD Secretary. “So far, the camps are protected by anti-personnel mines. We need to buy other equipment and that is very expensive.”
The three commanders of the armed forces have received instructions to draw up a proposal on how to protect military installations without mines, Mr Hettiarachchi said. Their report would include various types of technologies and their costs. He would not commit on a timeframe for submission of their conclusions.
Official sources said the MoD has been maintaining this position over the past year. They questioned how it was taking so long to make a decision. They also pointed out that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former Defence Secretary, wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs in 2011 that, “The Ministry of Defence is in agreement to becoming a State Party to the Ottawa Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention”.
“But they didn’t do it,” Mr Hettiarachchi said, in response. “They were in power till 2015.” The MoD under the current administration has repeatedly expressed reservations regarding accession.
Nevertheless, its position that anti-personnel mines are required to protect military installations contradicts even the policies of most other countries that have not yet acceded to the Ottawa Convention. They only deploy landmines to defend their land borders, not camps.
Since the war’s end in 2009, there are no land borders to protect in Sri Lanka. By joining the Ottawa Convention, a State party undertakes to destroy all stockpiled anti-personnel mines that it owns or are under its jurisdiction or control not later than four years and to clear landmines within ten years of becoming a State party. Up to now, 162 countries have joined the Convention.
In August 2016, the Sri Lanka Campaign to Ban Landmines petitioned President Maithripala Sirisena stressing the importance of acceding to the Ottawa Convention as well as the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). It pointed out that ratifying the two treaties will “guarantee for future generations that these indiscriminate weapons will not be used on Sri Lanka soil, thus joining hands with the world humanitarian disarmament community”.
The Campaign has raised the issue again in view of National Integration and Reconciliation Week which ended yesterday. It said that without taking concrete measures such as acceding to the Ottawa Convention or the CCM, reconciliation will not succeed in post-war Sri Lanka. “It seems that Sri Lanka may be the only country in the world saying that after an internal conflict and during an ongoing reconciliation programme, military installations should be protected with landmines,” said Vidya Abhayagunawardena, the Campaign’s Coordinator.
“Since 2004, Sri Lanka did not accede to any disarmament conventions and was isolated from the international disarmament community,” he continued. “It seems now the country has completely neglected the subject of disarmament despite being a champion of it at one time.”