By SELCAN HACAOGLU
Associated Press, 2009-04-10 10:19 PM
Turkey’s military on Friday said it has destroyed half of the anti-personnel mines in its inventory in compliance with an international treaty banning the weapons.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a Geneva-based organization which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, criticized Turkey, Greece and Belarus late last year for missing deadlines to destroy a total of nearly 7.5 million of land mines by March 2008.
“We have destroyed half of the anti-personnel mines,” said Lt. Col. Zafer Akalin, commander of the military’s munitions disposal facility in Kirikkale, central Turkey on Friday. He would not say how many mines were in the military’s inventory.
Last year, Turkey said that preparations for getting rid of its stockpiles took longer than planned. The disposal facility was inaugurated in November 2007 –more than three years after Turkey signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention against land mines.
Akalin said the facility was designed to carry out an environmentally safe destruction of munitions. Dozens of military experts were destroying rockets and dismantling rows of various types of anti-personnel mines during a media tour on Friday. Automated machines were also used to scrap huge artillery shells.
Mine explosions have killed or maimed hundreds of people in Turkey’s southeast where the military has been fighting separatist Kurdish rebels since 1984.
Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally, last year began clearing an estimated half a million mines laid along the Syrian border in 1950s to secure the plain border.
Source: www.etaiwannews.com, 10.04.2009
Leave a Reply