Punjab, Oct. 20 -- Finland is buying one million anti-personnel landmines. It left the Mine Ban Treaty in January, along with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland - and this is the first order of that scale since the exits.
What the treaty was
The 1997 Ottawa Convention banned the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines. It has more than 160 states parties and is among the most successful arms-control instruments ever written - annual casualty figures fell by roughly three-quarters in its first two decades, and most signatories destroyed their stockpiles.
Its logic was never that mines are militarily useless. It was that they keep killing for decades after the war ends, and that the people they kill are overwhe...