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if you ask a local person to find a souvenir landmine. |
Do not collect landmines, UXOs or parts of, for any reason or purpose (unless the purpose is for official mine awareness training, and then only with the assistance of demining experts). It was fashionable in some sectors of the humanitarian/UN worlds to use parts of mines and UXOs as office and home decorations. Landmines can make a perfect ashtray, great paperweights, workable door stops, unusual vases ( I have seen the top of a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) head made into a very practical cow bell).
The obvious issue here is that nobody can ever be sure that the devices are completely free from explosives (ffe). It is also not a good image to been seen treating these insidious weapons as everyday objects and passing on the wrong messages, especially dangerous to the children.
The official skull & cross bones warning signs are also removed from minefields for use as a wall hanging. They are often seen hung behind desks in offices; used to warn about electrical dangers; Thai truck drivers thought it was macho to display one on their dashboards; the poor rural Cambodians used them to repair their thatch roofs; used as a fan for grandma with the metal signs fashioned into useful buckets.
The displaying of mine warning signs in obviously non-mined areas may cause some people to start to disregard the intended purpose of danger signs they may encounter in a real mined situation at a later date. The removal of warning signs out of the minefields could cause someone to unknowingly enter a dangerous area and be killed. In Battambang Cambodia one afternoon I was sitting on the corner of an NGO colleague's office desk, mindlessly fiddling with his ornaments, when I noticed the object he was using as an ashtray was in fact a Chinese type 72 landmine. On closer examination I found that the explosive charge was still intact, although the detonation pin had been removed. The charge would probably not explode without a detonator, but it was capable of being ignited by a cigarette butt and flaring up to severely burn anyone closeby.
My colleague was a bit shocked when I pointed
this out to him and made me promise not to tell anyone what he did (so
this is just between me, you and Paul Mason ......... right?).
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MINE WARNING SIGNS MAIN POINTS
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