Landmines
A recent report on the ban the production and the use of landmines which appeared in the International Post caught my attention. Credit for the lucidly written report should be given to Ms Kazka, a colleague of mine, who illuminated the pertinent issues involved in the controversy revolving the production of landmines. Although the Philippines is fortunate enough not to have experienced the anguish of states like Afghanistan and Bosnia, we as a nation, averse at atrocities brought about by warfare, should contribute to the advancement of this noble cause of banning the production, the use and the demining of landmines.
As Ms Kazka reported, each day landmines kill or wound an estimated 75 people worldwide. Ninety percent of these victims are civilians. Among the victims may be a teenage girl gathering firewood in Cambodia. A grandfather herding sheep in Afghanistan. Or a boy running across an empty field in Angola. What makes antipersonnel mines so abhorrent is the indiscriminate destruction they cause. Mines cannot be aimed. They lie dormant until a person or animal triggers their detonating mechanism. Antipersonnel mines cannot distinguish between the footfall of a soldier and that of a child. Those who survive the initial blast usually require amputations, long hospital stays, and extensive rehabilitative services. These people do not usually recover from the psychological strain that the explosions cause. Moreover, they are discriminated by people in their respective society and are considered lower class people.
Vivid images of the leg-less people were described in detail by the report In Cambodia alone there are over 35,000 amputees injured by anti-personnel landmines--and they are the survivors. Many others die in the fields from loss of blood or lack of transport to get medical help. Mine deaths and injuries in the past few decades total in the hundreds of thousands. Landmines are now a daily threat in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Croatia, Iraq, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia, and dozens of other countries. Mines recognize no cease-fire and long after the fighting has stopped they continue to maim or kill. Mines also render large tracts of agricultural land unusable, wreaking environmental and economic devastation.
Refugees returning to their war-ravaged countries face this life-threatening obstacle to rebuilding their lives. Leading producers and exporters of antipersonnel mines in the past 25 years include China, Italy, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. More than 50 countries have manufactured as many as 200 million antipersonnel landmines in the last 25 years.
War is the means to many ends. The ends of ruthless dictators, of land disputes, and lives – each play its part in the reasoning for war. War is controllable. It can be avoided; however, once it begins, the bat...
In World War One the soldiers were not taken care of very well and were made to live in very horrible conditions. In Dulce et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen shows the problems of war through the mustard gas. They all “[fit] the clumsy helmets just in time” except for one soldier who starts to drown in his own fluids. He starts choking and lunging at the other men, but nothing can be done to help him. He is then flung onto a cart and shipped away. There are many problems with this. Not only is there the emotional toll of losing a friend, but also the constant torturing fear that t...
"Facts About Child Soldiers." Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch, 03 Dec 2008. Web. 18 Nov 2013. .
While some children and adults are able to escape the wrath of the LRA, many are hurt, persecuted and forgotten about every year, by the group’s tactics. Children are taken during raids in villages near the borders of Uganda, Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic. The men are usually killed and the women flee, are killed, or trafficked. These raids are usually carried out by “child soldiers much younger than their victims,” where they are forced to kill possible relatives and kidnap other children. The male children that are taken are usually forc...
...h more control than just being able to change the wallpaper. It also allows for the addition of widgets, although this can sometimes make the UI feel cluttered where the iPhone 5S seems a lot simpler. The added real estate, Full HD resolution of the 5-inch display coupled with expandable storage make the Samsung Galaxy S4 ideal for those that love to watch movies on the go, as well as those that have adapted to using both hands whist texting.
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
Though the use of child soldiers is a global concern, the highest numbers have been reported mainly in Africa and Asi...
These are the words of a 15-year-old girl in Uganda. Like her, there are an estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen who are serving as child soldiers in about thirty-six conflict zones (Shaikh). Life on the front lines often brings children face to face with the horrors of war. Too many children have personally experienced or witnessed physical violence, including executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest, sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home, and massacres. Over the past ten years, more than two million children have been killed, five million disabled, twelve million left homeless, one million orphaned or separated from their parents, and ten million psychologically traumatized (Unicef, “Children in War”). They have been robbed of their childhood and forced to become part of unwanted conflicts. In African countries, such as Chad, this problem is increasingly becoming a global issue that needs to be solved immediately. However, there are other countries, such as Sierra Leone, where the problem has been effectively resolved. Although the use of child soldiers will never completely diminish, it has been proven in Sierra Leone that Unicef's disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program will lessen the amount of child soldiers in Chad and prevent their use in the future.
The Encarta Encyclopedia defines a landmine as "an encased explosive device that is concealed below the surface of the ground." It can be made of "metal, plastic, glass, or wood" (n. p.). Probably the concept of landmines is almost as old as the existence of organized armies. Philip C. Winslow, in his book Sowing the Dragon's Teeth, describes how Roman soldiers, before the beginning of the first millennium, used a plant with spikes as a landmine in order "to delay pursuers" (126). The Chinese, according to Delbruck, used "ground mines" made out of explosives in the year 1232 (qtd. in Winslow 126). Six hundred years later, in 1840, the use of landmines was introduced in the United States; they were used "in large quantities" during the Civil War (Winslow 126, 127).
This news report assesses the effects of landmine explosion in the lives of Afghans and provides a detailed illustration of a case that happened in Lashkar Gah.
Education is the source of all power allowing people to achieve any dream they choose. A person without a true education is nothing more than an empty shell living an empty and pointless life. The process of education begins at conception and the human mind continues to learn until the time of their death but most lessons are learned in the first five years of life. When the topic of education is discussed it isn’t how much is needed but how best to provide the education. The need for high quality education is typically agreed upon; how best to provide that education is not as easily as settled. The line in the sand has been drawn with neither side willing to back down and possible casualties are the children.
In conclusion, a local area network is made up of computers and a myriad of devices, such as routers, servers, switches, and firewalls. In order for it to connect to the Internet, a router must be installed. Servers provide special functions such as printing, file sharing, etc. Switches connect the computers together from different parts of the network. Firewalls prevent unauthorized access. There are a host of other devices that may be used as well. These devices are hubs, gateways, repeaters, wireless access points,
This is a prime example of perception and cultural assumption. Varying cultures may view the banana as a different color, such as, green,
My generation may well be the generation that brings total destruction or total peace to the world. Therefore, the United Nations should think about working together with government and educational cabinet members to put together a unified educational program in the schools of every country in the world to teach constructive approaches to resolve conflicts peacefully within the family, school, and community environments.
Local Area Networks also called LANs have been a major player in industrialization of computers. In the past 20 or so years the worlds industry has be invaded with new computer technology. It has made such an impact on the way we do business that it has become essential with an ever-growing need for improvement. LANs give an employer the ability to share information between computers with a simple relatively inexpensive system of network cards and software. It also lets the user or users share hardware such as Printers and scanners. The speed of access between the computers is lighting fast because the data has a short distance to cover. In most cases a LAN only occupies one or a group of buildings located next to each other. For larger area need there are several other types of networks such as the Internet.