KEY POINTS:
New Zealand has bought a shipment of 1000 Claymore landmines from South Korea - despite campaigning internationally against the use of anti-personnel landmines.
The Government says that because the Claymores - fragmentation mines which can fire 700 steel balls in a deadly swath like a giant shotgun - are detonated by remote control, they are not covered by international treaty or domestic law banning landmines.
New Zealand destroyed all of its "live" mines in 1997, after the NZ Army renounced the use of landmines.
But in 2004 the Geneva-based Landmine Monitor reported that New Zealand "retains very limited operational stocks of Claymore mines. Measures have been taken to ensure that they cannot be used in the victim-activated mode and the tripwire assemblies and mechanical fuses have been destroyed"
These operational stocks of M18A1 Claymores were not prohibited under the international convention when operated in the command-detonated mode only, the monitoring agency said.
But anti-landmine activists are expected to question the Government about its need to continue buying the Claymore mines.
The Landmine Monitor Report 2007, released in Geneva on Monday by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) showed Hanhwa Corp, a private South Korean firm, sent 1000 Claymore mines to New Zealand in 2006.
The Yonhap news agency said today that South Korea had in the past acknowledged producing Claymore directional fragmentation mines.
"In 2006, Hanhwa produced about 1000 remote-controlled Claymores and exported them to New Zealand," it reported.
"Other than these Claymore mines, South Korea is not known to have exported any antipersonnel mines in the past."
Over a decade ago, in 1996, the NZ Government announced a moratorium on the use of landmines, with NZ defence forces unilaterally renouncing the use of landmines as a weapon of war. The army destroyed its small stockpile of antipersonnel and antitank landmines.
New Zealand's then Minister of Youth Affairs, Deborah Morris, signed an international Mine Ban Treaty in Ottawa, Canada in December 1997.
But when New Zealand MPs passed an Antipersonnel Mines Prohibition Act one year later the NZ law excluded anti-tank mines, anti-handling devices and Claymore mines.
Claymore mines were classified as "command-detonated devices" rather than anti-personnel mines, and the Government said: "The rigging of Claymores so as to detonate by tripwire is a technique no longer taught or practised by the New Zealand Defence Force".
Ms Morris, of Wellington, now the deputy convener of the Campaign Against Land Mines (CALM), said the Government had previously argued that remote-detonated Claymore mines did not meet the definition of anti-personnel mines in the treaty.
The purchase of Claymore mines from South Korea would be followed up by CALM, she said.
"It'll be something that we'll want to monitor, and to clarify what is the purposes of the mines, and how will they be used, where and when, and why retain these stockpiles" said Ms Morris. "It's something on which we will seek additional information from the Government ".
When initially produced by the United States for the Vietnam War, the Claymore was classified as an anti-personnel mine without regard to how it was detonated.
- NZPA
