> "We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'"
> "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this."
> The 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty compels signatories - which include the UK - to clear minefields in territory under their control.
> Since 2009 the British government has spent tens of millions of pounds on mine-clearance in the Falklands.
It's quotes like this that make me despair most for human civilisation. Our inability to design systems - or empower people - with the ability to act within a loose framework and avoid institutional insanity.
Michael Poole, Member of the Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly said:
"Falkland Islanders are grateful for the mine clearance work carried out by the UK Government in recent years. This work has opened up historically and valuable tracts of land which has been out of bounds since 1982."
This further commitment by the UK to clearing more of the Falkland Islands of mines is a welcome move and we remain willing to assist practically and logistically where we can."
Any plan made by humans will have flaws, but I think I'd rather waste a few dozen million pounds than leave any loophole for nations to slack off on mine clearance. If you say "Must clear all minefields unless the locals say they really don't mind," I suspect that some governments will suddenly discover a surprisingly large number of people with previously-unknown pro-minefield opinions.
I agree but also recommend the book "strategy of conflict" by Thomas Schelling. It's a counterpoint that shows why highly specific contracts are important, especially with regards to binding oneself to future actions.
From the pictures it seems it's a beach that has been mined.
I'm guessing the longer you wait, the more they'll move, the harder it'll be to clear - risking that mines are left behind.
> Behind their fences, shielded from human encroachment, the penguins have had decades of peace and quiet in their minefield. Native flora has regrown around them.
"Natural systems have returned to not quite a pristine state, but a state where you've reached climax communities in certain parts," says Paul Brickle, director of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute.
"This natural isolation along the 250 km (160 mi) length of the DMZ has created an involuntary park which is now recognized as one of the most well-preserved areas of temperate habitat in the world.
Several endangered animal and plant species now exist among the heavily fortified fences, landmines and listening posts. These include the extremely rare red-crowned crane (a staple of Asian art), and the white-naped crane as well as, potentially, the extremely rare Siberian tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear."
I wish I could up- and downvote at the same time; I feel like discussions belong at the top and memes at the bottom, but I also enjoy the bits of humor and less information-dense posts at HN, because they help me to humanize the community and they make the rest of the discussions easier to process.
Perhaps a "funny" flag could work?
Kind of like on Slashdot, but with a corresponding "showfun" setting, for the gravely serious user.
A rate or ratio limit for funny posts is needed to not let it spread and dominate the comments, so maybe a heuristic comment identifier that says "I'm glad you're having fun, but this post has reached its meme quotum for today. Have a nice day!" if a threshold is passed would be a solution. That's so much work to implement though...
I'm conflicted re: what to do with these meta thoughts. Perhaps I should set up a blog with essays regarding this, and put it there? I do feel it is on topic as in, "in the HN spirit" and relevant to what I'm responding to re: form, but not the content.
I did a contract down in the Falkland Islands in 2002 for Cable & Wireless, and was in Stanley for about a month with a weekend on Sealion Island. Things the HN crowd might be interested in:
When I arrived an army officer in camo fatigues got up on the (tiny) baggage claim carousel before it started running and gave us a brief introduction to how to spot landmines, and instructed us how to obtain ordinance maps of the known existing fields if we wanted to go for a walk one day. I got one and gave it to a friend as a present. I believe he has it framed in his home.
That beach they are discussing looks astonishing and there is little doubt if it's reopened it will not remain "wild" for a long time. That said, ozone depletion is still a thing, and whilst the climate is like Northern Scotland, there are sunny days but sun-bathing is not encouraged. Young military personnel are rumoured to occasionally try it, have to get treatment for quite skin burns, and because it's a self-inflicted injury will get court marshalled.
Sometimes a penguin or other animal will actually set off a mine on that beach, or at least did in my time there - you'd hear a distant boom, and it was just assumed one had been triggered. However, it's a huge area to clear. Strangely, I seem to recall there had been an offer from a foreign government to run mad cows or unwanted apes along it to try and trigger the mines. Thankfully, it was never taken up.
There is a lot of ordinance in the islands. After the war, some of the locals picked up discarded Argentinian weaponry and ammunition and stored it for use in case of another future attack. I sincerely hope that most of it is now discarded.
More tech information for this crowd: back then, all phone and data ran over a microwave network rated to 9600 baud but some could get 56kbps modems running well over it. There is a small machine room, and we were running Solaris 7 on Sun kit back then. I got the gig as I was familiar with Zeus which was their preferred web server at the time.
Connectivity was via a (very large) satellite dish back to the UK via a geostationary satellite. 1Mbps was the max transfer rate, and ping times back to the UK were > 500ms. They had investigated running fibre optic into the islands, but they (naturally) wanted to avoid that coming in via Argentina, so they'd costed running it up to the US straight up the Atlantic. It was doable, but would cost 10x the then national GDP of the islands, so, yeah, noooo…
It's a very beautiful place with lovely people, and I imagine the connectivity is much better than it was 15 years ago - if you ever have the chance to visit or work there, I'd definitely consider it, but the routes in are limited: MoD flight from RAF Brize Norton, via Santiago, or cruise ships sometimes stop by.
They actually suggested I might want a full time gig down there. Being in my early 20s and single it wasn't for me, but I could see for the right person, it's a pretty amazing place.
Large areas of reasonably flat land can be demined very quickly using a demining machine. It's a large armored vehicle with a set of rotating flails on the front, similar in appearance to a combine harvester. The flails detonate the mines, while a thick steel scoop deflects the blast away from the vehicle. It's a low-tech but very effective approach.
The problem in the Falklands is that demining machines are very destructive of habitat. A demining machine effectively ploughs the land - a useful side-effect if you're clearing agricultural land, but a serious problem if you're clearing a nature reserve.
Any robot capable of doing the neccessary manual digging would be so heavy it 'd certainly trigger the mines; also as you can see in the photos the land is not flat but highly varied, so a robot cannot drive there.
Another thing that makes demining really tedious is the amount of scrap metal in the earth - and if it's former farm land that's been mined it's bound to have loads of metal in it, mostly remains of agricultural equipment, and on the minestrips of former Yugoslavia you often enough hit archeological artifacts during mine-clearing.
If you wanted to do automated demining, you'd need:
1) scanner technology that can differentiate between scrap metal and mines, as well as penetrate at least 1-2m into the ground
2) robots on 2 legs and with 2 arms - basically, humanoid robots. Anything other is only usable on flat fields.
3) robots must be able to conquer vast amounts of vegetation. For example, the Yugoslavian wars were 2 decades ago - many of the minestrips that are still not cleared up are in the backside of the country and heavily overgrown by everything from grass to massive trees now. (Source: am half Croatian, seen some minefields)
4) robots with high-quality visual processing. The most devious mines are those that have been hidden in / masqueraded as stuff like old cans, soccer balls or other stuff that children pick up, play with it and boooom. Any robot which has to do demining in such areas must be able to detect and avoid these.
5) cheap robots. A single robot with above capabilities will run well into the 8-figures at the moment (esp. due to #2), a human is cheaper (especially as there's protective armor available that helps to prevent or soften severe injuries).
> Any robot capable of doing the neccessary manual digging would be so heavy it 'd certainly trigger the mines
Hm. Could you use light bots to search out and mark the mines, and send in diggers only once the area has been thoroughly inspected? Of course that just makes everything even more complicated...
How much of normal mine clearance is searching vs. removing? Is there any advantage to robots that mark mines for manual removal, or is that already the "easy" part?
> 1) scanner technology that can differentiate between scrap metal and mines, as well as penetrate at least 1-2m into the ground
Forgive me if this is naive, but do mines actually get buried 2m deep? I would think that would be unfeasibly difficult. Or are we thinking of shallower mines that were buried by natural soil movement?
> 2) robots on 2 legs and with 2 arms - basically, humanoid robots. Anything other is only usable on flat fields.
It could conceivably be helpful to use a robot that can cover moderately rugged terrain. You'd still need to use manual methods on the rougher patches, but it might at least reduce the size of the problem.
I realize it's probably unfeasibly expensive no matter what, but it's interesting to think about the problem.
I was going to cite stories about random walk simple robotics being used to clear mines in Afghanistan- think lawnmower powered beach balls. But apparently this isn't as effective as I'd thought:
Thanks for breaking that down. Didn't think about the need to differentiate between scrap and mine. And yes I was thinking specifically about this instance on the beach which faces much fewer issues than areas covered with vegetation.
The problem on the beach is not vegetation, yes, but uneven land and especially sand and salt water.
While a tank or an AK47 might work in this environment as intended, a robot with fine gears and other relatively delicate moving parts will have trouble with the sand... and the corrosive sea water environment. It will require an extensive amount of maintenance.
Making an invading force pay reparations isn't admitting their sovereignty. By that argument Germany has bought & paid for much of Europe via WWII reparations.
yes but they're not going to pay to remove them any more than Mexico is going to pay to build a wall, no matter how often some blowhard shouts it at clueless crowds
And then lost the war, yes. The trouble is that reparations, to be credibly imposed, must be backed by the threat of renewed hostilities, compared with which simply paying the weregild looks preferable; without such a threat, or at least the reasonable prospect of some meaningfully opprobrious consequence, the party nominally responsible for paying reparations has little enough reason to do other than simply ignore them.
I doubt the UK is about to invade Argentina over the issue, or the UN to vote for sanctions.
How about returning the islands they stole, instead? We're happy to clean the mines ourselves. It's not like they're anywhere close to London, are they?
Ok, for the sake of facts, and I'm not quoting Wikipedia.
- Spain named several governors for those islands from 1774 to 1810. Sovereignity was clearly stated by Spain over those islands.
- During that time, those islands depended of Buenos Aires government.
- If Spain owned Argentina plus the Malvinas, then once Argentina got its independence from Spain, the Malvinas were included as part of that independence.
- 1820, frigate La Heroína sailed to Malvinas to take possesion of it
- 1825, Great Britain admitted Argentina's independence from Spain, but didn't claim the islands.
- 1828, Buenos Aires government granted Port Soledad to Luis Vernet, for building up a colony. For this purpose, he shipped 100 inhabitants to the islands.
- 1829, Vernet was named as governor of the islands
- 1833, Great Britain took the Malvinas, and expelled the inhabitants from the islands.
Not to mention other facts like geology, and that the UN approved the new map for Argentina, which expands the continental shelf all around the islands.[1][2]
So, care to tell me how can Argentina OWN all the argentinean sea shelf AROUND the islands, BUT the islands?
> 1825, Great Britain admitted Argentina's independence from Spain, but didn't claim the islands.
They claimed the Falkland Islands before Argentina even existed as an independent country, as I said in my post. They didn't have to make a new claim every time they recognized a new country.
"Evidence" of what? A line drawn by Argentina around territory they want to take over? I'm going to assume you're kidding.
a) anyone can claim any territory they like; that doesn't automatically make the claim legitimate or credible
b) claiming a territory is academic unless you can actually enforce your claim
c) Britain claimed the Falklands (decades) before "Argentina" even existed in any form as an independent country
d) if a "British" claim and presence on islands with no native population is illegitimate, what does that make a "Spanish" claim and presence on land taken from the native population that is now called "Argentina"?
Maybe the people of the Falklands are going home when the people of Argentina do.
Even after so-called "Argentine independence" - half a century after Britain claimed the Falklands - "Argentina" didn't exist even remotely like the country we know today.
In fact even by 1865 - 100 YEARS after the British claimed the Falklands, and 15 years after "Argentina" relinquished claims in the treaty of Arana Southern - this is what "Argentina" looked like:
So who do the British owe the Falklands to again? Buenos Aires? United Provinces of the River Plate? Argentine Confederation? Chile? Uruguay? Araucania and Patagonia? Spain?
Tell me again the one about returning stolen land.
Oh, so your argument is that the country changed. Big deal.
Again: Spain asserted sovereignity over those islands as part of the colony way before that.
The "line drawn by Argentina" is the territory accepted by the UN. That little organization where all the countries are represented. I understand from what you say that you favor the rule of the strongest instead of the actual law and common sense, but it's something real and concrete: the Argentinean sea surrounds the islands, and it's been proved to be a part of the country. The UK has absolutely NOTHING to do there, as their country is on the other hemisphere.
I'll reply to the rest of the "arguments" as you so call them, about the "claims" they did. I need to retrieve some information from the library first, so I can give you some proper references, instead of Google, as you did. Maybe that way you can learn something.
This is going to go absolutely nowhere other than me repeating the same hard facts and you refusing to hear and accept them, but I'll just address this:
> The "line drawn by Argentina" is the territory accepted by the UN.
Do you not even understand what's written in the link you posted as "evidence" or something?
The very first sentences state (emphasis/capitalization mine):
"The Argentine Foreign Ministry announced on 28 March 2016 that it
had gained international recognition of a claim to an exceptionally
large continental shelf.
BUT THEY WERE MISTAKEN.
[...]
On 23 May 2016, the [UN] Commission made public its recommendations
and ONLY A SMALL PROPORTION OF THE ARGENTINE CLAIM WAS ENDORSED.
This paper explains the legal regime and the political process
that led the Commission to REFUSE TO CONSIDER THE ARGENTINE CLAIM
TO THE SHELF AROUND THE ISLANDS CONTROLLED BY THE UNITED KINGDOM,
AND TO A PART OF ANTARCTICA.
And, after citing Argentine government lies on the matter, and fake news reports from Argentina and the UK, it concludes with the following:
the Argentine Foreign Ministry knew NO PART OF THE CONTINENTAL
SHELF AROUND THE ISLANDS UNDER BRITISH CONTROL WOULD BE CONSIDERED
by the sub-commission.
[...]
Indeed, the legal situation was so unambiguous that THE ARGENTINE
DELEGATION DID NOT EVEN ASK FOR THE FULL SUBMISSION TO BE CONSIDERED.
You literally, objectively, as a matter of fact don't know what you are talking about here.
Just for the record: you're defending an imperial colony in the 21st century, that exists for the sole purpose of having a claim for the UK over Antartida. That's it. That's the whole point of the UK being there. Of course the oil and fish are a plus, but if those islands were closer to Brazil, they would've left a long time ago.
You know what they say, possession is 9/10 tenths of the law!
Besides, it is kind of difficult to decide who really owns any land when you look back through the long and complicated history of just about any modern country. Who should own Argentina? It used force to separate itself from Spain, so should Spain still have a claim over it? Should they demand it back again? How did Spain get it in the first place? By conquering the place, which means it was stolen from the natives. Should the descendants of the natives claim it back? But then the natives no doubt were made up of tribes/groups that used force to change ownership. So are you going to work that out backwards to the first tribe to arrive in the area many thousands of years ago? Where do you draw the line? Given the complexity you pretty much end up with the fairest method being to ask the actual inhabitants who they want to govern them. They said they want the British.
Nop, you're just mudding the discussion. Here are the facts:
- Spain named several governors for those islands from 1774 to 1810. Sovereignity was clearly stated by Spain over those islands.
- During that time, those islands depended of Buenos Aires government.
- If Spain owned Argentina plus the Malvinas, then once Argentina got its independence from Spain, the Malvinas were included as part of that independence.
- 1820, frigate La Heroína sailed to Malvinas to take possesion of it
- 1825, Great Britain admitted Argentina's independence from Spain, but didn't claim the islands.
- 1828, Buenos Aires government granted Port Soledad to Luis Vernet, for building up a colony. For this purpose, he shipped 100 inhabitants to the islands.
- 1829, Vernet was named as governor of the islands
- 1833, Great Britain took the Malvinas, and expelled the inhabitants from the islands.
Not to mention other facts like geology, and that the UN approved the new map for Argentina, which expands the continental shelf all around the islands.[1][2]
So, care to tell me how can Argentina OWN all the argentinean sea shelf AROUND the islands, BUT the islands?
> So, care to tell me how can Argentina OWN
> all the argentinean sea shelf AROUND the
> islands, BUT the islands?
The map you're linking to shows Argentina claiming much of the Antarctic. Leaving the Falklands aside, it should be obvious that a map like this is rather one sided and certainly doesn't have any international recognition given that no sovereign claim over the Antarctic is recognized by the UN or anyone else.
Aside from that I think you're misunderstanding what this map means. There's an international convention on continental shelves but national sovereignty supersedes it. There's no rule that if your continental shelf intersects territory intersects some island you own that island.
If it did then China would own Taiwan, France / Belgium / The Netherlands & Norway would own the British isles, South Korea would own Japan etc.
Most local population on Falklands has been of British origin since, what, 1840?
Ultimately, the important part is that there are no living people, whether on the islands or elsewhere, who are harmed by British control of the island, and there are plenty of living people who would be harmed by it being ceded to Argentine.
Really, the important part is that Argentina lost the war. But I get that people need to blow off steam about that sort of thing from time to time - there's something humiliating in losing a fight you started, especially when your opponent, basically just for the hell of it, sinks the severely superannuated secondhand light cruiser that's the pride of your nation's adorable little pocket navy. Why take it seriously? The result that matters is in. All the rest is just woofing.
If we're unwinding back almost 200 years to reach that conclusion, why not go 600? Have you appropriately compensated the native Argentinian tribes for the natural resources that you have plundered from them?
We are? Do people in "prehistoric societies" (whatever that is supposed to mean) not have rights to territory, or to natural resources?
In any case, I was definitely talking about people, not countries - this is clearly spelled out in the comment that started this thread. I don't care about countries. They only exist to serve the people, and any such rights they claim above and beyond that are illegitimate.
TL;DR: Penguins are not heavy enough to set off landmines left by Argentinians in Falklands War. Plenty are left, now the British government has to clear them due to Ottawa convention, and this will disrupt penguins and the ecosystem.
I suspect the title is referencing a monty python sketch about an exploding penguin. I'd find the sketch but I'm on limited mobile data at the moment, but I'm sure YouTube has it.
It's only a conflict until you base your value judgements on human flourishing. Then it becomes a relatively easy question - does humanity benefit from having the land mines removed? Pretty sure that anyone living in or around minefields has the answer to that one.
Someone living around minefields answers in the BBC story:
"Falkland Islanders weren't enthused by the idea, to put it bluntly," says Barry Elsby, a member of the Falklands Legislative Assembly.
"We would rather have left the minefields as they were. They are all clearly marked, clearly fenced. No civilian has ever been injured. We said to the British government, 'Don't spend the money here, go to some other country where they have a much greater need to free up farming land.'"
"Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this."
It looks a somewhat similar nature reserve to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which also acts as a superb nature reserve (also a BBC story):
Wow. I'm genuinely surprised to find _anyone_ okay with living near minefields.
My opinions are probably coloured by growing up with Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees as childhood friends. Their families had strong, and uniformly negative, opinions about landmines. Sounds like the circumstances were very different.
Obviously. The main difference in circumstances is indiscriminate use near farming lands and dwellings.
Landmines can be used properly or improperly. If you lay them properly, map them, and clear them when not needed, they're not any more risky than the typical remains of war (unexploded bombs and shells); less so in fact (considering Molotov breadbaskets scattered by artillery or air).
The Ottawa convention will be observed by those parties who anyway would have used mines responsibly (and thereby would have had a cheap, domestic defensive weapon, instead of paying big bucks to high-tech munition makers).
And those parties who we can expect to behave irresponsibly didn't join the convention in the first place.
I'm pretty sure there's no tigers in DMZ. This isn't the Amazon, this is a strip of land between two belligerent countries whose population densities make California look like a rural utopia. If there was a tiger, I think we'd know. :)
1. Makes a "good faith" remark about someone having an inaccurate (AFAIK) information on a part of land I grew up next to. (OK, calling Seoul "next to" DMZ might be a bit of stretch, but then Americans consider SV as "next to" SF...)
Eh? Population density according to Wikipedia (person/km2):
South Korea 507
North Korea 201
New Jersey 470 (densest amont US states)
New York 162
California 97
US average 33
The Korean DMZ is "about 250km long, 4km wide" strip of land sitting between two hostile countries, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers on either side, with barbed wire fences and watch posts running along its length. Thousands of eyes are watching every corner of it right now as I write this.
(For comparison, the Yosemite national park is 1,169 square miles, larger than DMZ. Somehow people are sure that it harbors no grizzly bears.)
A tiger isn't a bigfoot. It is an apex predator that roams around huge areas and is scared at nothing. I stand by my assertion: if there's a tiger in DMZ, we'd know.
Thanks, my bad with the greater/less than reference, I mixed up mi2 and km2 even though I thought I was watching out for that. Call it the same order of magnitude as California. Nothing like Hong Kong densities (6000+/km2).
> "Unfortunately," Elsby adds, "the British government have signed up to the Ottawa convention, which puts a duty on them to do this."
> The 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty compels signatories - which include the UK - to clear minefields in territory under their control.
> Since 2009 the British government has spent tens of millions of pounds on mine-clearance in the Falklands.
It's quotes like this that make me despair most for human civilisation. Our inability to design systems - or empower people - with the ability to act within a loose framework and avoid institutional insanity.