Disarm

2009-03-02 (Limited release)

Editor’s Note: To mark its DVD release, Disarm is screening 2 March at Scandinavia House (58 Park Ave. at 38th Street, NYC) at 7:30pm, preceded by a panel discussion with Jody Williams and followed by Q&A with filmmaker Mary Wareham.

“It’s not enough to just pay attention to how you use the landmine while you’re fighting,” says Jody Williams. “What happens when you leave the battlefield? What happens when you stop fighting? What is the long-term impact of how you conduct war? What are the other ways that people in society have addressed possible conflict without going to war?”

Williams poses these very good questions near the end of Disarm, Mary Wareham and Brian Liu’s sober, intelligent documentary on landmines. The film includes interviews with anti-landmine activists like Williams (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines [ICBL]) as well as men who have set mines and men now engaged in demining. It lays out the many complications of reducing the numbers of landmines the world over, not least being U.S. policy — that is, not to join the 1997 Ottawa Treaty. Footage shows Bill Clinton and Bush Administration representative Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr. rejecting the treaty. (The Obama Administration is currently studying the situation, with an eye to adjusting the U.S. position.)

Daunting and slow-moving as these processes may be, those working to ban landmines (often grouped with the equally devastating cluster bombs in such efforts) remain resolute, knowing their work is crucial to the future of the planet. This much is made clear in Disarm‘s visits to several areas that remain afflicted, including the Devil’s Garden, also known as the Shomali Valley, north of Kabul, where Farid Homayoun and Andrew Fimister of Halo Trust Mine Clearance, seek out and destroy mines. The mines “have been laid in “three sessions,” says Homayoun, beginning with the Russians in the 1980s, continuing with the Mujahedeen, and the recent conflict between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. An interview with Abdul Mahfoz, a local Northern Alliance commander, reveals an abiding faith in these rudimentary, “useful military weapons.” As he helps the deminers, remembering where he has laid mines without help of a map, Mahfoz explains patiently the weapons’ effectiveness, as protection for fighters with little technology or large-scale munitions available to them.

In widespread use since World War II, antipersonnel mines today affect more than 80 countries: over 80% of landmine victims are civilians. As Dr. Alberto Cairo, working in Afghanistan, puts it, the legacy of these many years is civilian injury and death. “The factory of the legs,” he says under images of workers making prosthetics, “remains the biggest industry in Afghanistan right now.”

The film, shot in 2003 and 2004 (and featuring music from Fugazi, the Flaming Lips and Thievery Corporation), makes stops in Iraq, Colombia, the Balkans, and Burma. If the effects in each place are similar — victims without legs, hobbling on crutches or scooting in wheelchairs, demonstrating against landmines and organizing to gain the attention and support of international bodies. Riding along with Damir Atikovic, of Norwegian People’s Aid, the camera observes as he drives, his grave face set against a bleak landscape viewed through his vehicle window. The landmines are “cheap, easy to use, and give us protection from the front,” he says, “All of us realize the consequences our own country has to pay now.” Another deminer, wearing protective vest and helmet, observes, “It’s the nature of the job that at one point you come across a mine to demine it, and you planted it yourself.”

This sense of self-sabotage is acute for several interviewees, while others insist on the continuing need for mines. Commander Anatoly Plesovskikh in Belarus insists that a warehouse full of some 124,000 landmines is only a stockpile, never used, “our unwanted heritage from the Soviet Union. Though Belarus currently has a delicate relationship with Russia (another non-signatory on the treaty), it has recently agreed to the ban. Demonstrating the destruction of one mine for the Disarm crew, Plesovskikh smiles. “We’ll gladly accept your help,” he says, in destroying the rest of them. It’s a step, the film suggests, even to be talking with those with access to such devastation.

RATING 7 / 10