Dogs, Comic Books, and Land Mines

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dogs. Comic books, Ted Turner. Queen Noor of Jordan.

An eclectic combination, to be sure, but all have played a role in an optimistic State Department assessment of the war against land mines and the effort to educate people on the subject.

A department report released Thursday said the number of land mines around the world is significantly lower than estimates from a few years ago. Based on intensive surveys, the estimates put the number at 60 million to 70 million, compared with earlier estimates of 80 million to 110 million.

The report, titled "Hidden Killers 1998: The Global Land Mine Crisis," says more land mines are being taken out of the ground than are being planted.

"While the problem is still huge, many experts believe that the antipersonnel land mine crisis can be solved in years rather than decades," the report said.

Assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth told reporters he believes the land mine problem can be solved by 2010, consistent with the time frame set by President Clinton.

The report, highlighting successful efforts to remove mines, said casualties in Cambodia's Kampot Province were reduced from 30 per month to nearly zero within one year after deployment of Cambodia Mine Action Center awareness teams.

In an area of Angola, the casualty rate dropped from one land mine victim per day to two or three per month, the report said, citing accounts from the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF. But Inderfurth and other officials said some advances in Angola have been erased by renewed fighting.

Inderfurth, the administration's top official for humanitarian de-mining, said the United States has trained over 1,600 people in Africa, Latin America and Bosnia on mine awareness and related skills and has spent $263 million on removing mines since 1993.

Unconventional methods also have been brought to bear in the struggle. So effective have dogs been in sniffing out land mines that the Defense Department is researching ways to replicate a dog's nose, Pentagon official James Shaer told reporters.

Dogs are useful not only in detecting land mines but also in verifying that formerly mine-laden areas have been fully cleared, Shaer said.

Comic books are used to educate citizens of land mine-affected countries about the risks of the weapon. They were used initially in Bosnia and more recently in Central America. Plans are being made for Portuguese-language comic books to be

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