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.
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.