It's not surprising that the civilization which used landmines in military operations some 500 years ago has the know-how to disarm such weapons.

Chinese peacekeepers deployed in Lebanon's southern border area are using the latest China-made equipment, including robot detectors, to sweep landmines that threaten local residents.

The new landmine-sweeping equipment has been unveiled by a training base of the U.N. peacekeeping engineers battalion located in southwest Yunnan Province, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily reports.

Nearly 1,000 U.N.-commissioned Chinese peacekeepers have been sent to the area on the Lebanon-Israel border since 2006 and used simple, but effective, devices to unearth numerous landmines left by the Lebanese-Israeli conflict in 2006.

The remote-controlled robot detector arrived in Beirut last Thursday. The current battalion is the first overseas peacekeeping mission to use this technology in the area.

The self-propelled robot finds landmine targets with a revolving arm mounted with a metal detector. To overcome the rough terrain, it is equipped with three pairs of crawlers.

The robot's controller watches live video images on his laptop computer relayed via wireless signal from the robot's cameras.

When the robot finds a suspect mine, it will stop, spray marking liquid on the surface and send an alert to the controller.

The machine is waterproof and able to operate for six hours before recharging, according to engineers at the training base.

The Chinese peacekeepers have also been equipped with extendible Bangalore torpedoes which were originally created by the PLA's engineers to sweep landmines buried in Sino-Vietnamese border areas.

Inspired by Chinese bamboo, the torpedoes are extended by sectional cartridges so as to reach far into dense vegetation in mountainous terrains where a common metal detector cannot easily discover landmines. The bamboo-like device can easily clean a path up to 10 meters long and two meters wide by detonating landmines in a thicket.

The engineers said that this simple weapon has been listed as an important official outfit in the PLA's mine-sweeping equipment and has been adopted in many international mine clearance missions.

Chinese engineers also invented a hook and rope with a range of40 meters using high-pressured air which could be used to trigger trip-wired mines from a safe distance.

As one of the world's major mine manufacturers, China has not signed the Ottawa Treaty co-signed by 121 countries in December 1997 as a joint effort to completely ban anti-personnel landmines.

A party to the treaty should stop producing, stockpiling or transferring anti-personnel mines. They also must destroy all the weapons in possession within four years, with the exception of a small number of mines to be used for training purposes.

So far, more than 150 countries have ratified the treaty. Other countries which have not signed the treaty include Israel, Lebanon, India, Vietnam, the United States and Russia.

But China has approved the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Body-Trap and Other Devices of the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons concluded at Geneva in 1980, and approved an amendment to the protocol in 1998 which tightens the restrictions to reduce mine's harm to civilians.

The amended protocol prohibits the use of non-detectable anti-personnel mines, non-self-destructing and non-self-deactivating mines outside fenced, monitored and marked areas.

China and Vietnam planted millions of mines during the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 and the following skirmishes along their border, leaving the mountainous region one of the most intensive minefields after World War II.

"No one has any idea of how many mines are there. We cleaned up a safe zone of 4.5 square kilometers by sweeping about 30,000 mines and unexploded ordnance last year in the region," Lt. Col. Fu Xiutang of an engineer regiment garrisoned in an area bordering Vietnam and Yunnan Province told Xinhua.

After signing the mine protocol, China has previously carried out two large-scale mine-sweeping missions in the 1990s and detonated more than 680,000 mines and unexploded ordnance.

"The Chinese government has paid great attention to the humanitarian issues caused by landmines," said Chen Zhou, a researcher with the PLA's Academy of Military Science.

Although China has not yet agreed the Ottawa Treaty, the country has actively participated in international humanitarian missions to help other countries disarm the mines.

In the past two years, China has trained engineers for Angola, Mozambique, Chad, Burundi and other African countries and financed Peru, Ethiopia and Ecuador to disarm mines.

In January, China donated 70 sets of landmine detectors and accessories to Egypt where some 16.7 million landmines and unexploded ordnance were left in the north African battlefield from World War II.

Four Chinese experts were also dispatched to Egypt to train local mine-sweepers. They also supplied Egypt with mine-sweeping technology to help free more residents from the deadly heritage that has claimed thousands of lives.

Chinese experts have also helped in Thailand and Eritrea to teach minesweeping practices, which is perhaps the most dangerous noncombat mission.

"Almost every minesweeping soldier has a scar on their body," Sun Shijun, an instructor with the regiment said, "but we are privileged to have the scar and regard it as an honor."

(Xinhua News Agency March 5, 2009)