Policy

Turkmenistan signed the Mine Ban Treaty on 3 December 1997 and ratified it on 19 January 1998, becoming a State Party on 1 March 1999. It has not enacted new legislation specifically to implement the Mine Ban Treaty.

Turkmenistan has not attended any recent meetings of the treaty. It did not attend the Third Review Conference in Maputo in June 2014. Turkmenistan submitted its fifth Mine Ban Treaty Article 7 report on 7 June 2010, but has not submitted an updated report since.

Turkmenistan is party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) and its Amended Protocol II on landmines and Protocol V on explosive remnants of war. Turkmenistan is not party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Production, use, transfer, and stockpiling

Turkmenistan has never used, produced, exported, or imported antipersonnel mines. It inherited a stockpile of 6,631,771 antipersonnel mines from the former Soviet Union. This stockpile included 5,452,416 PFM type scatterable mines in 75,718 KSF type cassettes.[1] The presence of such a large stockpile of antipersonnel mines in Turkmenistan was the result of the main ammunition storage facility for Soviet combat operations in Afghanistan being located in Charjoh (now Turkmenabad), according to military officials.[2]

The destruction of Turkmenistan’s stockpile of antipersonnel mines was completed on 11 November 2004.[3] While most of the stockpile was destroyed prior to its March 2003 deadline, it later destroyed 69,200 PFM-type mines (572,200 individual antipersonnel mines) that it had initially planned to retain for training and development purposes.[4]