The Killing Fields

They wait with menacing silence and near invisibility in the fields of Cambodia, on the paths of Angola, in the hills of Bosnia, and elsewhere around the globe. Land mines are patient. They will kill and maim today; they will wait until tomorrow or for many years to claim a victim. Land mines are nondiscriminatory; they care not whether it is a military boot or a child's bare foot that causes them to sprout their deadly yield of shrapnel.

Though the civil war in Angola is now over, land mines still randomly kill an average of 120 people there a month. According to UNICEF, 75 percent of mine victims in El Salvador are children. Mines have taken a limb or an eye from one out of every 236 Cambodians; 80,000 have been killed. Sam Soa was trying to find his cow in a field near his village when he stepped on a mine. "It knocks you down," he remembers. "I didn't realize what had happened, and I tried to run away."¹ Sam Soa could not run away, though; the bottom of his left leg was gone.

Land mines also attack those who come to help. Ken Rutherford, an American worker with the International Rescue Committee, was traveling a dusty rural road in Somalia when a blast tore off his right foot. "I was trying to put it back on," he recalls. "It kept falling off."² On another continent, the first American soldier killed in Bosnia was Sergeant Donald Dugan. The assailant was a mine. Globally, at least 2,000 people a month share the fate of Sam Soa, Ken Rutherford, and Donald Dugan.

It is impossible to know exactly how many land mines lie in wait around the world, but 110 million is a reasonable estimate. Egypt, with 23 million mines dug into its soil, mostly from the days of repetitive wars with Israel, has the most land mines on its territory. Bosnia-Herzegovina, with 152 mines per square mile, and Cambodia, with 142 per square mile, have the densest concentrations of mines. Angola has the highest ratio of mines to population, with 1.5 mines per Angolan. Sixty-four countries have land mines on their territory; 14 countries have a million or more mines still in the ground.

One reason that mines litter the earth is that they cost as little as $2 to make. They are, one U.S. senator observed, the "Saturday night specials of warfare."³ Unfortunately, mines are difficult and expensive to remove. Kuwait spent $800 million on mine removal after the Persian Gulf War, and the UN estimates that with current technology, it would take $33 billion and 1,100 years to purge the world of its land mines.

The ghastly toll of mines spurred the formation of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines (ICBL), an NGO alliance of more than 1,000 citizen-groups from 60 countries. The effort of the ICBL eventually played an instrumental role in bringing 79 countries to Vienna in 1995 for a conference convened by the UN to discuss if land mines were too brutal and too indiscriminate and, if so, how to end their menace. Yes, the delegates all agreed, land mines are terrible; but, no, they should not be banned, delegates from the United States, China, and some other countries demurred. "Mines are especially effective defense weapons for many countries, especially developing ones, to resist foreign aggression," argued the delegate from China, a leading producer and exporter of mines. In the end, the conference stalemated because, said the coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, "everybody [in Vienna had] an issue they [were] trying to protect."⁴

Canada, however, would not let the movement to ban land mines die. It led a movement that convened an alternative conference in mid-1997 to negotiate and sign a ban on land mines. Most countries responded favorably, and freed from some of the complications of the moribund UN conference, moved quickly to settle the matter.

At the negotiating session in Oslo, the United States continued to oppose a complete ban on the production, use, or sale of land mines. The United States wanted to allow the continued use of land mines along the border between North and South Korea, wanted to postpone the effective date of the treaty until 2006, and wanted to allow countries to withdraw from the treaty in time of war. The U.S. position was in substantial part due to the opposition by the U.S. military. Not all military experts agreed. Retired general H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the UN coalition forces in the Persian Gulf War, and retired general David Jones, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), wrote an open letter to the president telling him that, "given the wide range of weaponry available to military forces today, antipersonnel land mines are not essential."⁵ Whatever the truth, the president was not willing to ignore the warning of his Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I can't afford a breach with the Joint Chiefs," Clinton told the head of the Vietnam Veterans of America.⁶

Most other countries refused to give way to the proposed U.S. changes. "I'm sure the American delegation is feeling a bit lonely," said a Canadian representative with little sympathy. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also lent his weight to completing a treaty, even though the Ottawa conference had supplanted the official UN conference. "We must make land mines...a weapon of the past and a symbol of shame," Annan told the assembled delegates.⁷

This time the opposition of the United States and a few other countries was not enough to stem the momentum. With the U.S. delegate looking somberly on, delegates from more than 120 countries gathered in Ottawa in December, 1997, agreed to submit a treaty to the countries of the world for signature and ratification. Those countries that adhere to the treaty commit themselves never to use, produce, stockpile, or transfer antipersonnel land mines; and they agree to destroy current inventories and remove all mines they have planted. Countries have the right to withdraw from the treaty with six months' warning. The treaty will become effective six months after the fortieth country has ratified it. China, Russia, and a few other countries, in addition to the United States, declared that they would not sign the treaty, but that did not dampen the enthusiasm in Ottawa. Canada was the first country to sign, and after affixing his signature, Lloyd Axworthy, Canada's foreign minister, turned to hug American Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the ICBL. Kofi Annan also honored Williams and the NGO. The work of the ICBL, said the secretary-general, made "the international community a living, thriving reality, and not just the hope of a distant future." "Together we are a superpower," Williams said to the national and NGO representatives alike. "It's a new definition of superpower. It's not one of us, it's everyone."⁸

The future of the treaty seems assured. By mid-1998, 127 countries had signed the Anti-Personnel Mine Treaty, and 24 had ratified it, making it just a matter of time before the final needed ratifications are recorded and the treaty goes into effect. Even the United States will probably come along. Clinton has unilaterally declared that by 2003 the United States will stop using land mines, except in Korea, and will sign the treaty in 2006. The president pledged to spend $100 million a year on land mine clearance; Canada pledged $15 million a year; Norway, $20 million a year; and other countries joined in the effort to speed up the removal of the stealthy killers that made the admonition, "Watch your step," deadly serious advice.

Notes

1. New York Times, May 11, 1996, p. A4.

2. New York Times, October 5, 1995, p. E3.

3. Senator Patrick Leahy, quoted in the New York Times, October 5, 1995, p. E3.

4. Both quotes are from the New York Times, October 5, 1995, p. E3.

5. Both quotes are from the New York Times, May 7, 1996, p. A10.

6. New York Times, June 17, 1997, p. A10.

7. New York Times, September 4, 1997, p. A10.

8. New York Times , December 4, 1997, p. A1.