NEWS STORY: Bishops, pope seek land-mine ban as U.N. takes up issue

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are asking the Clinton administration to”act boldly”and quickly to ban the production, sale and use of anti-personnel land mines.”The United States should move quickly and unambiguously to ban the production, sale and use of anti-personnel land mines,”Bishop Daniel P. Reilly of Worcester, Mass., said in […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are asking the Clinton administration to”act boldly”and quickly to ban the production, sale and use of anti-personnel land mines.”The United States should move quickly and unambiguously to ban the production, sale and use of anti-personnel land mines,”Bishop Daniel P. Reilly of Worcester, Mass., said in a letter to Anthony Lake, President Clinton’s national security adviser. Reilly chairs the international policy committee of the U.S. Catholic Conference, the U.S. bishops’ social policy arm.

The bishops’ call came as the United Nations began a two-week meeting today (April 22) in Geneva to rewrite the land-mines protocol of the 1980 treaty on Certain Conventional Weapons. The meeting opened with a renewed appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for a total ban on what he called”loathsome weapons.””We must ban the use of land mines. We must ban their production,”Boutros-Ghali was quoted by the Associated Press


On the eve of the meeting, Pope John Paul II called on the governments meeting in Geneva to ban the production, trade and use of land mines-which he called”weapons of death.””We are talking about tens of millions of such weapons in many parts of the world, in particularly Cambodia, Angola, Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina,”John Paul said Sunday (April 21) in his weekly address to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter’s Square.

Estimates from the United Nations, the U.S. government and aid agencies indicate that land mines kill or wound 26,000 people a year, mostly civilians. It is estimated that more than 100 million mines are scattered in some 60 countries, ranging from Angola, Mozambique and Cambodia to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kuwait.

Handicap International, a Paris-based nonprofit agency that aids mine victims, estimates that Cambodia has more than 35,000 amputees as a result of mine explosions-one of every 200 Cambodians.

Although 26 governments have called for a comprehensive ban on mines, few religious advocates of the ban expect action at the Geneva conference to lead to the abolition of land mines.”I think the case (against mines) is being won … (but) not in this particular meeting,”David Atwood of the Quaker United Nations Office told Ecumenical News International, the World Council of Churches-based news agency.

China, India and Pakistan, which use land mines to protect their borders, are among the nations that oppose an overall ban. Russia, a major producer of the deadly devices, also has expressed reservations about a ban.

The United States and Great Britain are pushing for commitment to so-called”smart mines,”which self-destruct after a certain period, thus minimizing their danger to civilians after a conflict is ended.

The United States has instituted a one-year moratorium on mine use beginning in 1999 and a three-year mine export ban.


Clinton endorsed the renunciation of land mines two years ago but has not committed to a date. On Friday (April 19), The Washington Post said the administration is considering a proposal to stop using land mines by 2010.

Reilly, however, said such a date was inadequate.”A decision to ban land mines at some date beyond this decade fails to reflect adequately the moral urgency and human stakes in the continued use of land mines,”he wrote Lake.”… To postpone into the next century a ban on land mines could hurt the cause we share (eventually ending their production and use) and reduce the credibility of the U.S. in the global struggle to ban land mines.” Other religious voices in the growing international campaign to ban the production and use of mines have come from such diverse quarters as the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, and the church council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

In a message to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which is organizing non-governmental groups in Geneva, the Dalai Lama said”the terrible toll that land mines take clearly (shows) the immense destruction and suffering these awful weapons are capable of causing.”The ethical aspect of compassion is to refrain from harming others-not just fellow human beings but all living beings,”the Dalai Lama said.”That is why it is important that we try to inculcate the value of compassion in our hearts while making efforts to ban destructive weapons, such as land mines.” The church council of the Chicago-headquartered ELCA, the denomination’s highest decision-making body between churchwide assemblies, voted at its April 13-15 meeting”to support the call for an international ban on the use, production, stockpiling and sale, transfer or export of anti-personnel land mines.””This is a beginning step for our church,”said the Rev. Will Herzfeld, associate executive director of the church’s Division for Global Mission.”I hope it can move us from rhetoric to action. Now we need to look for ways in which our church can be proactive in helping to rid the world of these destructive weapons.” Religious activists gathered in Geneva have called for interfaith prayers over the April 26-28 weekend in support of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a 4-year-old umbrella organization of 400 human rights, religious, humanitarian, medical and environmental groups in 40 countries.

MJP END ANDERSON

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