c. 1996 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON (RNS)-When the United Nations-sponsored conference reviewing international law on the use of land mines ended earlier this month, Swedish diplomat Johan Molander, who chaired the meeting, hailed it as”an important achievement in international humanitarian law.” But Molander’s upbeat assessment of the two-week, 55-nation conference in Geneva, Switzerland, was not shared by many of the religious and humanitarian aid agencies that have been leading a campaign to ban all production, export and use of anti-personnel land mines.
The campaign, endorsed by more than 500 organizations in 60 countries, has sought to make the mines the moral equivalent of poison gas after World War I-weapons outside the bounds of war.
Fueled by declarations from more than 30 governments renouncing the production or use of land mines, these groups looked to the Geneva conference as an opportunity to ban the weapon once and for all.
According to U.N. and U.S. State Department officials, an estimated 110 million land mines are strewn in some 60 countries around the world, from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Sudan to Mozambique, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Approximately 24,000 people, most of them civilians, are killed or maimed each year from land mines left over from previous conflicts.
At Geneva, however, governments rejected the outright ban and instead adopted a series of restrictions on the production, export and use of mines. The non-governmental organizations said the new rules will do little to ease the problem.
The new rules require that mines be made detectable and, in some cases, capable of self-destruction, so-called”smart”mines. The rules also impose some new export restrictions and limit sales to governments.
Military strategists defend continued use of the mines as a defensive measure that saves the lives of troops and protects borders and facilities from enemies.
Michael J. Matheson, who headed the U.S. government delegation at the talks, hailed the agreement in words similar to Molander’s, calling it”an important first step”toward eventual elimination of the weapon.
But Eric Roethlisberger, vice president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said his organization considered the new restrictions”woefully inadequate.”The horror of the immense human suffering caused by land mines is set to continue, and amended (rules) will do little to change this situation,”he said.
David Radcliff, the Church of the Brethren’s director of Denominational Peace Witness, said governments at the conference had”given in to the interests of nations and arms suppliers whose decisions are driven more by economics than morality.” The Rev. Ishmael Noko, general secretary of the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation (LWF), one of the main religious groups involved in the international campaign to ban land mines, said he was”extremely disappointed”at the failure of the conference to enact a total ban.”The LWF is distressed that this agreement places virtually no curbs on the production, transfer and use of anti-personnel land mines,”Noko said.”It fails to address the main concern of reducing human suffering, as well as the deep social, economic and environmental effects of land-mine pollution.” Noko said”numerous exceptions and ambiguous formulations”in the new rules will make their implementation”very difficult.” Because there will not be another meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons Review Conference for another five years, the ban campaign is turning to a country-by-country strategy, with the United States at the top of the list of nations whose policy it hopes to influence.
The new tactic was signaled Monday (May 13), when the U.S. Catholic Conference released a letter to President Clinton from Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, urging Clinton to”offer strong, unmistakable and convincing leadership”in the global effort to ban land mines.”The disappointing results of the Geneva review conference only reinforce the need for the United States to lead by example in stigmatizing these indiscriminate weapons,”Pilla said in the letter.
Pilla’s letter came amid reports that Clinton, who has supported an eventual ban on the use of the weapon, is ready to support a ban within several years if it includes some exceptions such as continued use of mines to protect borders and troops in Korea and the Persian Gulf.
But Pilla said such a compromise was unacceptable.”Efforts that further restrict land mines, but which fail to ban them, will not resolve the moral and humanitarian problems with these weapons,”he wrote Clinton.”A decision by the United States to renounce their use, but only in certain circumstances and at some date well in the future, would fail to reflect adequately the moral and human consequences of continued use and would undermine the credibility of U.S. efforts to seek a global ban,”Pilla said.
LJB END ANDERSON
