Banning Land Mines Is a No-Brainer

Maybe she shouldn’t have called him a “weenie.” After all, he is the president of the United States, and Jody Williams, the land mine crusader, is now a Nobel Laureate. But her outrage is fully justified.

Bill Clinton is the leading opponent of the Ottawa treaty to ban land mines, which kill or maim 26,000 people a year, 87% of them innocent civilians. It is expected to be signed by 100 countries in December. When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition of more than 1,000 groups that have worked to eliminate this scourge, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin had the audacity to claim: “It is not American land mines that are blowing up little children.”

What sanctimonious swill. Who does he think left behind the tons of “unexploded ordnance” that turned the rice paddies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into a deadly obstacle course for innocent farmers and their children?

The campaign against land mines began with Robert Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, who lost the use of his legs as a Marine during the Vietnam War. He returned to Vietnam during the 1980s to help provide prosthetics for Vietnamese amputees and was shocked to learn that the majority of them were civilians wounded by land mines after the war. His group, along with five other human rights organizations, hired Williams in 1991 to launch an international crusade.

Land mines not originally made in America are likely to be from China or Russia. In response to the peace prize, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin came to his senses and announced support for the Ottawa treaty, while China and the U.S. still insist that these weapons have a legitimate military purpose.

Clinton points to the heavily mined buffer zone between North and South Korea as if we have no other means to restrain a crumbling North Korean army that we are now helping to feed. This zone was created to stop communist China, now a favored trading buddy.

The main purpose of land mines is to terrorize civilian populations. That’s how the Khmer Rouge use them in Cambodia, a nation of 9 million people and 6 million land mines. The day after the Nobel prize was announced, Khmer Rouge radio boasted of having just planted more mines. It didn’t say whether they were communist Chinese or democratic American weapons, and it is not likely that kids maimed by them would care. Perhaps the State Department’s Rubin is unaware that we have been silent partners of the Chinese in backing the genocidal Khmer Rouge and their land mines for most of the past 20 years.

“What planet do they live on?” asked Richard Walden of Operation USA, one of the organizations honored by the Nobel committee, referring to the Clinton administration’s claims of innocence.

In June, I was with Walden in Cambodia and got a crash course in land mine clearance, an excruciatingly tedious and dangerous activity with land cleared inch by inch. Brave teams crawl about, poking sticks into foliage to locate trip wires or digging gently into the earth to find the perimeter of a mine without exploding it. It’s all too common for them to fail and be added to the long list of those who will be sacrificed before the 100 million mines throughout the world are cleared.

One of the letters nominating Williams for the Nobel prize was written by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.), who met her when she was working in El Salvador. “I remember kids lined up in front of Salvadoran hospitals as [far] as you could see, waiting in hopes of getting arms or legs. It was a turning point for both of us,” McGovern said.

It was images like that in Angola that moved Princess Diana, and Muller says it was Diana’s death, reminding us of her commitment to banning land mines, “that brought this issue to mass public consciousness.” But not the president’s. Clinton knows these weapons should be banned and indeed proposed just that in a speech to the U.N. in 1994. But he soon lost the courage to oppose Pentagon and Senate hawks on the issue. “I think it’s tragic,” Williams said, “that President Clinton does not want to be on the side of humanity.”

Since the president is impervious to the human costs of these terrible weapons, perhaps one of his sharper advisors can convince him that coming out against land mines, even at this late date, would score political points. How can he lose by lining up with Pope John Paul II, Jimmy Carter, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and now the Nobel Peace Prize committee and the International Red Cross? That’s an argument even a political weenie can endorse.