Pentagon Seeks Funds for New Type of Land Mine

The Clinton administration is seeking nearly $50 million from Congress this year for a new type of artillery-fired land mine system designed to blow up both tanks and people, which would violate an international treaty that the president had pledged to try and sign someday.

Land mine opponents say the surprise budget request raises questions about whether President Clinton has quietly given up trying to comply with a global accord to ban the indiscriminate explosives, though a Pentagon official Friday denied that that was the case.

“This is the typical Clinton rope-a-dope strategy,” said Michael Leaveck, associate director of the Vietnam Veterans of America, part of a coalition of groups pushing for the United States to join a treaty so far signed by 133 nations. “He started off very sincere on the land mine problem.”

The global land mine ban goes into effect on March 1, when the clock starts ticking for participating nations to destroy antipersonnel land mine stockpiles within four years and get them out of the field within 10 years. The U.S. has refused to sign the accord adopted in Ottawa in 1997, arguing that it needs antipersonnel mines to protect South Korea from North Korea, and to keep enemies from creeping up and disabling its antitank mines.

In the kickoff of a new campaign, 12 Americans who lost limbs to land mines, from Nazi Germany to Bosnia, plan to ceremonially remove their prostheses and hang them on the White House gate on March 1 to protest the U.S. refusal to sign the ban.

Clinton has said the government would eliminate antipersonnel mines everywhere but on the Korean Peninsula by 2003, and then at that frontier by 2006--if alternatives could be found. Though land mine opponents in Congress and in the activist movement are unhappy with this stand, they say the president’s 2000 defense budget request casts doubt on even that conditional commitment to the Ottawa treaty.

James Schear, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, said the new system is more efficient because the two mines would be fired as a single unit, and would eliminate the military’s reliance on stand-alone antipersonnel mines, which he said is one of Clinton’s goals toward treaty compliance.

“This system is a more humanitarian alternative to the existing suite of systems that we now have,” he said, in that it would eliminate mines targeted strictly at people. He said it is an important fallback if the military is unable to meet the president’s goal of coming up with an alternative to land mines targeted at people.

Buried in the budget proposal is a request that would authorize $48.3 million to be spent on a system that would combine in a single artillery canister an existing antipersonnel mine with an antitank mine--the first phase of a project that ultimately would total nearly $200 million.

The system--called RADAM, a merger of the acronyms of the two mines it would combine--would be fired by artillery in front of approaching enemy tanks. Currently, the military separately fires an antipersonnel mine and an antitank mine at the same general spot on the battlefield.

Antipersonnel mines are small, sensitive devices designed to wound or kill; antitank mines, which are not covered by the treaty, are much larger.

“This move just sends the wrong signal,” said Tom O’Donnell, an aide to U.S. Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.), a vocal critic of Clinton’s land mine stand. “You made a commitment. Let’s get on with it. To me, [the mine system proposal] is very inflammatory.”

Production Decision Won’t Be Until 2001

Land mine opponents say they’re surprised that the Pentagon is seeking procurement money when the decision on actual production won’t be made until 2001, said Tim Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who supports the Ottawa treaty.

“Sen. Leahy appreciates and supports the Pentagon’s efforts to find alternatives to antipersonnel mines, but an approach which simply repackages mines which are prohibited under Ottawa is not a solution,” he said.

Stephen Goose, arms program director for Human Rights Watch, said the Pentagon’s contention that RADAM is a transitional device to a mine-free world nevertheless “creates the very odd situation where the Pentagon is saying we are going to get to a ban on antipersonnel mines by producing a new antipersonnel mine system.”

Schear said the project could well be dropped if the Defense Department comes up with alternatives to the tactic of protecting antitank mines with antipersonnel mines.

“I understand the critics,” Schear said. “I would agree it does not technically meet Ottawa standards. The objective is to protect our soldiers.”

National Security Council spokesman P. J. Crowley said the fact that the program was in the budget doesn’t indicate any lessening of Clinton’s dedication to banning antipersonnel mines. “No one should doubt our commitment to developing and fielding suitable alternatives,” he said.

Non-Signers Include Russia, China, India

Though the Ottawa convention includes all NATO nations except the U.S. and Turkey, and every country in the Western hemisphere except the U.S. and Cuba, some heavily armed powers have also refused to sign, including Russia, China, India, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

Leahy is hosting a press conference for the 12 land mine victims who plan to gather outside the White House on March 1 to mark the first day of the treaty. Churches in scores of states and countries have been enlisted to toll their bells that day to mark the commencement of the treaty.

Among the people who hope to meet with Clinton that day is Jerry White, co-director of the Landmines Survivors Network in Washington. White, a 35-year-old father of four, was a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem when he stepped on a mine while hiking in 1984. It blew off his right foot and damaged his left leg.

Despite the reluctance of the world’s most populous nations to sign the accord, agencies involved in monitoring the effects of the land mine movement say there have been concrete reductions in the devices that are estimated to kill or maim 25,000 people annually, most of them noncombatants.

Of the 133 countries that have signed the treaty, 64 have ratified it and more are expected to follow suit before the signatories meet in May in Mozambique, said Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch.

Rebel groups aren’t eligible to agree to stop laying mines, only governments. Liberia, torn by years of factional fighting and forgotten minefields, hasn’t signed. Angola signed but there is evidence it is again laying mines, Goose said.

Yet many countries, from Canada to South Africa, have destroyed thousands of mines and even countries that haven’t signed the accord, like the United States and Russia, have made substantial improvements to reduce them or eliminate certain types, Goose said. The United States now only uses mines that self-destruct or deactivate and has spent more than $150 million for global efforts to eliminate mines.

Exports have almost stopped completely in the last four years and between 10 million and 15 million land mines have been destroyed from stockpiles, said Goose.