[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 128 (Tuesday, September 23, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9778-S9781]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          LANDMINE BAN TREATY

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, last week, President Clinton announced that 
the United States would not join nearly 100 nations, including most of 
our NATO allies, in a treaty to ban antipersonnel landmines.
  I want to take a few minutes to respond to the President's decision. 
First, let me say that President Clinton and I have spoken many times 
about the landmine issue. I am convinced he wants to see these weapons 
banned from the face of the Earth. He and I have discussed the 
horrendous toll of innocent lives that landmines cause, and in speeches 
at the United Nations he has twice called for a worldwide ban.
  President Clinton said, ``The United States will lead a global effort 
to eliminate these terrible weapons and stop the enormous loss of human 
life.'' Those were inspiring words. However, as convinced as I am of 
the President's desire for a ban, I am as convinced that a tremendous 
opportunity was lost last week. An opportunity that rarely comes in 
history.
  As a USA Today editorial put it, ``having blown the best chance ever 
to negotiate an acceptable international ban on landmines, the Clinton 
administration now finds itself churning in the wake of world affairs. 
The United States has joined a few nations, including rogue states like 
Iran and Iraq, on the outside of a remarkable process.''
  There are many losers in the administration's last-minute failed 
attempt to negotiate in Oslo. Unfortunately, the most notable losers 
were the innocent victims of landmines who the treaty aims to protect. 
Mr. President, the victims of landmines are almost invariably children 
and innocent civilians.
  Because while the treaty is immensely important for establishing a 
new norm of conduct, until the United States signs it, there will never 
be a worldwide ban. There is simply no substitute for the credibility 
and influence of the United States to bring reluctant nations on board 
and make sure that violators of the treaty are caught and punished. 
There is no way to fully stigmatize these weapons and curtail the use, 
as has been done with poison gas, without U.S. leadership far stronger 
than we have seen today.
  And the tragedy of our country's decision is that it was avoidable. 
Although the President said his administration had gone the extra mile 
to find an acceptable compromise in Oslo, I must respectfully and 
honestly disagree.
  Two weeks ago I went to Oslo where I met with representatives of 
governments, including the United States, and nongovernmental 
organizations that were participating in the treaty negotiations.
  The treaty they adopted was nothing short of a miracle. In less than 
a year, nations as diverse as our closest European allies who have been 
major producers of landmines, to Mozambique whose people have been 
killed and maimed by landmines, joined together in finalizing a treaty 
that does nothing less than ban the use, production, stockpiling, and 
transfer of a category of weapons that Civil War General William 
Tecumseh Sherman called ``a violation of civilized warfare'' over a 
century ago.
  I call the Ottawa Treaty a miracle because it was only 11 months ago 
that Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy launched what is now 
called the ``Ottawa process.'' At the time, no one knew how many 
nations would take part or where it would lead, not even Minister 
Axworthy. It was a bold and courageous leap of faith, and the

[[Page S9779]]

same kind of leadership I and so many others hoped to see from the 
White House last week.
  The Ottawa Treaty culminates two decades of failed attempts to deal 
effectively with the landmine problem. Two decades ago many of the same 
nations that gathered in Oslo met in Geneva to draft a treaty to 
address the growing concerns of the effects of landmines on civilian 
populations. Landmines had been widely used in Southeast Asia, and they 
were being sown like seed in Afghanistan and Central America and many 
African countries. Vast areas were being laid to waste with the 
innocents paying the horrifying price. I have seen victims, all over 
the world, of these indiscriminate weapons.
  My wife is a registered nurse and has visited the hospitals where the 
amputations take place, where broken bodies are put back together as 
best can be done in countries where medical care is often rudimentary.
  That treaty, however--the Conventional Weapons Convention--utterly 
failed to achieve its goal. It was doomed to fail because of the fact 
that landmines are inherently incapable of distinguishing between 
civilians and combatants, and that fact was never even acknowledged in 
Geneva, much less addressed. Instead, in diplomatic niceties, by people 
who would never have to face landmines themselves, they adopted vague 
limits of how mines could be used. Those limits were then routinely 
ignored. In the years since then, the devastation inflicted by 
landmines on innocent people, often the poorest people in the world, 
has increased dramatically. In fact, Mr. President, it was the 
widespread recognition of the failure of that treaty which led to the 
Conventional Weapons Review Conference 2 years ago. Finally, it seemed 
there could no longer be any excuse for doing whatever was necessary to 
stop the carnage wrought by landmines.

  That was the hope. Unfortunately, the reality was a lot different. 
Rather than devise a roadmap for ridding the world of these weapons, 
governments, including our own, fought for the right to use them. The 
idea of a ban was barely mentioned. The amended protocol, while 
preferable to the original, did far more to reaffirm the legitimacy of 
landmines than to stop their use. Once again, governments had failed to 
act with anything like the decisiveness that was called for.
  So it is important to remember that the Ottawa process evolved only 
after years of failed attempts by governments to solve this problem in 
the traditional way. There was no shortage of impassioned speeches 
about the harm landmines were causing the innocent. But the expressions 
of outrage were qualified with the assertion that the problem wasn't 
the mines themselves, but other people, always other people, who used 
them irresponsibly. You would think it was a tea party rather than arms 
control. And the carnage, of course, continued.
  But we hear those same arguments today. The same failed arguments of 
a decade ago. Today when a Pentagon official was asked about the tens 
of thousands of American landmine casualties in Vietnam, he said that 
was no longer relevant because ``smart'' mines had ``solved their 
problem.''
  Of course, they have not solved it. Almost no one besides the United 
States uses those mines. In Bosnia, more than 250 U.N. and NATO 
soldiers and thousands of civilians have been injured or killed today 
by the same types of mines used in Vietnam a generation ago.
  As I have said so many times, an effective international agreement 
based on stigmatizing a weapon cannot have different standards for 
different nations. The importance of this principle cannot be 
overstated. It is what underlies any international agreement.
  When the Princess of Wales spoke about the insidious toll of 
landmines, she said, ``Before I went to Angola, I knew the facts, but 
the reality was a shock.'' Unfortunately, the reality that Princess 
Diana saw was a reality which far too few government officials have 
experienced, including many people at the Pentagon. When people have 
gone with me and seen the carnage caused by landmines, they have a new 
understanding.
  A year ago, after the President urged all nations to complete a ban 
treaty ``as soon as possible,'' it became clear that the administration 
was not willing to show the kind of leadership that was necessary to 
turn those words into reality.
  Instead, other countries, led by Canada and hundreds of 
nongovernmental organizations, stepped into the void. In a matter of 
months we saw the number of nations participating in the Ottawa process 
exceed 100, including many nations that were producers and exporters 
and users of antipersonnel mines.
  Those nations came together determined to overcome past failures 
because they knew about those failures. Many had suffered the effects 
of landmines because of those failures. They came together to do the 
only thing that could solve the landmine problem--ban the types of 
landmines that are triggered by an innocent footstep, ban them without 
exception, ban them without reservation. And they wanted the United 
States to be part of it. When I was in Oslo I found a genuine desire to 
try to accommodate the United States, if it could be done without 
weakening the treaty.
  But the administration seriously underestimated the worldwide 
commitment for a ban. For months, the White House belittled the Ottawa 
process. Since it wasn't their idea, they refused to take it seriously. 
And rather than throw the weight of the United States behind Canada to 
help achieve something unprecedented in history, something that would 
have taken both courage and imagination, the administration tried to 
talk other governments out of taking part.
  They wasted valuable time by pursuing negotiations in the U.N. 
Conference on Disarmament even when it was clear that avenue was 
blocked. They said the United States would only give up its mines if 
all nations did, knowing that, like the chemical weapons treaty, there 
is no chance of that happening for decades. And when they finally 
decided at the 11th hour to go to Oslo, they went with demands that had 
no chance of being accepted, and little flexibility to negotiate.
  Any of the nations in Oslo that have pledged to sign the Ottawa 
treaty could make a stronger case to continue using these weapons than 
the world's only superpower. Basically, the United States went to Oslo 
and said: we are the most powerful Nation on earth, but we can't give 
up our anti-personnel mines because we have better technology, but you 
less powerful nations, you should give up your mines.
  Well, Mr. President, the Pentagon is, understandably, deeply 
reluctant to give up a weapon that has some utility--and it does--even 
if doing so would pressure others to end the suffering of innocent 
people. Like any government department, the Pentagon's job is to 
protect its options. It has always resisted giving up weapons, from 
countermanding General Pershing in the 1920's at the first Geneva 
convention when he wanted to ban poison gas, to nuclear testing in the 
1990's. If a Pentagon official is asked what he or she needs, the 
answer is always ``more.'' More firepower might mean fewer casualties, 
so the Pentagon has resisted the pressure to give up antipersonnel 
landmines.
  The President is constantly faced with departments that do not want 
to cut their budget or eliminate programs. That is why he has the 
National Security bureaucracy, to make those hard decisions. In the 
case of weapons of mass destruction like nuclear and chemicals weapons, 
his advisers have found ways to work closely with the Pentagon to find 
creative solutions.
  But when issue of landmines reached the surface a year and a half 
ago, nobody in the administration was willing to aggressively challenge 
and prod the Pentagon into finding a workable solution. Without that 
prodding, the Joint Chiefs put far more effort into blocking the U.S. 
from joining the ban than into planning how to live with it--even 
though there were those in the Pentagon who at least were honest enough 
to privately point out the fallacies in the assumptions underlying the 
Pentagon's own arguments.
  As recently as a few weeks ago--and the Pentagon did not serve the 
White House well in this--White House officials were not even aware of 
the weaknesses in the Pentagon's doomsday predictions about the 
consequences of removing antipersonnel mines from Korea, or even aware 
of the fact that the Pentagon was, at least internally, divided over 
some of the same arguments they had made at the White House.

[[Page S9780]]

  They did not even have a thorough grasp of the treaty's provisions. 
Right up until the end, there were those in the administration who were 
unaware that the treaty effectively grants a twelve-year grace period 
for removing existing minefields, such as in Korea. Last week, the 
Secretary of Defense wrote in the Washington Post that ``millions'' of 
lives could be lost if the U.S. signed the treaty because North Korea 
might interpret our signing as a loss of resolve and start a war 
because of it. Good Lord, Mr. President. This is as bad as ``the 
Russians are coming, the Russians are coming'' scenario we heard, even 
as the Russian army was collapsing internally. Not only is that about 
that as far-fetched as any dire Pentagon prediction I have heard yet--
and that includes its assessment of the Red Army that was fit to 
conquer the world--it could not even conquer Chechnya--it ignores the 
conclusion of every serious Pentagon analyst that a North Korean 
invasion would be destroyed, with or without antipersonnel landmines, 
before it could traverse 50 miles down narrow, pre-targeted mountain 
passes to Seoul. If antipersonnel landmines are going to determine the 
fate of South Korea, South Korea ought to surrender. But the fact is, 
South Korea has a far better trained, better equipped army, is better 
motivated than North Korea, and is backed by the might of the most 
powerful Nation on earth. A North Korean invasion would be suicidal, 
and they know it and everyone knows it. A former commander of our 
forces in Korea says scattering landmines there would impede the 
mobility of our own forces, and inflict casualties on our own troops.
  But it does not even matter, because the other countries in Oslo were 
prepared to try to accommodate U.S. concerns on Korea. Had the White 
House not waited until the last minute to get involved, a solution 
could have been found. In fact, many of us told them that months ago.

  Over 60 Members of the U.S. Senate, Republicans and Democrats, 
including every veteran of combat in the Vietnam war, have signed onto 
legislation to ban antipersonnel landmines. In fact, Mr. President, the 
Leahy-Hagel bill would do no more than what Great Britain, Germany, 
South Africa, France, and a lot of other nations have already pledged 
to do, over the objections of some of their own armed forces. In fact, 
it does not go as far because it gives the President broad flexibility 
on Korea, which the Pentagon has called a unique situation--``the Cold 
War's last frontier.'' The Pentagon said they need time to take care of 
Korea. Our legislation gives them more time than they need.
  I was encouraged by the President's statement last week that he wants 
to work with Congress. I welcome that, and I thank him for the kind 
words he spoke about my efforts. I really do believe that he wants to 
see a worldwide ban on landmines. I have always supported efforts to 
negotiate an international export ban in the U.N. Conference on 
Disarmament.
  But, Mr. President, the clock is ticking, and there should be no 
mistake. The Ottawa treaty is the only hope for achieving a 
comprehensive worldwide ban on these weapons. There is no other treaty. 
If the United States does not sign in December, we have to find a way 
to sign at the earliest possible time.
  That is not going to happen as long as the Pentagon pretends that a 
weapon it called an antipersonnel landmine a few months ago, and which 
the President pledged to ban a year ago, has suddenly, miraculously, 
overnight become no longer an antipersonnel mine if it's placed near an 
antitank mine. They tried that in Oslo; they tried to change the 
definition. It would have invited any nation in the world to use 
antipersonnel mines--dumb, smart, just average, or any type--
indefinitely, as long as they were in the vicinity of an antitank mine. 
It was a terrible idea and literally a loophole big enough to fly a 747 
through.
  If the use of antipersonnel mines near antitank mines is what 
prevents the United States from signing the treaty, then solve it. We 
run a little Rover around on Mars. If we can do that, we can solve this 
problem. If the Pentagon had spent the past three years since the 
President first called for a worldwide ban really trying to solve that 
problem rather than to keep from having to solve it, the United States 
might have been able to show the leadership on this issue that the 
world needs and, frankly, the world wants.
  This is not a public relations problem to be managed. This is not 
about trying to find some way to convince a focus group. It is not a 
question of valuing the lives of American soldiers more or less than 
the lives and limbs of innocent civilians. Both soldiers and civilians 
will benefit from a landmine ban. It is about the one nation on this 
planet, whose power and influence and moral authority are unmatched, 
the nation that I am proud to serve in the U.S. Senate. It is about 
this nation seizing the best opportunity there is ever going to be to 
deal with a problem that is needlessly plaguing so many countries.
  Staying outside this treaty is not an option. We have to be part of 
it, if not now, then we need to do what needs to be done to become part 
of it.
  I might note, Mr. President, that Japan, which like the U.S. also 
expressed concerns about the treaty in Oslo, is apparently 
reconsidering its position and may sign in Ottawa after all. I wrote to 
their foreign minister saying I hope they do this. It would be 
extremely significant, as many Asian nations look to Japan for 
leadership.
  President Clinton also spoke of efforts the United States is making 
to help other nations get rid of landmines, and to aid the victims. I 
join him in that. But I remind the President and the Pentagon that each 
of these efforts was started by the Congress. They are vitally 
important, and I welcome the President's announcement that he wants to 
expand them. But even expanding something like the Leahy War Victims 
Fund is no substitute for putting an end to the use of these weapons.

  I want the United States to show the kind of leadership that is 
expected of the world's leading democracy, the greatest democracy 
history has ever known. The United States was a founder of the League 
of Nations and the United Nations. We have been a leading force in 
every significant humanitarian law treaty and arms control treaty in 
history. Leadership by definition means taking risks. It means having 
the faith and courage to seize an opportunity that comes rarely in 
history and rejecting the conventional wisdom, and taking a dramatic 
step.
  The chemical weapons treaty would not exist had it not been for the 
United States taking such a step. The nuclear test ban treaty would not 
exist without our leadership.
  The United States showed its capacity for greatness with the Marshall 
Plan. We didn't say we would rebuild Europe ``except for this country 
or that country.'' We said all should benefit, including our former 
enemies. I am proud of what my country did then, and I want to see the 
same kind of leadership now.
  The Ottawa treaty will be signed in December. There is still time for 
the White House to reconsider. Fourteen Nobel laureates sent a letter 
to President Clinton last week urging him to reconsider. There is still 
time to aggressively engage the Pentagon on the technical issues that 
have prevented the President from agreeing to sign. If we do not have a 
plan for solving them by December, then get busy and solve them. At 
least commit to signing it at a future date. That is what the world 
needs to hear. It is the least we can do.
  Mr. President, the Ottawa treaty will set a moral standard for the 
next century that even those nations who do not sign will ignore at the 
risk of being condemned as international outlaws. It will be a tribute 
to those nations who recognize the urgency that this humanitarian 
crisis demands. The treaty ends the 20th century, the bloodiest in 
history, in a way in which the world can be justly proud. It is our 
gift to the next century. The United States should be part of it.
  I said in Oslo that my wife and I look forward, with great pleasure, 
to the birth of our first grandchild at the beginning of next year and, 
God willing, that child will live most of his or her life in the next 
century. My prayer is that it will be a century where armies of 
humanity dig up and destroy landmines and no one puts new ones down.
  I ask unanimous consent that the Nobel laureates' letter to the 
President be printed in the Record.

[[Page S9781]]

  There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:

                                               September 18, 1997.
       Dear President Clinton: We are writing to demonstrate our 
     support of the many other individuals and organizations 
     urging the United States government to sign a treaty for a 
     comprehensive ban on anti-personnel landmines along with 100 
     other nations scheduled to meet in Ottawa this December.
       Mr. President, we ask you to reflect on repercussions of 
     your final decision on this matter. We are aware that you 
     plan to condition your approval of the ban on the inclusion 
     of certain exceptions considered vital to U.S. security 
     interests and in the best interest of military personnel. 
     Consider for a moment the dangerous precedent that would be 
     set if the United States asks for concessions. Indecision by 
     a world superpower is sure to undermine the long effort to 
     reach this ban, only leading to further delays.
       It is clear that every additional week of delay will leave 
     hundreds of innocent men, women, and children dead or maimed 
     due to these devices whose military value is highly 
     questionable. The recently publicized 1972 US Army report 
     vividly describes the terrible toll US anti-personnel 
     landmines have taken on its own soldiers during the Korean 
     and Vietnam conflicts.
       We, Nobel Peace Laureates, are joining the Albert 
     Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities, named after the 
     renowned humanist and Nobel Peace laureate Dr. Albert 
     Schweitzer, and the Connecticut Coalition to Abolish 
     Landmines in the international call to ban landmines. We add 
     our collective voice to that of many other individuals, 
     organizations and governments who strongly support this ban.
       As the leader of a major world power, it is in your hands 
     to demonstrate courageous leadership and endorse the 
     comprehensive ban on landmines.
         Donald S. Gann, on behalf of American Friends Service 
           Committee, 1947; Dr. Norman E. Borlaug, 1970; Mairead 
           Maguire, 1976; Betty Williams, 1976; Mother Theresa, 
           1979 (verbal agreement given three days before her 
           death); Adolfo Perez Esquivel, 1980; Lech Walesa, 1983; 
           The Most Rev. Desmond Tutu, 1984; Dr. Gurwarj Mutalik, 
           on behalf of International Physicians for the 
           Prevention of Nuclear War, 1985; Elie Wiesel, 1986; 
           Oscar Arias Sanchez, 1987; Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 1990; 
           Joseph Rotblat, on behalf of Pugwash Conferences on 
           Science and World Affairs, 1995; Bishop Carlos Felipe 
           Belo, 1996; Jose Ramos Horta, 1996.

           

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