[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 99 (Tuesday, June 24, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3907-S3910]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            MINE BAN TREATY

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, yesterday in Maputo, Mozambique, 
representatives of many of the 161 countries that have joined the 
treaty banning the production, stockpiling, export, and use of 
antipersonnel landmines convened the third review conference in the 15 
years since the treaty came into force.
  The impact of that treaty, once ridiculed as a naive dream by many in 
the U.S. defense establishment, has been extraordinary. The vast 
majority of landmine use and production has stopped. New casualties 
have dropped significantly. Many countries have cleared the mined areas 
in their territories.
  Of the 35 countries that have not yet joined the treaty, including 
the United States, almost all abide by its provisions. We can be proud 
that the United States has been the largest contributor to programs to 
clear mines and to help mine victims. Those programs have saved 
countless lives. In fact, the Leahy War Victims Fund was first used in 
Mozambique.
  But I remember during the negotiations on the treaty how officials in 
the U.S. administration at the time urged, even warned, their 
counterparts in other countries, including our NATO allies, against 
signing the treaty. In the end, every member of NATO except the United 
States joined it.
  Some in our government said it was a meaningless gesture that would 
accomplish nothing. I think they resented that other governments, 
especially Canada, and nongovernmental organizations from around the 
world could achieve something outside the U.N. negotiation process, 
which had utterly failed to address this problem.
  Instead, the treaty has already accomplished more than most people 
expected, thanks to the extraordinary advocacy of the International 
Campaign to Ban Landmines and three-quarters of the world's 
governments, many of whose people have suffered from the scourge of 
landmines.
  But the problem is far from solved. There are still thousands of 
deaths and injuries from mines each year, and most are innocent 
civilians.
  Twenty years ago this week, in a speech at the United Nations that 
inspired people around the world, President Clinton called for a global 
ban on antipersonnel mines. I was proud of President Clinton for doing 
that, but his Presidency, his administration, was outmaneuvered by the 
Pentagon, and it failed to join the treaty. Then, during the 8 years of 
the last Bush administration, nothing happened. In fact, during those 
years, the White House reneged on some of the pledges of the Clinton 
administration.
  When President Obama was elected, I thought we would finally see the 
United States get on the right side of this issue. After all, we fought 
two long wars without using antipersonnel mines. All our NATO allies 
and most of our coalition partners have banned them.
  But that has not happened.
  Now we rightly condemned, and I do condemn, the Taliban for using 
victim-activated IEDs, which are also banned by the treaty, but we 
still insist on retaining our right to use antipersonnel mines.
  Eighteen years ago, President Clinton charged the Pentagon to develop 
alternatives to antipersonnel mines. Instead, the Pentagon has fought 
every attempt to get rid of these indiscriminate weapons, even if they 
do not use them.
  As I have said many times, no one argues that antipersonnel mines 
have no military utility. Every weapon does. Poison gas has a military 
utility, but we outlawed it a century ago. Are we incapable of 
renouncing, as our closest allies have, tiny explosives that are the 
antithesis of precision-guided weapons, weapons we have rightly not 
used during two long wars, weapons that kill children and innocent 
civilians, and weapons that should bring condemnation to anybody using 
them?
  We talk about the importance of avoiding civilian casualties. We all 
believe in that. We have seen how civilian casualties can turn a local 
population against us. We do not export antipersonnel landmines. We do 
not use them. We can drive a robot on Mars by remote control, but we 
say we cannot solve this problem. It begs credulity.
  This is not an abstract issue. This girl is who I am talking about. I 
have met countless people like her. She is lucky. She survived, even 
though without hands and legs. Many others like her bleed to death.

[[Page S3908]]

  I have been to clinics in poor countries where, instead of soccer 
balls, they make artificial limbs like these. We support them with the 
Leahy War Victims Fund. I am glad we can help, but I wish there was 
absolutely no need for that.
  I visited a young girl in a hospital after the Bosnia war. Her 
parents had sent her away so she could be safe. The war ended. The 
soldiers returned home. She was running down the road calling out to 
her parents, and she stepped on a mine. Both her legs were blown off. 
The war was over, but not for her.
  We recently sent people to that part of the world after flooding. 
Why? Because thousands of landmines still in the ground had washed up 
and moved around. Schoolchildren now face the danger again, because 
even though they had mapped where the landmines were that was before 
the floods.
  As in the past, the White House hides behind their failure to act by 
pointing at North Korea. Who is not concerned about North Korea? But 
are we so dependent on antipersonnel landmines that we cannot develop 
war plans to defend South Korea without them? I reject that just as 
former commanders of our forces in South Korea rejected it long ago.
  Last week, after a cursory 2-minute debate that inaccurately 
described the landmines in the Korean DMZ as U.S. mines, which they are 
not, and that inaccurately asserted, based on erroneous press reports, 
that the White House is about to join the mine ban treaty, which it is 
not, the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee adopted by voice 
vote a prohibition on the use of funds to implement the treaty.
  The amendment's sponsor even claimed that the one thing--the only 
thing--stopping a North Korean invasion is U.S. antipersonnel mines. 
Balderdash. Did the Pentagon tell them that? Of course not. I wonder 
how many, if any, Members of that subcommittee have even read the 
treaty.
  One would think, 61 years after the Korean war, that the Pentagon 
would not still be arguing that the defense of South Korea depends on 
tiny, indiscriminate explosives that would pose a threat to U.S. forces 
if we counterattacked. It makes you wonder.
  This country, with the most powerful army, that spends far more money 
on its armed forces than any country in the world, has to rely on 
antipersonnel landmines? Oh, come on.
  President Obama can still put the United States on a path to join the 
treaty, but time is running out. It will require some revision of our 
Korea war plans. That can be done in a manner that protects the 
security of South Korea and our troops. It needs to be done, because 
without the participation and support of the United States, the most 
powerful Nation on Earth, no international treaty can achieve its 
potential.

  I commend the participants at the Maputo review conference. I regret 
the United States is there only as an observer, as it has been since 
the Ottawa process began 18 years ago. We sit on the sidelines as 
though we have no role in this. What a missed opportunity, what a stain 
on the country that should be the moral leader.
  The next review conference is in 2019, the 25th anniversary of 
President Clinton's speech. What an anniversary it would be if that 
next review conference were held in Washington, with the United States 
attending as a party to the treaty.
  I ask unanimous consent that a June 22 article in the Boston Globe 
and a June 23 article in the New York Times on this subject be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From the Boston Globe, June 22, 2014]

          Formerly a Leader on Land Mine Ban, Obama Now Balks

                           (By Bryan Bender)

       Washington.--In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama wrote to a 
     constituent that he would use his influence to help advance 
     an international treaty banning land mines, decrying what he 
     called the ``horrific injuries and loss of life'' among 
     civilians long after wars end.
       But in his five-plus years as president, Obama has not 
     asked the US Senate to ratify the pact signed by 161 other 
     nations, showing an unwillingness to take on military 
     officials who assert that the devices, which the Pentagon 
     last used in battle in 1991, are still needed. Instead, his 
     administration has repeatedly delayed a review of the issue 
     initiated early in his first term.
       Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has spent 
     more than two decades directing federal funding to clear 
     minefields and provide victims with wheelchairs, prosthetics, 
     and job training, is so frustrated at Obama's lack of action 
     that he is complaining bitterly and publicly about it.
       ``I think of children who have gone to something shiny on 
     the side of the road thinking it was a toy and instead having 
     their legs blown off,'' Leahy said in a blunt floor speech in 
     late March, the first in a series he has delivered to focus 
     attention on the issue. ``President Obama, you know what you 
     should do.''
       Indeed, what is most vexing to many treaty supporters is 
     that the United States has done more than other countries to 
     address the problem, but still hasn't taken up the treaty.
       In addition to spending more than $2 billion over the last 
     two decades to reduce the threat and aid victims, the United 
     States has halted the production and export of so-called 
     ``persistent'' or ``dumb'' mines that have no disarming 
     mechanism and can remain a danger for unsuspecting villagers 
     for decades.
       ``The United States has actually probably lived up to about 
     90 percent of the requirements of the treaty,'' said Lloyd 
     Axworthy, the former foreign minister of Canada who hosted 
     the treaty negotiations, expressing incredulity that the 
     United States has nonetheless long resisted giving up the 
     weapons.
       Although it was among the first to call for a treaty 
     banning land mines, the United States is now the only member 
     of the NATO military alliance that has not joined the pact. 
     The only other nation in the Western Hemisphere to refuse is 
     Cuba. When treaty signatories meet on June 23 in Mozambique 
     to discuss ways to accelerate the destruction of mines as 
     well as strengthen the pact, the United States will attend 
     only as an observer.
       ``It was US leadership that really got the ball rolling,'' 
     said Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of 
     America Foundation, who was a key organizer of the original 
     movement to ban the weapons. ``But the United States is 
     shamefully behind the curve.''


                         The killing continues

       In late May, a six-year-old girl was killed and five other 
     villagers wounded in Myanmar when they came upon a land mine 
     near the border with Thailand.
       The same week the US State Department dispatched a ``quick 
     reaction force'' to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina where 
     flooding had dislodged land mines left over from the civil 
     war in the former Yugoslavia.
       Advocates for the ban believe America's continued 
     reluctance to embrace the treaty is slowing momentum to 
     render politically unacceptable a weapon that kills or 
     injures an estimated 10 people every day in the 60-some 
     countries where they remain in the ground. For example, US 
     allies Ukraine and Finland have recently signaled they might 
     withdraw from the treaty out of military necessity.
       Three dozen countries still remain outside the treaty, 
     according to a recent report by the Arms Control Association, 
     a nonprofit advocacy group, including the United States, 
     China, Russia, India, and Pakistan. Together they 
     collectively account for an estimated stockpile of 160 
     million landmines, while experts say there is no reliable way 
     to estimate how many landmines are still littering global 
     battlefields.


                       At first, some high hopes

       The ``Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, 
     Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines 
     and on Their Destruction'' was proposed in 1997, requiring 
     member nations to no longer use land mines, destroy all 
     remaining supplies, and remove those planted on their 
     territory.
       The so-called Ottawa Treaty was heralded as the first 
     global arms treaty to emerge from civil society, as opposed 
     to governments. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 
     a coalition of 1,400 nongovernmental organizations from 
     around the world--led by American Jody Williams--was awarded 
     the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the effort, which 
     also benefited from high-profile advocates like the late 
     Princess Diana.
       The treaty's unique evolution is viewed as a possible 
     reason why the American military brass is still resisting; 
     the thinking goes that commanders fear that giving up land 
     mines could encourage similar efforts by human rights groups 
     to seek to ban other types of controversial weapons, such as 
     drones.
       The United States initially was a leading advocate of the 
     pact; then-US President Bill Clinton called the land mine 
     problem ``a global tragedy.''
       ``In all probability, land mines kill more children than 
     soldiers, and they keep killing after wars are over,'' 
     Clinton said.
       But he opted not to sign the treaty and seek its 
     ratification after US military leaders insisted that they 
     needed time to develop alternatives to mines.
       The Bush administration also adhered to that position, 
     while the US Army began developing so-called ``smart'' mines 
     as a replacement, devices officials say are now ready to be 
     part of the arsenal.
       One alternative, called the Spider, is designed to detonate 
     only by command and to self-defuse after a limited period. It 
     is designed and built in part by Textron Systems

[[Page S3909]]

     in Wilmington, Mass. Textron officials did not respond to a 
     request for comment.
       When Obama came into office in 2009 there were high hopes 
     that he would seek to join the treaty; he instead ordered up 
     a review that has gone on for five years.
       Asked about the assessment, Edward Price, a spokesman for 
     the White House's National Security Council, said, ``We are 
     pressing forward to conclude our review of US land mine 
     policy'' but declined to provide details.
       ``The United States shares the humanitarian concerns of the 
     parties to the Ottawa Convention,'' Price added, noting that 
     ``the United States is the single largest financial supporter 
     of global humanitarian demining efforts.''
       A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lieutenant Commander Amy 
     Derrickfrost, defended the military's position. She said that 
     in addition to ending the use of so-called ``dumb'' mines in 
     2010, the US military also no longer uses plastic mines, 
     which cannot be identified with a metal detector or other 
     mine surveillance technologies.
       But the military continues to say that it must have the 
     ability to use anti-personnel land mines.
       ``I consider them to be an important tool in the arsenal of 
     the armed forces of the United States,'' General Martin 
     Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a 
     congressional hearing in March, especially on the Korean 
     penninsula, where they are intended to help blunt an invasion 
     by the North Korean army.
       The Pentagon position has its share of supporters on 
     Capitol Hill, including Representative Randy Forbes, a 
     Virginia Republican, who calls land mines ``vitally important 
     to the defense of South Korea.'' Fearing that Obama will sign 
     the treaty, he has proposed an amendment to a new defense 
     bill that would prohibit the administration from implementing 
     the treaty.
       Many observers, however, remain surprised at the extent of 
     opposition at the Pentagon to the treaty.
       ``Some of the guys that wrote the [Korean] war plans were 
     advocates of the mine ban,'' said retired Army Lietenant 
     General G. Robert Gard, who traveled to South Korea in the 
     late 1990s at Leahy's request to make an assessment.
       Gard, who is chairman of the Center for Arms Control and 
     Nonproliferation, a nonprofit think tank, said commanders 
     asserted ``we could accomplish the things that land mines 
     were purported to do for us by other means.''
       A veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Gard believes 
     that the continued Pentagon resistance is driven by fear that 
     giving in could embolden human rights groups to try to ban 
     other weapons.
       He described the argument: ``If you give in to those flaky 
     nongovernmental organizations they will try to to make us get 
     rid of other weapons we really need.''
       Meanwhile, the ongoing land mine policy review--the third 
     such assessment since the Clinton years--has treaty advocates 
     such as Williams, the peace prize recipient, deeply 
     frustrated.
       She said in an e-mail that she ``does not understand why 
     this review has taken place at all and even less do we 
     understand or accept why it has taken five years already and 
     President Obama still seems unable to bring it to a 
     conclusion that can be shared with the American public.''


                         `Life forever ruined'

       The gruesome photographs, blown up to nearly life size for 
     maximum effect, line a small, cluttered office of the Senate 
     Appropriations Committee. One depicts a pair of legless men 
     looking up from their wheel chairs, another a woman hobbling 
     along with the help of a stick.
       The images were all captured by Leahy, an amateur 
     photographer who has personally chronicled dozens of innocent 
     war victims from Central America to Southeast Asia.
       His crusade against land mines began more than two decades 
     ago in a jungle village in Nicaragua, at the height of its 
     civil war.
       ``There was a little boy, probably 12 years old, one leg, 
     homemade crutch. He'd lost his leg from a landmine,'' Leahy 
     recalled in an interview in his Senate office, where some of 
     his war victim photos hang at eye level above his desk.
       Leahy asked the boy if he was injured by the forces loyal 
     to the Sandinista government or the so-called Contra rebels. 
     ``Well, he had no idea. He just knew that his life was 
     forever ruined.''
       Leahy later used his perch on the panel overseeing the 
     State Department budget to establish a US fund to help the 
     most vulnerable victims of war, which was later named the 
     Leahy Victims Fund. He also provided money for mine clearance 
     groups around the world.
       Leahy later proposed legislation prohibiting the United 
     States from exporting land mines. To help convince a 
     skeptical Senate, he persuaded DC Comics to publish a Batman 
     comic edition in which the caped crusader, in his effort to 
     rescue a child, had to walk through a minefield.
       The last panel depicted the child reaching for a shiny 
     object and being warned by Batman not to pick it up before 
     there was a ``Kaboom.''
       Leahy provided a copy of the special issue to every 
     senator; his legislation passed by voice vote without 
     opposition. He now remains optimistic that if Obama would 
     sign the land mine treaty and send it to the Senate for 
     ratification it has a good chance of garnering the required 
     two-thirds, or 67 votes, to pass--despite the overall 
     partisan rancor.
       ``I don't want to sound like I am on a crusade but nothing 
     has gripped me as much since I have been here,'' Leahy said, 
     tearing up when recalling how he lifted a Vietnamese landmine 
     victim into his wheelchair. (``He grabbed my shirt, he pulled 
     me down, and he kissed me''.)
       ``This is today's poison gas,'' Leahy said. Failing to join 
     the treaty, he believes, ``is a moral failure of our 
     country.''
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, June 23, 2014]

         Treaty Is Making Land Mines Weapon of Past, Group Says

                          (By Rick Gladstone)

       Despite the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, the 
     armed uprising in Ukraine and turmoil in other hot spots in 
     the Middle East and Africa, one of war's most insidious 
     weapons--antipersonnel land mines--have been largely outlawed 
     and drastically reduced, a monitoring group said in a report 
     released Monday.
       In the 15 years since a global treaty prohibiting these 
     weapons took effect, the use and production of the mines has 
     nearly stopped, new casualties have plummeted, and more than 
     two dozen countries once contaminated by land mines buried 
     since old wars have removed them, said the report by the 
     group, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
       ``The Mine Ban Treaty remains an ongoing success in 
     stigmatizing the use of land mines and mitigating the 
     suffering they cause,'' said Jeff Abramson, the project 
     manager of Landmine Monitor, the group's research unit.
       The group, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its 
     work, released the report to coincide with the Third Review 
     Conference of the Mine Ban Treaty, which convened Monday in 
     Maputo, Mozambique, where representatives from its 161 
     signers and other participants will spend five days 
     discussing how to further strengthen enforcement of the 
     agreement.
       Antipersonnel mines are hidden explosive devices that are 
     buried in the ground and designed to be detonated when a 
     person steps on or near them, causing indiscriminate death 
     and grievous injury. They can lie dormant for decades, long 
     after a conflict has ended. Many of their victims are 
     children.
       The United States, which was among the original countries 
     to call for a treaty banning mines and has done much to help 
     other countries purge them, has not signed the treaty. It is 
     among the 36 countries that have not signed it and is the 
     only NATO member outside the treaty. (Russia and China also 
     have not signed.)
       An American delegation is attending the Maputo conference 
     only as observers.
       Human rights advocates criticize the United States for what 
     they call a conspicuous lapse that may be dissuading other 
     countries from joining the treaty.
       The Obama administration, which says it has been evaluating 
     the treaty's provisions since 2009, has issued conflicting 
     signals about its intentions.
       ``It's going to be embarrassing for the U.S. to have to 
     explain to the high-level officials at the summit meeting why 
     it has been reviewing its land mine policies for five years 
     without making a decision,'' said Stephen Goose, the 
     executive director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch 
     and the chairman of the United States Campaign to Ban 
     Landmines, a coalition of groups that has been pressing the 
     United States to join.
       American defense officials have resisted a blanket 
     renunciation of land mines. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman 
     of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional hearing in 
     March that he considered such weapons ``an important tool'' 
     in the American arsenal, citing as an example their use in 
     South Korea to deter an invasion from North Korea.
       Others, however, have expressed frustration over what they 
     regard as an inexcusable American refusal to join the treaty. 
     Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and a prominent 
     supporter of the treaty, has pressed the administration in 
     speeches this year to endorse it.
       ``If land mines were littering this country--in 
     schoolyards, along roads, in cornfields, in our national 
     parks--and hundreds of American children were being 
     crippled'' like children in Cambodia, Mr. Leahy said in an 
     April 9 statement, ``how long would it take before the White 
     House sent the Mine Ban Treaty to the Senate for 
     ratification.''
       Despite its apparent reluctance to join the treaty, the 
     United States has spent more than $2 billion in the past two 
     decades to help clear mines and aid victims, more than any 
     other country.
       The United States also has stopped production and export of 
     so-called dumb mines that cannot be disarmed, and it no 
     longer uses plastic materials that can foil metal detectors 
     used to decontaminate mine-infested areas.
       The report by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines 
     said that only five countries--Israel, Libya, Myanmar, Russia 
     and Syria, all nonsigners of the treaty--had used 
     antipersonnel land mines since 2009.
       But it also reported that Yemen, which has signed the 
     treaty, disclosed last November that it violated its pledge 
     against land mine use in 2011.
       The report said global stockpiles of mines had dropped 
     sharply, with 87 signers of the

[[Page S3910]]

     treaty having completed their promised destruction of a total 
     of about 47 million mines, since the treaty took effect. 
     Twenty-seven nations contaminated with mines have proclaimed 
     themselves mine-free during that period.
       Casualties from leftover mines have also declined by more 
     than half since the treaty took effect, the report said. Yet 
     in the roughly 60 countries where contamination from land 
     mines and other explosive remnants of war remains a problem, 
     an estimated 4,000 people a year are killed or wounded.
       The report said nearly half the victims were children. In 
     Afghanistan, it said, children constitute 61 percent of all 
     such casualties since 1999.

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate is in morning business until 11 
a.m.
  Mr. LEAHY. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida.

                          ____________________