[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.
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