The Campaign Against Land Mines

...If land mines can be taken as symbols of the productivity and destructiveness of modern technology, they can also be taken as symbols of the asymmetry of problem and remedy that seems to confront us today...

...Furthermore, it is not simply their ethical but their practical utility that is being called into question...

...And, perhaps most ominously, they make humanitarian assistance and postwar reconstruction extraordinarily difficult, so that farming and even simple travel are almost impossible in large portions of many countries...

...Yet it is precisely for this reason that it is so important, for it opens up new ways of contesting violence and human suffering and organizing politically across borders...

...Furthermore, given the complex causes of violence—class inequality, global flows of capital and labor, political authoritarianism, the widespread availability of so many means of destruction, the sheer momentum of conflict itself—it is hard to believe that the twenty-two DISSENT /Fall 1998 • 71 RECLAIMING THE WASTELAND articles of the Land Mine Treaty can do much even to halt the use of land mines much less to promote peace, reconstruction, or care for landmine victims...

...It shows that such a partnership is a new kind of 'superpower' in the post–cold war world...

...Much of the media discussion has centered on whether and how nonsignatory nations, especially the United States, can be brought along to subscribe to the treaty's principles...

...The use of land mines perpetuates such wars and stands in the way of postwar reconstruction of social and economic life...

...What Peter Simpkin, former director of the UN's Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Unit, said about Angola is true in many other places as well: "Angolans have no rights whatsoever...

...Like Sisyphus, we will never rid our world of its burdens...

...Equally notable, while such networks combine grassroots activism and elite forms of knowlDISSENT / Fall 1998 n 69 RECLAIMING THE WASTELAND edge and activity, they do not aspire to be mass movements as these have been conventionally understood...

...But the only use-value of these products is death, destruction, and the despoiling of vast tracts of land rendered uninhabitable and uncultivable...

...It is nonideological, pursuing humanitarian goals—the minimization of civilian casualties, the cessation of civil conflict, and the promotion of basic human security—and seeking basic remedial action—the elimination of antipersonnel land mines—rather than a fundamental redistribution of political power...

...Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water .. . I will show you fear in a handful of dust...

...If they share a common objective, it is the general ethos enunciated by Albert Camus: a refusal to be executioner or victim, and a corresponding commitment to "an obvious complicity among men, a common texture, the solidarity of chains, a communication between human being and human being which makes men both similar and united...

...A growing consensus is emerging that antipersonnel land mines have no other purpose than to terrorize populations and to kill indiscriminately...

...All of them pollute the environment and endanger the RECLAIMING THE WASTELAND health of humans and other species...

...As Jerry White of the Land Mine Survivors' Group put it: "Let's look at the injured and land-mine survivors not just as those who step on a land mine and perhaps have an amputated limb, but as the families and communities that are held hostage to land mines...

...But just as significant are the values it promotes...

...The significance of the ICBLM's strategic success has not been lost on its supporters...

...But its 121 signatories, which include such nations as Canada, Austria, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, as well as South Africa, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Angola, constitute widespread diplomatic support...

...The administration has announced its general opposition to the use of antipersonnel land mines but has also claimed, following a long-standing Pentagon strategy, that such weapons, which currently litter the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, are necessary to protect the 37,000 American troops currently stationed there in the event of a North Korean incursion into South Korea...

...Such conditions reproduce widespread existing socioeconomic inequalities...

...Secretary of State Cyrus Vance...

...The product of extraordinary scientific ingenuity and scrupulousness, conceived as an inexpensive and efficient means of controlling territory and constricting the movement of military forces, these agents of destruction are deeply embedded in the geopolitical terrain...

...The treaty draws upon a series of legal precedents invoked in its preamble...

...The campaign was particularly effective in mobilizing expert knowledge to influence public and, especially, elite opinion about the devastating effects of land mines, producing and disseminating a series of reports, including "The Coward's War: Land Mines in Cambodia," "Mines: A Perverse Use of Technology," "Hidden Enemies: Land Mines in Northern Somalia," "Land Mines in Angola," "After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Land Mines," and UNICEF's important "Impact of Armed Conflict on Children...

...It was as a response to these problems that the Land Mine Treaty was drafted...

...Nobody knows exactly how many land DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 67 RECLAIMING THE WASTELAND mines there are, and nobody knows exactly where they are located...

...The land mine is eternally prepared to take victims...

...It proves that civil society and governments do not have to see themselves as adversaries...

...The reconstruction of some war-torn and mine-infested regions is better than the reconstruction of none...

...Such a politics of reclamation is a far cry from the struggle for justice and equality that has long animated the left...

...As a consequence of these activities, the campaign was in a position to do what few nongovernmental organizations can do—to work as a diplomatic agent in its own right, and to participate as an equal member, along with diplomatic officials of nation-states, in the drafting of the treaty...

...This is no reason to give up...

...BUT EVEN more attention has focused on the astonishing success of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines in bringing this issue to the fore and in pressing, within a few short years, for the drafting and adoption of the treaty...

...And similar campaigns and global networks, on behalf of child laborers or women's rights, represent an important new form of politics in an era of globalization...

...and accountability politics—the attempt to hold powerful actors to their avowed policies and principles...

...What is notable is that such networks typically do not work at the level of political parties and state power, nor do they seek to occupy governmental authority...

...Land mines can be seen as a particularly lethal kind of garbage littering the earth...

...Thomas Hobbes long ago observed that covenants are but words unless backed up by the means of enforcement...

...But the literal wasteland created by land mines, and the figurative wasteland that land mines symbolize, attest to the difficulty of solution, and to the pervasiveness of our vulnerability...

...Such military experts have argued that land mines endanger one's own troops as much as one's enemies, and that they serve no purpose that could not be served through other means...

...The rehabilitation of some mine victims is better than the rehabilitation of none...

...They work together from time to time—as witness the role of Human Rights Watch in the formation of the ICBLM—but they do not add up to a single program of radical transformation...

...It is not clear that the treaty establishes any such means...

...it does not include the many paramilitary and guerrilla forces whose use of land mines contributes so much to their proliferation...

...Similar stories could be told about other, similar civil wars, in Africa, Asia, Central America and—let us not forget Bosnia—in Europe itself...

...One of the principal causes of poverty and degradation in the third world is brutal civil war...

...A few other nations have opposed the treaty, notably China, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Israel...

...And in any case, the elimination of antipersonnel land mines is a daunting task...

...Yet the politicization of this issue is a significant development with important implications for democratic politics...

...symbolic politics—the ability to generate persuasive symbols and narratives for geographically remote audiences...

...General Secretary BoutrosBoutros Ghali, and former U.S...

...for land mines are literally implanted in the soil throughout the planet...

...It can also be viewed as an insistence on the importance of transnational corporate responsibility...

...Many of the Land Mine Treaty signatory governments are unstable and authoritarian regimes whose willingness to disavow land mines does not necessarily translate into a willingness to discontinue their use...

...These weapons create a permanent climate of fear and mistrust, endangering civilians and prolonging civil war...

...While a number of nations, notably the United States, have maintained that antipersonnel land mines are a necessary means of conventional defense, the ICBLM has refuted this claim by mobilizing the opposition of military leaders to these weapons...

...The campaign to end land mines is thus an exemplary rebellion against a pervasive and elusive source of worldwide suffering and injustice...

...The campaign worked on two fronts, publicizing ICBLM's purpose (assisted by Diana, Princess of Wales, and other celebrity supporters) and coordinating a targeted campaign of citizen diplomacy...

...It embodies cosmopolitan values of universal dignity and respect for human life, and a global ethos of solidarity that transcends the boundaries of nation-states...

...And this embdeddedness is only partly metaphorical...

...Yet the world being what it is, such a politics should not be taken lightly...

...Until there is free circulation of people, we'll have a state of sub-subsistence economy with severe shortages, no market, high inflation fueled by shortages of products, and a rapid deterioration of the infrastructure...

...The Lusaka accords of 1994 brought an official end to the state of war, and yet, as Winslow demonstrates, Angola is a society held hostage to land mines and to the irresponsible way in which these mines were implanted, along extended stretches of roads and around entire villages and cities...

...ACCORDING to most reports, there are over a hundred million antipersonnel land mines buried worldwide...

...AN IMPORTANT aspect of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines is the way it has pioneered this new kind of activism and demonstrated its potential as a way to effect change on a global scale...

...In a Summer 1994 Dissent piece Paul Wapner highlighted the growing importance of such networks in connection with global environmentalism ("Environmental Activism and Global Civil Society...

...The most famous instance of this opposition was an April 1996 open letter to President Clinton signed by fourteen three- and four-star generals and an admiral, published in the New York Times, repudiating land mines as a weapon of war...

...But there is something Sisyphean about such efforts, given the magnitude and embeddedness of the problems against which they set themselves...

...Although it is possible to seek deeper, underlying causes of such warfare, the simple fact remains that as long as such conflicts persist millions of people are consigned to lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short...

...and garnered the support of the Vatican Council, Pope John Paul II, the Islamic Conference, the European Parliament, the Africa, Caribbean, Pacific–European Union Joint Assembly, UNICEF, and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees...

...contacted supportive diplomats such as Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, former U.N...

...Jody Williams, ICBLM's coordinator, has stated that "It is historic...

...The objection to land mines is that they are indiscriminate in both time and target...

...The first is the value of peace itself...

...Such campaigns have also assumed importance in connection with labor rights—as witness the global campaign against Nike's third world labor practices— women's rights, prisoners of conscience, rights of indigenous peoples, and other forms of humanrights struggle...

...Antipersonnel land mines are indiscriminate and virtually impossible to detect...

...A 1994 UN report estimated that if such mines were immediately banned and all nations committed themselves to their eradication, it would cost over $33 billion and take over one thousand years to remove all existing mines...

...The repudiation of such weapons is thus as thoroughly consistent with just-war theory as it is with more antimilitarist or pacifist orientations...

...Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), sponsor of a Senate ban on the export of American land mines, has held that "this extraordinary coalition of organizations representing civil society on every continent was instrumental in first putting the spotlight on the land-mine problem and spurring governments to act...

...These campaigns have a generally democratic orientation, and they challenge diverse forms of oppression...

...Land mines are obviously a more directly hazardous product...

...As Williams's comment indicates, the campaign is antimilitarist, but not necessarily pacifist...

...as Philip C. Winslow makes clear in his superb Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War, land mines pervade our world, turning large parts of the globe into heaps of broken images, and engendering a fear in a handful of dust that Eliot could not have dreamed of...

...Finally, the campaign supports the values of sustainable economic development and democracy...

...Indeed, unlike these other materials, land mines are not waste...

...Over 26,000 people are killed every year from antipersonnel-landmine explosions...

...U.S...

...The vast majority of these victims are civilians, many of them children, who are simply foraging for food or playing in a field or walking from one place to another...

...The treaty was an outstanding achievement, but until that treaty becomes international law, until the countries sign it and destroy their stockpiles, it is just beautiful words on paper...

...Keck and Sikkink claim that these networks are becoming increasingly important in the post–cold war world, as means of addressing global issues and as vehicles for participatory citizenship...

...It joins humanrights activists North and South in an effort to promote peace and justice...

...Indeed, it was the danger that antipersonnel land mines posed to international humanitarian relief workers and international "peacekeeping forces" that first brought the issue to the attention of advanced industrial societies...

...they are the "useful" product itself...

...The campaign against land mines is thus part of the broader movement to insist upon more-accountable and responsible forms of global commerce...

...His latest book is Democracy in Dark Times, published by Cornell University Press...

...The current controversy regarding the treaty surrounds the Clinton administration's opposition to its categorical language...

...Land mines, like other forms of weaponry, but also like infant formula and cigarettes, are a global commodity whose export does damage to the health and welfare of millions in those countries who are the "beneficiaries" of such exports...

...The group's success has been widely attributed to its savvy use of Internet technologies, which allowed its activists to quickly and inexpensively communicate across the globe, stimulating the emergence of new affiliates and the establishment of connections between them...

...The Campaign to Ban Land Mines is a noble effort that is worthy of the support of all conscientious citizens of the world...

...Williams puts her finger on some of the distinctive features of the campaign...

...The ICBLM is a coalition of over one thousand nongovernmental citizen organizations in more than sixty countries...

...The campaign against land mines is thus implicitly a struggle for social and economic justice, for as long as these mines exist, anything remotely resembling justice or democracy can be little more than a distant dream for millions...

...It was formed in 1992 by six groups— Vietnam Veterans of America, Medico International of Germany, the Mines Advisory Group of Britain, Handicap International of France, and the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human RightsRECLAIMING THE WASTELAND and quickly attracted the support of hundreds of affiliates, most located in the third world...

...The treaty goes into effect six months after forty of its signatories have ratified it, something that has not yet taken place...

...Although the land-mines issue is consistent with more conventionally defined "left" political struggles over labor rights, multinational corporate power, imperialism, militarism, and even environmentalism, in many ways it lies at a diagonal to such struggles, as a "humanitarian" or human-rights issue that transcends class and whose remedies fall short of the kinds of institutional transformations typically envisioned on the left...

...leverage politics— the ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation in which weaker and more vulnerable actors are unlikely to have influence...

...Humankind currently confronts a number of crises of disposal of hazardous materials— plutonium, uranium, PCBs, numerous other forms of hazardous waste, and simple, ordinary refuse...

...And it has achieved remarkable success in attracting public attention and in effecting diplomatic change...

...Winslow's Sowing the Dragon's Teeth presents a vivid account of the use of these weapons by the Sovietbacked Marxist government and the U.S.backed UNITA insurgency during the Angolan civil war...

...The issue of land mines has been thrust into the political limelight by the recent Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, signed by 121 nations in Ottawa in December 1997, and by the awarding of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines (ICBLM) and to its coordinator, Jody Williams...

...72 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...Thus, banning them would not undermine the effectiveness or safety of our forces...

...They argue that such networks typically operate at four levels: information politics—the ability to quickly and credibly generate strategically relevant information...

...And the casualties caused by land mines further exacerbate these inequalities, causing profound hardship and taxing the medical and financial resources of families and communities, most of them already suffering from grinding poverty...

...An antipersonnel land mine, unlike an antivehicle mine, is designed to explode when stepped upon by a human being...

...Every twenty minutes somebody is shredded by a mine...

...Eliot, "The Waste Land" ANTIPERSONNEL land mines epitomize the vulnerability and risk experienced by many inhabitants of the late modern world...

...T.S...

...The clearing of some land mines is better than the clearing of none...

...The campaign is a kind of peace movement, in that it supports the eradication of a particularly lethal weapon...

...Most of these materials are the byproducts of processes purportedly producing some other useful object...

...Its goals are more modest, and its successes are likely to be tentative, fragile, and frustrating...

...Once implanted in an area they remain indefinitely, an explosion waiting to happen, which accounts for their facetious nickname—the "permanent sentry...

...The military appeal of these weapons derives precisely from how cheaply they can be produced and distributed and how easily they can be implanted (it takes a hundred times longer to remove a land mine than to deploy one...

...I N THIS regard it exemplifies the novel forms of activism analyzed by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in their Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics...

...The opposition to land mines can be viewed as a refusal of the environmentally irresponsible use of technology, and an insistence on a more ecologically sensitive way of organizing human affairs...

...While they are considered part of "conventional" military strategy— notably by the United States in the demilitarized zone separating South and North Korea— they play an even more important role in civil wars, from Cambodia to Somalia to Afghanistan to Bosnia, where military regimes, paramilitary forces, and guerrilla movements use them to hold conquered territory, to defend against enemy incursion, and simply to contain resident populations...

...As Jody Williams has put it: "Land mines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the land mine cannot tell the difference between a soldier and a civilian—a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal...

...It demonstrates that small and middle powers can work together with civil society and address humanitarian concerns with breathtaking speed...

...It lobbied public officials...

...Marx once insisted that mankind only sets for itself problems that it can solve...

...As the open letter stated: "Given the wide range of weaponry available to military forces today, antipersonnel land mines are not essential...

...The second value implicit in the campaign is a healthy suspicion of technology and an insistence on the importance of natural and human ecology...

...Land mines not only permanently endanger noncombatants, they also perpetuate the cycle of mistrust and violence...

...AND YET it is important to be realistic about these achievements...

...Furthermore, the treaty, like most such treaties, is only an agreement among duly constituted nation-states...

...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political theory at Indiana University, Bloomington...

...The crux of the problem is that while the use of the weapon may be militarily justifiable during the day of the battle, or even the two weeks of the battle, or maybe even the two months of the battle, once peace 70 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 is declared the land mine does not recognize that peace...

...It practices a new kind of diplomacy, involving citizens and nongovernmental organizations, transcending the boundaries of national sovereignty, and establishing new cosmopolitan links and political identities...

...Jody Williams has acknowledged as much...

...It is adamantly nonpartisan, and it treats governments as potential partners rather than as adversaries...

...Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Somalia...

...Yet like Sisyphus we can also see, as Camus wrote, that "all is not . . . exhausted...

...If land mines have long struck fear into the hearts of soldiers and civilians throughout many parts of the world, until recently they were a relatively obscure political issue...

...Although the treaty also enumerates conditions under which time extensions can be sought, it categorically repudiates antipersonnel land-mines and calls for their total elimination...

...Its main provisions involve a commitment on the part of signatories to a complete ban on the production, use, and export of antipersonnel land mines, the de68 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 struction of existing stockpiles within ten years, and international cooperation in promoting land-mine clearance, mine-awareness programs in countries plagued by mines, and the care and rehabilitation of land-mine victims...