A Campaign to Sweep Away Danger

Hundreds of charities share glory as international effort to ban use of land mines captures Nobel prize

When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this month, hundreds of non-profit organizations in dozens of countries considered themselves to be co-winners, claiming a share of the credit — if not the $1-million prize money.

The groups differ widely in their missions and operations. But together they form a global coalition that in a few short years has successfully persuaded many of the world’s nations to agree to a comprehensive ban on land mines.

“In France, 320,000 People Receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” trumpeted an ad placed in two French newspapers the week after the prize was announced. The number refers to the citizens who signed ban-the-mines petitions circulated by the ad’s sponsor, a French charity called Handicap International.

In awarding the prize jointly to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and to its international coordinator, Jody Williams, the Nobel Committee cited the worldwide network “through which it has been possible to express and mediate a broad wave of popular commitment in an unprecedented way.” As governments have joined the grassroots groundswell for a ban, the committee said, “this work has grown into a convincing example of an effective policy for peace.”

The prize in turn has energized those working on the campaign. In Oslo last month, delegates from more than 100 countries drafted a treaty that would outlaw the manufacture, sale, and use of antipersonnel land mines — those intended to harm people rather than tanks or other vehicles. The campaign is now focused on securing the signatures of as many countries as possible when the treaty is signed in Ottawa in December. Once 40 nations have ratified the document it will become international law.

The success of the six-year effort highlights the increasing influence non-governmental organizations are having on the world stage, say non-profit leaders.

“It shows the growing capacity of grassroots non-governmental organizations to mobilize and challenge governments, to put new items on the world’s agenda,” says Kathryn Wolford, executive director of Lutheran World Relief and the chair of InterAction, a coalition of U.S. charities that operate overseas.

The campaign got its start six years ago among charities in the United States and Europe that were helping mine victims or working to prevent human-rights abuses in places like Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, and Cambodia.

“We got tired of putting legs on people and of seeing innocent women and children blown up years after a war had ended,” recalls Susan B. Walker, the U.S. director of Handicap International, which provides prostheses, wheelchairs, and other assistance to disabled people in 39 countries.

Handicap International was one of six non-profit groups that formed the nucleus of the campaign in 1992, a year after it had been established by Medico International, a German charity that promotes primary health care in developing countries, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, a Washington organization. The other members were Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, based in the United States, and the Mines Advisory Group, based in Britain.

None of the charities was particularly large, wealthy, or well known. But together they organized a campaign so compelling that it won support from hundreds of organizations in more than 60 countries. The aggregate effect was to swell their small individual voices into a roaring chorus protesting the continued use of land mines, which claim lives and limbs on a daily basis in many developing parts of the world.

The unusually broad-based coalition now boasts more than 1,000 members: schools and student groups, churches, and groups active in fields as disparate as arms control, development aid, the environment, human rights, medical assistance, peace, refugee aid, veterans, and women and children. They include big international groups like Caritas, Doctors Without Borders, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF, and World Vision. They also include regional or local ones, such as the Asia-Pacific People’s Environment Network in Malaysia, the Cambridge (Mass.) Zen Center, the Centre for Peace Research in Australia, the Khmer Students Association in Cambodia, the Mozambican Association of Women Lawyers, and the Maharashtra State Youth Congress in India.

Despite the many differences separating them, all have united around a single goal: ending the humanitarian crisis posed by the indiscriminate use of land mines in many countries.

“This is pretty simple stuff: 100 million land mines are buried in the ground, and 200 million more are waiting to go into the ground,” says Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and a co-founder of the campaign. “Once there, they go on for decades; there’s no ‘off’ switch.”

He adds: “Everybody doing relief and development work around the world has got something against land mines. They’re destroying farm-based agriculture and destabilizing developing countries,” he says, because farmers will not till land infested with mines, nor will refugee populations resettle in such areas.

Mines kill or maim an estimated 25,000 people a year — of whom nearly 90 per cent are civilians. The problem has significant repercussions for the reconstruction of a country, Ms. Walker observes. “You can’t run a vaccination program in rural Cambodia, for example, because the community health workers won’t go out on the roads to vaccinate people because the roads were mined. So we’ve started seeing polio again.”

The human toll is all too familiar to people engaged in relief and development work overseas. At least six of Ms. Walker’s friends and colleagues have been killed or injured by mines. She herself, after 15 years of working in Thailand and Cambodia, would not stray from a path to cross a field or lawn for six months after she had returned to Minneapolis.

“You get so conditioned to be afraid to take that step,” she says. “It is daily terror. It is insidious.”

Campaign members have engaged in a spectrum of activities aimed at educating citizens and government officials about the problems caused by land mines. Last week, for example, a “Ban Bus” sponsored by the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines began a five-week cross-country trek from Berkeley, Cal., to Ottawa, Ontario, to draw attention to the issue. Other activists have collected petition signatures, held poster contests, staged letter-writing campaigns, published newspaper ads, and sponsored talks by mine victims — who have proved to be the most persuasive advocates for a ban.

Although the campaign began as a U.S.-European effort, it soon extended its reach to developing countries — where mine victims were already among the most vocal proponents of an international ban on land mines.

Land-mine victims from places like Cambodia “were more than poster boys and girls, by far” when they told their stories to audiences around the world, says Ms. Wolford of Lutheran World Relief. “They brought a credibility to the issue, an incredibly powerful moral and political voice.”

In fact, it was the people in mine-infested countries, she says, who prodded many U.S. charities to raise their goals beyond merely caring for the victims. “That was an important message,” she adds, “because for some governments and even some N.G.O.s, it would have been very easy to stop at the relief phase of the fight.”

The campaign began amid growing frustration over the inability of the world’s governments to deal effectively with the land-mine issue through conventional diplomacy.

“Anybody in the international community who looked at what it was going to take to go through traditional channels to get a treaty approved and ratified knew it would take decades,” says Deborah Bain, development director at the Ploughshares Fund in San Francisco, which has made grants to the campaign.

The campaign did pick up support from powerful government officials along the way. It forged ties in 1992 with an influential Democratic U.S. Senator, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who was chairman of the foreign-operations panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Senator Leahy introduced legislation in 1992 calling for a one-year moratorium on the export of U.S. land mines, which passed Congress and was renewed the following year.

“That really inspired a legitimate international campaign,” says Mr. Muller, because it signaled to the world that the last military superpower might voluntarily give up one of its weapons.

The growing momentum of the citizens’ campaign, coupled with mounting frustration over the inability of the United Nations to deal with the issue in a speedy way, prompted Canada to announce last fall that it would try to help secure a treaty outside the U.N. framework. That effort will culminate in December when the new treaty is signed.

Campaign members repeatedly cite two key ingredients to its success. One was the hard work and leadership of its international coordinator, Jody Williams. Ms. Williams joined the campaign in 1991 after previously working for Medical Aid for El Salvador, a relief group based in Los Angeles, and advocating changes in U.S. policy toward Central America. She saw the land-mine issue as a way to raise public awareness about issues of war and peace at a more global level.

Says Ms. Walker of Ms. Williams: “The woman is brilliant in her ability to articulate a historic new way of civil society working with governments, a new way of conducting diplomacy in the post-Cold War era.”

The other key factor was electronic mail, which enabled Ms. Williams and other campaign workers to keep in regular contact with their far-flung ground troops.

Some observers say that such a global campaign involving hundreds of grassroots groups would have been impossible as recently as five years ago, when most organizations would have lacked that technical capability.

Says Naila Bolus, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund: “To build a truly international campaign of over 1,000 organizations in 64 countries — you can’t organize by phone with that many people and places.”

But by using the Internet, she adds, organizations could stay in close contact with one another and with campaign organizers, whether based in Washington or in rural Vermont, which is where Ms. Williams spent much of her time.

Electronic mail also enabled organizations to keep under control the costs of a campaign that until recently had operated on a virtual shoestring. Mine-related work at the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation — including that of both the international and the U.S. campaigns to ban land mines — may approach $3-million this year, says Mr. Muller, after several lean years.

The organization has contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and other government agencies, and it also receives grants from philanthropies like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Public Welfare Foundations and the Ploughshares, John Merck, and Ruth Mott Funds.

The Ploughshares Fund has given about $500,000 to organizations working on the mine-ban campaign since its inception, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute this year announced that it will award $1.5-million a year for three years to match other contributions for land-mine work. The $1-million peace prize will be split between Ms. Williams, who makes $61,000 a year as campaign coordinator, and the campaign itself.

Nevertheless, the campaign has not met all its goals. Its signal failure has been an inability to persuade the United States government to endorse the treaty that was drafted in Oslo. Although President Clinton has said he favors a ban on land mines, he decided last month to back his military advisers, who argue that U.S. forces must retain the option of using land mines in the Korean peninsula to protect the 37,000 U.S. troops currently stationed there.

The campaign’s standing with the Clinton Administration was not advanced, some members say, when Ms. Williams, after winning her prize, called Mr. Clinton a “weenie” and a “coward” for bowing to pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“We’re all united on immediately and comprehensively banning land mines,” says Richard Walden, president of Operation USA, which is promoting new mine-clearing technology. “We have wildly different operating styles. The campaign has managed to reach out to mainstream groups not in the habit of insulting the government.”

Some campaign members thought Ms. Williams made intemperate remarks in widely televised interviews showing her barefoot and in a tank top just after she learned she had won the prize.

Mr. Muller, whose organization sponsors the international campaign, is diplomatic in responding to those concerns.

“The last thing I’d want to do is diminish any aspect of the work that’s been done and the glow of this extraordinary award,” he says. “We have worked very hard to become an absolutely respected, credible, establishment-supported cause.”

But Mr. Muller, who is known for his own blunt-talking activist leadership, adds: “A lot of people we walk down the road with are not appreciative of being cast in the light of Woodstock retreads; they’re not barefoot in the backwoods of Vermont. And they do not consider the Commander in Chief to be a coward or a weenie.”

But the prize has afforded Ms. Williams an independent platform from which to deliver her opinions, Mr. Muller acknowledges. “Jody now has her own voice, which is appropriate as a Nobel laureate,” he says. “Her voice is not necessarily the voice of the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation or of the International Campaign.”

Campaign members say they are glad to have the land-mines work gain recognition from the Nobel Committee, but several say they wish the committee had included more — or fewer — people in their award, to reflect the broad, international nature of the movement and the effective partnership between governments and private organizations.

“Singling out one person, as important a role as she’s played, probably does exacerbate any tensions in the coalition more than brings it together,” says Ms. Wolford. “That’s sort of unfortunate. In a case like this, it’s almost more powerful to recognize all the unsung heroes. But I would much rather we had it this way than not at all.”

Several groups that focus their energy on removing existing mines hope that the momentum generated by the campaign will not dissipate once the treaty has been signed. Only when the estimated 110 million mines currently deployed have been cleared, they say, will people in many countries be able to resume normal lives.

“Lives will be saved tomorrow by not putting new mines in, but lives will be saved today by clearing the mines that are already in the ground,” says Lionel A. Rosenblatt, president of Refugees International in Washington.

Campaign activists say they will have plenty of work to do even after the treaty is signed. Their next task will be to promote its ratification by signatory countries and to persuade holdout countries to sign it as well. Those countries include China, Cuba, North Korea — and the United States, whose support is seen as key to an effective ban.

Says Mr. Muller: “Without the U.S., everybody out there doesn’t mean a hill of beans.”

Charity leaders remain confident that citizen activists increasingly will prod governments and international agencies into action.

“We have a tremendous network of non-governmental organizations around the world today who basically think very differently from governments and who are feeling a lot of encouragement from this effort,” says Anthony Kozlowski, president of the American Refugee Committee in Minneapolis. “It’s a sign of the times, where non-profit organizations are doing things that official diplomacy hasn’t been able to achieve.”