A bill to support proposals to implement the United States goal of eventually eliminating antipersonnel landmines; to impose a moratorium on use of antipersonnel landmines except in limited circumstances; to provide for sanctions against foreign governments that export antipersonnel landmines, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Foreign Relations.
Cosponsorors
I further ask to have printed in the Record a portion of a statement issued on June 16, 1995, by the U.S. Catholic Bishops at their semi-annual meeting in Chicago, entitled `Sowing Weapons of War: A Pastoral Reflection on the Arms Trade and Landmines.' In that statement the Bishops call on the United States to lead an international effort to ban the use of antipersonnel landmines. That is the goal announced by President Clinton at the United Nations last December, and my legislation aims to move us toward that goal.
The statement follows:
Banning Landmines: An Urgent Task. Finally, we would like to add our voice to appeals of Pope John Paul II and the growing movement to control and eventually ban anti-personnel landmines. The Holy Father has issued `a vigorous appeal for the definitive cessation of the manufacture and use of those arms called `anti-personnel mines'. . . In fact, they continue to kill and to cause irreparable damage well after the end of hostilities, giving rise to severe mutilations in adults and above all, in children.' Some 100 million of these hidden killers are strewn around the world, killing an estimated 500 people per week, most of whom are civilians. In Cambodia, one of every 236 people is an amputee because of mine blasts. While landmines can be used responsibly for legitimate defense, they are often indiscriminate in use, especially in the intra-state conflicts which are so prevalent today. Moreover, landmines are indiscriminate in time because, as the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has pointed out, they cause `unacceptable damage to civilian populations long after the cessation of hostilities.' From Cambodia to Angola, large areas have been rendered uninhabitable, preventing refugees from returning to their homes, inhibiting post-war reconstruction, and producing an ongoing threat to innocent life.
The United States should lead an international effort to reduce and ultimately ban the use of anti-personnel landmines, just as was done with chemical and biological weapons. The current moratorium on U.S. exports of landmines is commendable; it should be made permanent and should be extended globally. The United States should also take steps, such as those called for in legislation now before Congress, to further restrict its own use of landmines, while it pursues with urgency and persistence international agreements to restrict use globally. The decision to ratify the Conventional Weapons Convention and to seek to strengthen it during its review this year is welcome. Finally, our government should continue to take a leadership role in developing an international effort on the costly and time-consuming process of demining, so important to the protection of innocent life and reconstruction in so many war-torn countries.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, on June 16 I introduced S . 940 , the Landmine Use Moratorium Act. My bill, which calls for a 1-year moratorium on the use of antipersonnel landmines, aims to exert U.S . leadership to address a problem that has become a global humanitarian catastrophe, the maiming and killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians by landmines.
Landmines are tiny explosives that are concealed beneath the surface of the ground. There are 100 million of them in over 60 countries, each one waiting to explode from the pressure of a footstep. Millions more are manufactured and used each year. The Russians are scattering them by air in Chechnya. They are being used by both sides in Bosnia, where 2 million mines threaten U.N. peacekeepers and humanitarian workers there, as well as civilians.
In Angola there are 70,000 amputees, and another 10 million unexploded mines threatening the entire population. Mines continue to sow terror in dozens of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union.
Again, my bill calls for a 1-year moratorium on the use of antipersonnel mines. Not because the United States uses landmines against civilian populations the way they are routinely used elsewhere, but because without U.S . leadership nothing significant will be done to stop it.
Like the landmine export moratorium that passed the Senate 100 to 0--2 years ago--and like the nuclear testing moratorium, my bill aims to spark international cooperation to stop this carnage. Time and time again we have seen how U.S . leadership spurred other countries to act.
The Landmine Use Moratorium Act has 45 cosponsors--37 Democrats and 8 Republicans. They are liberals and conservatives. They understand that whatever military utility these indiscriminate, inhumane weapons have is far outweighed by the immense harm to innocent people they are causing around the world.
Every 22 minutes of every day of every year, someone, usually a defenseless civilian, often a child, is horribly mutilated or killed by a landmine. It is time to stop this. My bill takes a first step.
Mr. President, in recent weeks, newspapers around the country have published editorials and articles about the landmine scourge and the need for leadership by Congress.
I ask unanimous consent that several newspaper articles about the Landmine Use Moratorium Act from Maine, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, as well as several defense publications, be printed in the Record.
I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Gorton be added as a cosponsor to S . 940 .
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Land-Mine Ban Woes
In 1994, about 100,000 land mines were removed from former war zones at a cost of $70 million. At the same time, another 2 million mines were deployed elsewhere.
These and other sobering, frustrating statistics came out of a three-day international conference in Geneva last week on mine-clearing.
The daunting prospect of new mines being sown at a rate 20 times faster than they can be removed is matched by the apparently futile attempts to ban the sale and manufacture of these inexpensive weapons.
There is some momentum to enact an international ban, with 25 nations adopting moratoriums on mine exports and three--Mexico, Sweden and Belgium--calling for comprehensive bans on their sale and manufacture. But in Geneva, it was concluded that banning land mines must be a long-term goal.
Despite the clear evidence that these weapons often can serve as everlasting and deadly vestiges of wars long resolved, some countries demand the right to keep them in their inventories.
The nations that want to have land mines in their inventories typically are not the same 64 countries where collectively 100 million land mines kill or maim 500 persons each week. If they were, perhaps a comprehensive ban would not be so elusive.
While international support is growing for a comprehensive ban on the sale and manufacture of antipersonnel mines, Western leaders must speak with one voice in demanding stronger curbs on these weapons that kill about 70 people each day.
Following the U.S . lead, 18 countries have declared moratoriums on the export of antipersonnel land mines and a U.N. conference beginning in September in Vienna will examine how and where antipersonnel land mines may be used.
Despite these and other promising signs, a worldwide ban on these mines that kill or maim 26,000 people each year remains an unlikely outcome of the U.N. meeting.
Even the European Parliament, which is hoping to influence the U.N. decision by soon adopting its own resolution calling for an antipersonnel mine ban, may have trouble achieving consensus.
While Belgium, for instance, banned all production, sale and export of antipersonnel mines last month, officials from other countries, such as Finland, insist that antipersonnel mines are a vital asset in national defense.
Because of these widely divergent views, a strong European Parliament resolution renouncing antipersonnel mines may be an elusive goal.
Even the United States, which had been a leader in the drive to rid the world of antipersonnel land mines, is falling off the pace. Despite a landmark speech by U.S . President Bill Clinton to the U.N. General Assembly in September in which he stressed the elimination of antipersonnel land mines, the government would allow the sale of certain high-tech antipersonnel land mines if the congressionally imposed export ban that ends in 1996 is not extended.
The U.S . military wants to keep high-tech antipersonnel mines that are self-deactivating. And a multilateral mine control regime being touted by U.S . officials concentrates on eliminating long-lived antipersonnel mines that do not self-destruct or self-deactivate.
While the newer high-tech mines offer great improvements over many of their predecessors, they nonetheless are dangerous weapons that should be included in a global ban.
Antitank mines, however, are vital weapons in the modern battlefield and do not cause the civilian casualties that antipersonnel mines do.
As Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Lane Evans said in a letter to Mr. Clinton after his September speech, `* * * land mines undoubtedly have some military use, that must be weighed against their advantage as a force multiplier for potential enemies in countries like Somalia or Iraq, where our troops increasingly are being sent.'
But soldiers are not the most frequent victims of these mines. Civilians, often children, are.
More mines are being scattered each day in places like Chechnya and the former Yugoslavia. The global landscape already is littered with 85 million to 100 million unexploded antipersonnel mines.
Western leaders must act now to ensure more of these mines are not sown and that programs are put in place to verify compliance to the ban.
Sanity May Take Root in Land Mine Debate (By George C. Wilson)
Far too many of us still see the hurt and disbelief in the eyes of someone who has just been hit by a land mine. The eyes that still bore into my mind are those of a little Vietnamese girl who set off a mine while washing clothes on the bank of the Perfume River in Hue in 1990--a full 15 years after the war was supposed to be over for her and everyone else.
The girl lay in a hospital bed in Hue with bandages over most of her body. Her mother was attending her because of the shortage of nurses. The mother looked up from her bedside chair and asked me through a translator why the `booms' were still going off. Her daughter just stared at me in searing silence.
I had no answer then, but have something hopeful to say now. The U.S . Senate, perhaps this week but certainly this summer, will confront the scourge that maims or kills somebody in the world every 22 minutes. As many as half of the victims are children like the one I saw in Hue. Soldiers know how to detect and disarm mines. Children don't. Sowing mines is like poisoning village wells: The soldiers on both sides realize the danger, drink from their canteens and move on. Not so with the villagers.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and more than 40 Senate co-sponsors have drafted legislation that would declare a one-year moratorium on sowing mines on battlefields, starting three years from now. Claymore mines, which infantrymen spread around their positions at night and use in ambushes, would be excluded from the experimental, one-year ban. So would anti-tank mines. Also, international borders, like the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, could still be sown with mines.
The Leahy proposal is but a short step toward the goal of inspiring an international agreement to ban land mines the way the nations managed to ban the use of poison gas and dum-dum bullets. But it is a symbolic step. It will at least force the Congress, the military and the public to confront this uncontrolled sowing of poison seeds.
In the Senate, Leahy plans to tack the moratorium legislation onto another bill on the floor, perhaps the defense authorization bill.
In the House, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., a Marine grunt from 1969 to 1971, is pushing a similar measure but has not decided when to push for a vote. The hawkier House--which seems determined to give the military almost anything it wants--almost certainly will reject the amendment until the Joint Chiefs of Staff say they favor it.
This hasn't happened despite expert testimony that it would do the U.S . military more good than harm if land mines were banned. No less a soldier than Gen. Alfred Gray Jr., former Marine Corps commandant, has said:
`We kill more Americans with our mines than we do anybody else. We never killed many enemy with mines . . . What the hell is the use of sowing all this [airborne scatterable mines] if you're going to move through it next week or next month . . . I'm not aware of any operational advantage from broad deployment of mines.'
Leahy warns that `vast areas of many countries have become deathtraps' because 62 countries have sown between 80 million and 110 million land mines on their land. `Every day 70 people are maimed or killed by land mines. Most of them are not combatants. They are civilians going about their daily lives.'
Yet mines are so cheap--costing as little as $2--that small armies all over the world are turning to them as the poor man's equalizer. American forces increasingly are being sent to these developing areas and would be safer if land mines were banned.
`The $2 or $3 anti-personnel mine hidden under a layer of sand or dust can blow the leg off the best-trained, best-equipped American soldier,' Leahy notes.
At the United Nations last year, President Clinton called on the world to stop using land mines. He could weigh in heavily on the side of the one-year moratorium and push the chiefs in that direction. But don't count on it. He seems determined during his re-election drive not to offend the military and its conservative champions.
Belgium and Norway this year forbade the production, export or use of land mines. Leahy and Evans hope the upcoming debate will create a climate for a similar stand by the United States. Lest you conclude the land mine moratorium is being pushed by peacenik lawmakers, note that among the senators supporting it are decorated war veterans Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, J. Robert Kerrey, D-Neb., John F. Kerry, D-Mass., and Charles S. Robb, D-Va.
The case for the Leahy-Evans moratorium is overwhelming. Even so, Congress probably will lose its nerve and refuse to enact the moratorium this year. But I think I could tell that little girl in Hue, if she lived through her maiming, that reason is beginning to assert itself. Man is beginning to see the folly of fouling his own nest with mines. There is at least a dim light at the end of the tunnel.
Killers in the Earth
(By Anne Goldfeld and Holly Myers)
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Rep. Lane Evans of Illinois have just introduced a bill to establish a year-long moratorium on the use of land mines. This legislation is a critical step toward the goal of an eventual international ban on the production, stockpiling, trade and use of these weapons. Passage of this amendment is a humanitarian imperative as, day by day, the public health and environmental crises of land mines spin out of control.
At as little as $3 apiece, land mines have become the cheapest choice weapon in the civil war conflicts that plague our planet. In the former Yugoslavia alone, as many as 5 million land mines have been dug into the earth since the outbreak of fighting. In Rwanda, tens of thousands of mines newly laid in the last year will target the poorest in society--the children and women who must collect firewood or fetch water for survival. As elsewhere, women and children make up 30 percent of land mine victims, and because of their small size, children rarely survive a blast. Tragically, children too frequently perceive land mines to be brightly colored toys.
Land mines are an epidemic more deadly than the Ebola virus, killing or maiming at least 26,000 people a year, 90 percent of whom are noncombatant civilians. However, unlike Ebola, this scourge has spread to nearly every continent on the globe: 10 million land mines in Afghanistan (where the technique of scattering mines from the air was perfected), 10 million mines in Angola, 130,000 mines in Nicaragua, 4 million mines in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Mines were laid in the recent Peru-Ecuador border dispute, and new mines are being laid with a ferocity in current hot spots such as Chechnya and Bosnia. The cost of clearing a single mine ranges between $300 and $1,000 and requires a brave man or woman to work on hands and knees, meticulously removing one mine at a time.
In Cambodia, a country of 8 million people, there are an estimated 8 million land mines. Twenty percent of the land in the country's fertile northwest provinces is now not cultivable because of mines. Approximately one out of every 200 people is an amputee, the highest percentage in the world; in the United States the comparable ratio of amputees to the general population is one out of 22,000. At the current rate of clearance, Cambodia will not be free of mines for 300 years.
According to the U.S . State Department, there are an estimated 100 million land mines in the earth today and at least another 100 million stockpiled in arsenals. Like Ebola between outbreaks, they remain hidden and await their victims patiently for decades. With each passing day, they turn once-fertile fields into abandoned wastelands and destroy lives, limbs and futures.
There is no possible military objective or argument that can justify the human toll and the pollution of the earth exacted by the continued use of land mines.
Land mines, `weapons of mass destruction in slow motion,' have claimed more victims than nuclear, chemical and biological weapons together. The indiscriminate chemical and biological weapons systems are now banned, and land mines must also be banned. President Clinton, at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, proposed that the elimination of land mines be a common goal of member nations. Let's put this theoretical position into action. Active support of the Leahy-Evans bill represents a crucial start.
Fields That Keep Killing
Numbers can be cold abstractions. An account of five minutes in the life of one child at Auschwitz can convey the evil of the Nazi genocide more unforgettably than any quantitative summary of Hitler's mass murder. To understand a contemporary massacre of the innocents that continues day after day, one must feel the horror hidden in the figures on antipersonnel land mines.
One hundred million is the number of mines waiting to kill, maim or blind a child going to school, a farmer tilling the soil or a refugee returning home. Twenty-six thousand is the number of people who were killed or maimed in the past year by land mines. Seventy is the figure for those who are blown apart each day. Sixty-two is the number of countries where land mines, weapons of mass destruction that kill in slow motion, have been sown in the soil. Three dollars is the cost for a land mine, the cheapest terror weapon of all.
The ethical imperative to eliminate land mines is clear. Mines do not discriminate between civilians and combatants. They go on murdering and mutilating innocent victims indefinitely. There are still areas of the Netherlands and Denmark that are off-limits because of unexploded mines from World War II. In countries such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola or Iraq, the diffusion of mines has created permanent killing fields. And Russian planes are currently strewing mines in Chechnya.
To help end the commerce in land mines, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont is planning to introduce a bill to ban U.S . use of antipersonnel land mines except `in marked and guarded minefields along internationally recognized national borders.' To discourage the proliferation of mines, the United States would end all transfers of military equipment to `any country which the President determines sells, exports or transfers antipersonnel land mines.' The bill would also authorize $20 million to clear and disarm existing land mines.
Leahy's bill is necessary because the Pentagon has prevailed on President Clinton to keep using mines that self-destruct after a few months or years. That would be a license to prolong mass murder. Leahy has proposed a wise and humane measure that deserves support.
Newlyweds, Killed in Blast (By Michele Salcedo)
They were newlyweds, celebrating their nine-day-old marriage with a dream honeymoon at a Red Sea resort in Egypt.
But on Monday the lives of U.S . Army Maj. Brian Horvath, a cardiologist who grew up in Sayville, L.I., and his bride. Maj. Patricia Kopp-Horvath, ended together when the off-road vehicle in which they were touring the Sinai desert hit a landmine.
An Army spokesman at the Pentagon, Lt. Col. William Harkey, declined to confirm the Horvathe death until a positive identification could be made in six to 10 days.
But Capt. Dominick Yarrane, commander of the Suffolk County Police Community Response Unit, where Horvath's mother, Arlene, works as an aide, said an Army official from Fort Hamilton notified the Horvath family of the tragedy Monday evening.
The newlyweds had rented an off-road vehicle, and hired a driver and guide for a tour of the desert territory fought over by Israel and Egypt between 1948 and 1967.
Horvath and wife, their driver and guide had driven 30 miles north of the Red Sea resort of Shaphi al-Sheik, according to Michael Sternberg, the chief representative in Israel of the multinational force in the Sinai, where they struck the mine. The driver and guide survived the blast, but their condition was unclear.
A source at the U.S . Embassy in Cairo said that the area where the explosion occurred--just north of the Sinai's southern tip--was well-traveled and visited frequently by tourists. It was not in any way restricted, the source said.
The Egyptian Ministry of the Interior said the area had been mined during 40 years of recurring hostilities, but that efforts had been made to clear it of mines when Israel returned the area to Egypt. American officials in Egypt considered the incident an accident, the U.S . Embassy source said.
The Horvaths announced their engagement in April and were married June 17 in Stillwater, Minn., near Patricia Kopp's hometown. They were stationed at Landstuhi Regional Army Medical Center in Germany, where Brian Horvath practiced and Patricia Kopp-Harvath worked as a certified registered nurse-anesthetist.
Judging by the way our lawmakers vote and our citizens act, Oregon is one of the most pro-peace states in the nation.
It will disappoint Oregonians, then, to learn that the United States is the leading arms exporter in the world, with 72.6 percent of the market. It's also disappointing that while a hundred million unexploded land mines spread around the world kill or maim 26,000 innocent people each year, only 57 percent of Americans want a moratorium on their export.
The U.S . Senate is expected to take up this summer both a moratorium on land mines and a `Code of Conduct,' pushed by Sen. Mark Hatfield, to restrict the sale of conventional arms to dictators and countries that fail to meet certain humanitarian criteria.
Of all the measures, elimination of land mines should be the easiest to obtain. The United States imposed a one-year moratorium in 1992 and has extended it every year, President Clinton wants to do the same this year and then move toward elimination--but with a catch. His administration wants countries to use self-destructing land mines as an interim step. Many see this as a self-serving promotion of American-made self-destruction mines.
Except for specific purposes and specific times--along borders in a war--antipersonnel mines have no honest military purpose. Nevertheless, they've been sown like wheat across the countryside in many countries. Innocent children and civilians become their victims.
Oregonians should be the first to urge Congress to vote the toughest sort of ban on land mines, including the self-destruct models.
Oregonians have supported Hatfield's `Code of Conduct' bill in the past and must maintain that support, in hopes that Congress eventually will get the message. His code may be the only way to stop this country from selling arms to nations that may eventually use them against us--Iraq and Somalia are good examples. Besides, we subsidize the sales with U.S . tax dollars and loan guarantees.
Wars fought with conventional weapons have claimed the lives of 40 million people since World War II. How do U.S . taxpayers feel about their contribution to this slaughter?
Land Mines Plague World
SPECTER SHOULD LEAD GOP SENATORS IN EFFORT TO PROTECT CIVILIANS
Senate Democrats are pressing a bill that would make the United States the leader in a global effort to sharply restrict the distribution and use of land mines.
According to the State Department, 26,000 civilians around the world are killed or maimed each year by land mines left over from wars. Official estimates of the number of such devices buried on innumerable former battlefields range as high as 100 million.
No Republicans have signed on as sponsors to the Senate bill, which would extend a moratorium on the use of U.S .-produced anti-personnel land mines, expect in certain marked areas where they help to protect borders.
Such a moratorium would give the U.S . the moral weight needed to lead to a global moratorium on anti-personnel mines, an international conference on which is scheduled to convene in September.
Civilian populations suffer during wars but should be relieved of such burdens when hostilities cease. The United States should be a leader in protecting, rather than contributing to the endangerment of civilians.
Sen. Arlen Specter is considered a swing vote on this issue. He should lead his GOP colleagues in helping to stop the carnage caused by land mines.
Land-Mine Moratorium
In 1992, Congress took an intelligent half-step of approving a one-year moratorium on the export of land mines, and subsequently passed an extension. It now has the opportunity to expand the moratorium, saving thousands of lives in the process.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont has proposed a further measure that calls on the president to support international negotiations to eliminate anti-personnel land mines, imposes a one-year moratorium on the use of U.S . land mines except in certain marked areas along international borders and encourages other countries to adopt the moratorium. Passage of the bill could have far-ranging implications. After the '92 moratorium was passed, two dozen other countries enacted similar measures. By rough count, there are 1 million land mines currently sown into the earth, awaiting either the costly process of removal (Kuwait has spent $800 million doing this since the end of the Gulf War) or the costlier detonation by an unwilling passerby. Land mines do not know when a war has ended or whether a victim is a soldier or civilian. Their placement in fields once used for planting has the doubly vicious result of causing widespread injury among civilians while discouraging other refugees from returning to their farm lands.
Land mines are designed to maim instead of kill. They cause disabling injuries, inflict pain and terror among those unfortunate enough in the minelaced regions of Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, and a dozen other places. Approximately 26,000 people are killed or injured by land mines each year. Once used as a defensive weapon, militaries have found these cheap devices ideal for offensive purposes, as well. Their drain on scarce medical resources means that others suffering from disease or malnutrition will die from want of treatment.
President Bill Clinton has endorsed the idea of eventual elimination of antipersonnel land mines, but unfortunately also wants to allow a U.S . firm to export a higher-tech version of the weapon, known as a self-destructing land mine. In theory, these land mines either blow up or become inactive after a given time. But allowing one type of land mine opens a loophole for several types, and makes enforcement of a ban on the rest nearly impossible.
As the world's largest arms exporter, the United States has the special problem of facing potentially hostile countries supplied with U.S .-produced weapons. The land-mine moratorium is an important step toward reducing that eventuality and increasing world safety. Maine's senators should support the Leahy bill.
Ease the Threat From Land Mines
The numbers are staggering, so enormous that no one can say with precision just how many unexploded land mines litter the planet.
In a speech to the United Nations last September, President Clinton cited the figure 85 million. More recently, the State Department has put the number at 100 million, or one for every 50 people in the world.
What is known is that on average about 500 people are killed or maimed each week--26,000 every year--by land mines. Huge swaths of ground have been rendered uninhabitable by the sowing of mine fields, from Kuwait to Angola. One of every 236 people in Cambodia is an amputee as a result of mine blasts. Around the world, wherever land mines lie in wait for the unsuspecting or careless, prominent among their victims are children.
But there is an effort under way to do something about this madness. A one-year moratorium on the sale, export and transfer of land Mines was adopted by the United States in 1992, followed the next year by unanimous Senate passage of a three-year extension. The moratorium effort has since been joined by 25 other countries.
Late next week, the Senate is expected to vote on The 1995 Land Mine Use Moratorium Act, which:
Urges the president to pursue an international agreement for the eventual elimination of anti-personnel land mines.
Imposes a one-year moratorium on U.S . use of land mines, except in certain marked areas along international borders.
Encourages additional countries to join the moratorium.
The legislation is sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., with 44 co-sponsors representing both parties. Absent from the sponsors list for this wise legislation, which has the active support of the U.S . Conference of Catholic Bishops and more than 200 other human rights organizations are the names of Pennsylvania's senators, Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum.
We urge our two Republican senators to join the effort to end this indiscriminate means of warfare, just as the nations of the world have previously agreed to end the use of biological and chemical weapons. America's leadership and example is no less essential to making this a safer and more peaceful world than it was in winning the Cold War.
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Ban Land Mines
The world is slowly waking to the indiscriminate carnage that results from the use of a cheap, easily dispersed and deadly weapon--the land mine.
The question is whether the United States will exercise the leadership required to move the international community toward a total ban of a weapon that kills and maims 26,000 people a year.
There are about 100 million land mines already in place on killing fields around the globe. They create terror on the cheap. They cost between $3 and $20 to make, and 80 percent of those killed are children. Long after the battlefields are quiet in Cambodia, Angola, Lebanon and Vietnam, the killing goes on.
Land mines are the weapons of cowards. The Soviet Union spread them by the millions in Afghanistan; some were specifically designed to entice children into picking them up. Now Russia is spreading them in Chechnya.
Sen. Patrick Leahy has played a leading role in prodding the Clinton administration and the international community to bring this hideous technology under control. Legislation introduced by Leahy two years ago led to a moratorium by the United States on the manufacture and sale of land mines and prompted 25 other nations to follow suit. Leahy also introduced a resolution before the U.N. General Assembly on behalf of the United States calling for the `eventual elimination' of land mines.
Now the Clinton administration is backtracking.
Leahy has introduced a bill that would prohibit the United States from using land mines, except in certain specifically designated border areas, and to impose sanctions on nations who use them. He hopes the United States will lead by example, as it did on the manufacturing moratorium, so other nations also disavow use of land mines.
The U.S . military, however, is wary of establishing a precedent. Even though land mines are primarily an instrument of terror aimed at innocent civilians, the Army does not like to have its options limited. Certainly, land mines are not the most important weapon in the U.S . arsenal, but the military does not want Congress to get in the habit of indulging its humanitarian impulses by limiting the weapons the Army can use.
Thus, Clinton has found a way to equivocate.
Though the United States introduced the U.N. resolution favoring the elimination of land mines, Clinton now favors the export and use of self-destructing land mines that would detonate by themselves over time.
Here Clinton indulges in fantasy. Does he really believe the dozens of nations with tens of millions of land mines in their possession will decide they would rather buy more expensive self-destructing mines and use them instead? In this way, Clinton undermines the international effort to eliminate the use of this weapon.
Just four years ago there were only two organizations raising the alarm about land mines. One was the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation whose land mine campaign is led by Jody Williams of Brattleboro. She had seen what land mines do in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Now there are 350 organizations in 20 countries pushing to eliminate the use of land mines. Pope John Paul II, former President Jimmy Carter, Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali all support a ban. And yet Clinton backs away.
Leahy's bill would put the U.S . once again at the vanguard of the effort to eliminate what Leahy has called `weapons of mass destruction in slow motion.'
Leahy's bill has 44 co-sponsors, including Sen. James Jeffords, but he has still not been assured the bill will come to a vote. It ought to come to a vote, and despite Clinton's equivocation, Congress ought to send the message that the United States will lead the way in containing the violence war causes among the world's innocent bystanders.
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, in my ongoing effort to see a worldwide ban on the use of antipersonnel landmines, it is interesting to note that since starting this effort 25 countries have taken at least the initial step by halting all or most of their exports of antipersonnel mines.