Diana's
Landmine Legacy
By JONATHAN POWER
GENEVA, Switzerland--In Shakespeare's time--and even
later--the blood feud now proclaimed by Princess Diana's
brother, Charles, would have been settled on the
battlefield, a resounding re-match of Plantagenet versus
York. It was Erasmus, writing in the early sixteenth
century, who said that wars occurred because they were a way
of life among a militarized, aristocratic, ruling class.
Humanity has moved on since then and today the alleged
dishonoring of the house of Spencer by the house of Windsor
will be fought in the newspapers and on television, above
all in the court of mass public opinion.
The British, one of the most warlike of nations, as
Margaret Thatcher showed not so long ago with her war
against Argentina over the inconsequential Falklands
Islands--two bald men fighting over a comb, as one wag at
the time put it--are now undergoing a discernable sea-change
in their attitudes. Martial virtues are being sublimated.
Even the football hooligans have faded into the background.
Tony Blair's Labor government, while not pacifist, is imbued
with strong moral values, as the prime minister showed the
world with his passionate rendition of St. Paul's admonition
to "love," in his reading from Corinthians during the
funeral service for Diana.
The anti-landmine movement is her immediate legacy, the
campaign she was most engaged in when she died. It was both
important in itself and important in that it is chipping
away at mankind's long tolerance of the evils of war. War,
the systematic and organized use of violence, is peculiar to
the most advanced of animals, man. To quote Erasmus once
more: "Whoever heard of 100,000 animals rushing together to
butcher each other, as men do everywhere?"
Before Mr. Blair came to power in May the attitude of the
British government towards landmines was the same as that of
the U.S.--they are a necessary part of the modern armory.
Mr. Blair changed that and now President Bill Clinton, after
an initial policy of resistance, has signalled an important
departure in the U.S. negotiating position. Washington has
agreed to be party to a Canadian government initiative
which--without waiting for the laggards, China, India and
Russia--will commit those who are of a like mind to ban the
use, production, sale and stockpiling of anti-personnel
mines. In Oslo this week and next negotiations are in
process with a target date of December for the signing of a
treaty.
This is an astonishing turnaround for both Britain and
America. Until very recently--last month in Mr. Clinton's
case--the Canadian initiative was regarded as high-minded
but unrealistic. Now with Diana's death can anything stop
its satisfactory conclusion?
For the moment Washington is still seeking a number of
let-out clauses, in particular to be allowed to keep its
mines in Korea on the "demilitarized" border between north
and south. Yet in a telling piece of reportage last week a
New York Times correspondent couldn't find one American
soldier in Korea to speak in favor of landmines, such is the
modern, more educated, soldier's abhorrence of a weapon that
is more likely to maim and kill children than any other
weapon of war, long after a conflict is over. Diana's death
ought to be the nail in the coffin for Washington's
reservations.
Diana, we now learn, was campaigning for a treaty that
would go even further than a ban. For this knowledge we have
to thank Bill Deedes, the former editor of the right-wing
British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, who surprised
everyone by becoming the Princess' confidante and speech
writer on these matters. In August they travelled together
to visit landmine victims in Bosnia and when she died they
were working on a speech for the Oslo meeting that would
"stress that a ban on producing landmines was not itself a
solution. She realized that, even with the whole world
agreeing to 100% ban, we would still have 110 million mines
in the ground and still have thousands of people in Bosnia,
Mozambique, Cambodia and elsewhere being killed and wounded
by mines." In this speech that never happened she was
planning to say, "if we could pool the best methods of
bringing up mines--finding them possibly by satellite--we
could speed the work." She believed, says Mr. Deedes "that
governments that had invested so much in making mines should
now use their best scientific talent to find ways of getting
rid of them." Yesterday, I interviewed Cornelio Sommaruga,
president of the International Committee of The Red Cross,
initiator of the original anti-landmine campaign. He added
this sombre point to Diana's would-be observation: "If the
proliferation of landmines were stopped in 1997 it would
still take hundreds of years at current rates of detection
and clearance to rid the world of the mines already laid."
Diana was lobbying us, pushing us, to take a small but
significant step towards the outlawing of war and the
improvement of peace. If the time when kings and dukes
fought wars and knights duels over nothing more than their
reputations now seems part of a distant past, it is time
overdue, as the millenium approaches, to progress even
further. With the abolition and removal of landmines it will
be a small step for the generals but a very important one
for mankind.
September 10,
1997, GENEVA
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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