Washington's response to the Ottawa Land Mines Process.

AuthorKirkey, Christopher

[T]oday I am proposing a first step toward the eventual elimination of a less visible but still deadly threat: the world's 85 million anti-personnel land mines, one for every 50 people on the face of the Earth. I ask all nations to join with us and conclude an agreement to reduce the number and availability of those mines. Ridding the world of those often hidden weapons will help to save the lives of tens of thousands of men an women and innocent children in the years to come. (1)

President Bill Clinton, 26 September 1994

Last month I instructed a U.S. team to join negotiations then underway in Oslo to ban all antipersonnel mines. Our negotiators worked tirelessly to reach an agreement we could sign. Unfortunately, as it is now drafted, I cannot in good conscience add America's name to that treaty. (2)

President Bill Clinton, 17 September 1997

In a much celebrated September, 1994, address to the 49th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, President Bill Clinton exhorted the international community to concentrate its efforts towards securing the global elimination of land mines. Just over three years later, in December, 1997, 122 countries gathered in Canada to sign the Ottawa Convention - formally titled the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. Yet, despite widespread international support for it, the United States glaringly opted not to sign this agreement - the most significant negotiated to date to eliminate land mines.

This essay chronicles Washington's land mine policy during the tenure of President Bill Clinton, and more specifically, the U.S. approach toward international efforts to secure a land mine elimination agreement. Drawing in part on extensive interviews with key U.S. negotiators from the Department of State, Department of Defense, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and the National Security Council (NSC), it will examine the period from May, 1996, to December, 1997, paying close attention to Washington's evolving position toward the Ottawa Process, the decision to utilize the Conference on Disarmament (CD) as the most appropriate forum for land mine elimination negotiations, and America's late commitment to Convention negotiations at the September, 1997, Oslo Diplomatic Conference. (3) Scrutiny will also be paid to the negotiation positions advanced by the United States at Oslo, with particular attention given to examining why the U.S. could not endorse the final text of the Convention. Was U.S. reluc tance motivated, as some observers have suggested, by a deep seated disdain for the actors, methods and forum that made up the unconventional Ottawa Process? Was the Department of Defense, as others have alleged, simply unwilling to surrender a much valued weapon of war? This essay will clarify the political and military factors of the Ottawa Convention for the United States (considerations that combined to prevent Washington from signing), and comment on the land mine policy of the U.S. in the post-December, 1997, period.

Admittedly, the land mine issue does not neatly fit within the confines of the bilateral Canada-United States relationship. While it is clear that Canada championed and steered the issue to a successful conclusion - i.e., the realization of the Ottawa Convention Washington's position on land mine use, and especially land mine elimination, was not simply a response to the position advocated by Canada. The issue of global land mine elimination transcended North American borders to capture worldwide attention, involving more than one hundred states, several international groups and hundreds of NGOs. Instead of placing the subject of Washington's approach toward land mine elimination in a strictly Canada-U.S. political context, this essay demonstrates that Washington's response to the issue was driven by considerations above and beyond the self-contained realm of Canada-U.S. relations.

  1. U.S. LAND MINE POLICY: PRELUDE TO OTTAWA

    Much effort to restrict land mines, albeit sporadic and less than fully successful, had been spent by the international community including the United States - prior to the onset of the Ottawa Process. The 10 October 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) represented the first major breakthrough in an effort to address the humanitarian horrors inflicted by land mines. (4) Protocol II of the CCW - Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-traps and Other Devices - was by no means, however, a definitive solution. In the face of ongoing and increased use of land mines and concomitant accidents/deaths, most notably in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Mozambique, public and private observers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s found the 1980 Protocol to be increasingly ineffective. (5) The CCW, it was recognized, failed on several counts including 1) the absence of adequate verification methods to ensure state compliance and enforce implementation; 2) the absence of any meaningful political, economic, or military penalties to punish violators; 3) the inapplicability toward domestic or intrastate conflict; 4) the restrictive focus on land mine use (as opposed to production, stockpiling, transfer, etc.); and, 5) the lack of an effective mechanism to guarantee ratification and implementation. (6)

    In an attempt to design tougher measures to combat the myriad problems stemming from land mine use, the international community reconvened in 1995 at the Review Conference of the CCW. (7) These meetings, held in Vienna and Geneva from 25 September-13 October and also in January and 22 April-3 May 1996, culminated in a revamped Protocol II, yet one that still failed to fully satisfy many states, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations alike. (8) A sense of frustration led eight like-minded states (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Campaign to Ban Land mines (ICBL) "to explore the potential for a new track of diplomatic action on the AP mine issue." (9) These discussions, which began on 19 January 1996 with subsequent meetings in April and May, were ironically attempting to identify an alternative land mine ban course of action, even as the CCW Review Conference continued on. By the conclusion of the CCW Conference on 3 May 1996, Canada -- arguably the most determined state leading the initiative for a more meaningful land mine ban agreement -- declared its intention to convene a multilateral forum in the latter part of 1996. The meeting would be designed to identify and implement a plan of action to meet the desired end. (10)

    For its part, the United States, which had played an active role in crafting the CCW Protocol revisions, was not yet prepared to participate in (let alone endorse) what would soon come to be known as the Ottawa Process. (11) In the Spring of 1996, Washington was instead engaged in an internal policy review to determine the military use of, and need for, land mines. This review, announced on 16 March 1996 and ordered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, culminated two months later. (12) Prior to President Clinton's statement on 16 May, the broad contours of America's landmine policy, had been publicly disclosed. (13) The land mine position of the United States, as outlined by the President, would include the following components:

    1) a renewed commitment to seeking an international agreement to eventually eliminate all land mines;

    2) a commitment to eliminate all non self-detonating/self-deactivating (i.e., "dumb") land mines from the U.S. arsenal by 1999, with the exception of more than one million land mines used to protect American and South Korean defense forces against a potential military attack from North Korea; and,

    3) a decision to continue the use of self-detonating/self-deactivating (i.e., "smart") land mines until such time as effective alternatives were designed to replace them or an international land mine elimination accord was reached. (14)

    As described by Department of Defense spokesman Kenneth Bacon, the revised policy was tacit recognition of political preferences combined with military realities. "We're looking for a formula that will meet the President's promise of eliminating the use of antipersonnel land mines.... There's a humanitarian imperative to do this, but we have to balance the humanitarian imperative with the need to protect our forces." (15)

    The summer of 1996 witnessed no substantive changes to the newly enunciated U.S. land mine policy. Washington's focus shifted to the question of whether or not to participate at the upcoming Canadian-sponsored international forum on eliminating AP mines, scheduled to be convened in Ottawa. U.S. officials from State, Defense, ACDA and the NSC met with Canadian representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and Department of National Defence (DND) on several occasions to discuss the format, scope, purpose and intended outcomes of the Ottawa Conference. As one Department of State participant involved in the talks put it:

    we were well aware that a number of states - Canada, Austria, Norway and the like - were dissatisfied with the CCW Review outcome. The NGO community was even more frustrated by the May result. They viewed the upcoming Ottawa meetings in a redemptive light... as an opportunity to create a fresh start to rid mines from the world. Our concern at this time was ensuring that any declaration to emerge from Ottawa be non-binding on parties... A deadline to eliminate mines by, say, 2000 was from our perspective wholly artificial and inconsistent with past international negotiations and with our security commitments. (16)

    Canadian officials emerged from these meetings convinced that the U.s. was reluctant to commit to a...

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