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U.S.
Campaign to Ban Landmines Email Newsletter In this edition. . .
Help the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines do the important work that we do advocating for the U.S. to ban landmines and increase resources for landmine victim assistance and demining. Contribute to our 2nd Annual On-Line Charity Auction. Do you or someone you know have a piece of artwork you can donate? How about a weekend at a country home or a gift certificate to a restaurant or a Bed and Breakfast? How about dinner or coffee with a well-known person? A celebrity-autographed item? If so, consider making a donation to our auction. We will be holding the auction on the www.yahoo.com auction site in early October and will be accepting items for donation through early September. To find out more or to tell us about your donation, please e-mail USCBL intern Guinevere Higgins at higgins@phrusa.org. Angola
to Ban Landmines The Angolan government says it has ratified an international treaty banning landmines. Officials in Angola, one of the countries worst affected by landmines, said the decision to join the 1997 Ottawa Convention was a signal to the international community that it is firmly committed to the elimination of anti-personnel mines. Three months ago, the government signed a peace accord with the Unita rebel group to end more than 25 years of civil war, during which all sides used landmines extensively. The Ottawa Convention prohibits the use, manufacture, and trade in anti-personnel mines. The BBC correspondent in Luanda said that as Angola returns to peace, mines are still preventing displaced people from returning to their areas of origin, and preventing aid agencies from reaching those in need. U.S.
Firm Provides Cambodia Detailed List of 1970s U.S. Bombing Runs A U.S. defense contractor Monday provided the Cambodian government with computerized information detailing thousands of U.S. bombing runs on Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, officials said. The information is intended to help Cambodian de-mining groups clear land for settlers and agricultural development, officials said. The information came from the U.S. national archive, originally supplied by pilots after completing their missions during the Vietnam War. U.S. bombing against suspected Viet Cong supply lines through Cambodia, which neighbors Vietnam, began in 1969 and bombing of suspected communists in Cambodia continued sporadically until 1973. Tens of thousands of Cambodians were killed and injured in the raids, many of which were orchestrated secretly by U.S. President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and later declared illegal by U.S. Congress. Many of the bombs did not explode and are scattered about the Cambodian countryside, along with unexploded ordnance from more than 30 years of recently ended civil strife in the country, one of the poorest in the world. In a ceremony at the government's Cabinet office, Cambodian authorities accepted the information, contained in a CD-ROM, from Michael Sheinkman, a private analyst with ties to the U.S. Defense Department. The donation has the blessing of the U.S. government. "If they were dropping leaflets, that's in the database. If they were shooting bullets, that's in the database. Large bombs. Cluster bombs -anything that was in the air at the time it was recorded," Sheinkman said. U.S. Embassy Defense Attache Col. Mike Norton, who attended the ceremony, said the information may not be of "pinpoint" accuracy. "But it's better to know, 'Okay, this is the general area something may have happened.' It will assist the de-miners in their planning of demining operations," Norton told the AP. Cambodia, funded by international donors, spends millions of dollars each year clearing land mines from its pockmarked countryside. U.S.
Aids Egypt Landmine Clear-Up Egypt will receive U.N. and U.S. help to clear millions of landmines it says have hampered development in its Western Desert for more than half a century, a government official said on Tuesday. Egypt has 23 million landmines on its soil, the second largest number after Angola. They are mainly the legacy of fighting in Egypt between the British, Italian and German armies during the Second World War. "The first phase of the plan will concentrate on the development of the north-west coast. This is extremely important to Egypt because of development projects in these areas," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Faiza Abu el-Naga told reporters. She said the project, due to start next year at a cost of $250 million, would receive help from a United Nations fund and the United States. She added that Germany, Britain and Italy had expressed readiness to help. Egypt wants to clear the land for economic development, including tourism, mining and agriculture. Most of Egypt's population of 70 million people live in the narrow Nile valley. Copyright 2002 Reuters. All rights reserved. Spotlight on Singer Judy Collins On July 3, well-known folk singer Judy Collins sang at the Marin County Fair in San Rafael, California and announced her partnership with the San Rafael-based demining group Roots of Peace. With help from the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, California vintners, and ordinary citizens, Roots of Peace has raised more than $500,000 for mine removal efforts, primarily in former vineyards and farmland in the Balkans and Afghanistan. On July 6, Croatian born Napa Valley vintner Miljenko Grgich hosted a special wine auction that raised $40,000 for the program of Roots of Peace and the Rotary Club of San Rafael to demine land in Karlovac, Croatia. For more information about Roots of Peace, visit www.rootsofpeace.org. Editorial:
President Bush Against the World The relentless U.S. drift toward isolationism is by now familiar. Eighteen months after President George W. Bush moved into the White House, a lengthy array of complex multilateral issues is bedevilled by a narrow, me-first U.S. foreign policy that seems to neither understand nor much care what the rest of the world thinks. Even against that backdrop, however, the United States' willingness to torpedo the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia over misplaced concern about the just-born International Criminal Court sets a new benchmark in global selfishness. The consequences may prove severe. Modelled on the twin Hague-based UN tribunals that have slowly but successfully pursued war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the far broader ICC opened for business on Monday. Seventy-six countries have ratified the court, Canada and all the Western European nations included. Just as many have not, notably Russia, China, Israel and most of the Arab countries. The most glaring absence, however, is that of the United States. From the outset of his presidency Mr. Bush made plain his hostility to the ICC, perceiving it as a violation of U.S. sovereignty and a tool that America's foes would use to drag U.S. combatants and peacekeepers into court on trumped-up charges. In May, U.S. non-recognition became formal, when the administration announced it would disregard former president Bill Clinton's signature on the 1998 Rome treaty that created the court. Now, to the great dismay of Mr. Bush's European allies, particularly his friend British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the crisis over renewing UN peacekeeping duties in Bosnia has demonstrated just how deep-rooted -- unthinking might be a better word -- that hostility is. On Sunday, the United States vetoed what should have been a routine UN Security Council resolution renewing the Bosnia mission after the council refused U.S. demands that all UN peacekeepers be placed beyond ICC reach. The result is a standoff and a temporary three-day extension of the UN mandate that expires tonight at midnight. All this could have been avoided. However well Mr. Bush's suspicions about foreign interference may play inside the walls of post-Sept.-11 Fortress America in an election year, they make no sense measured against the strong safeguards built into the ICC's powers. Chief among these is a proviso that in the event of credible war-crimes allegations, the international court can step in only if authorities in the home country of the accused fail to do so. Further, Britain has secured Security Council agreement that any ICC actions against any American serving in Bosnia would be delayed for at least a year, giving U.S. authorities ample chance to investigate. And the ICC has no retroactive mandate; nothing that occurred before July 1, anywhere, is subject to prosecution. Moreover, war-crimes charges must meet the criteria of the Geneva Conventions. None of this, it seems, matters to the White House. But a little distance down the road it may matter a great deal. With or without the United States, the multinational effort in Bosnia will for now continue, after almost seven years of successfully keeping the lid on what remains a tinderbox. Immediately imperilled is the 1,500-member UN force, which includes a few dozen Americans, that is slowly building a Bosnian police force. But most of the larger NATO-led collection of 18,000 peacekeepers, 3,100 of whom are Americans, would stay in place. But for how long? Several of the nations contributing to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's force have already threatened to pull out of Bosnia if Washington does. And what happens in the next war zone that needs an international post-conflict presence? Another shrug from the world's sole superpower? Mr. Bush's reckless conduct does not merely undermine the ICC. It threatens the entire future of international peacekeeping. Yet here is the same president urging the free world to think globally and rally around him and his war on terror. As with steel and lumber imports, as with the Kyoto air pact, as with international agreements on land mines and biological weapons, Mr. Bush's obsession with putting America first displays profound contempt for its enemies and friends alike. Were it not so habitual, his hypocrisy would be stunning. Copyright 2002 | Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. For more information about the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines or to donate on-line, please visit www.banminesusa.org
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