Web-site: www.banminesusa.org

CONTACT:
USCBL Coordinator
Gina Coplon-Newfield
617-695-0041

EIGHTY RELIGIOUS, VETERANS, MEDICAL, HUMANITARIAN, AND HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS URGE PRESIDENT TO BAN LANDMINES; SUPPORT FOR TREATY BUILDS NATIONALLY AS WHITE HOUSE SETS TO RELEASE NEW MINES POLICY

Eighty major U.S.-based organizations representing a wide cross-section of American values and constituencies issued a strong call today for President Bush to join the Mine Ban Treaty, an accord signed by over 140 governments, including every NATO nation except Turkey, that prohibits the production, stockpiling, transfer, and use of antipersonnel landmines. The White House is currently in the midst of an interagency review of US landmine policy. This process is expected to revise former President Clinton's executive directive that the US will join the treaty by 2006 if certain military conditions are met. In recent media reports, there is increasing evidence that the Bush Administration plans to abandon this timetable altogether, moving the US further away from ever joining the Mine Ban.

"We hope you will take this opportunity to renounce this weapon of terror that does not discriminate between soldiers and children," stated the groups in a letter to the President (see attached). "Our government's reluctance to participate in this successful accord gives political cover to armies that continue to use the weapon."

Annually antipersonnel landmines maim, blind, or kill 15,000-20,000 people, the majority of whom are civilians, in the more than eighty countries infested with these indiscriminate weapons. However, landmines, as Pentagon casualty reports have clearly shown, also pose a serious risk to U.S. troops, most recently in Afghanistan. In May of last year, eight retired senior commanders in the US armed services publicly asked the President to bring the US onboard the treaty for ostensibly military reasons.

"We would not be urging [you to join the treaty] if we did not believe it would enhance our combat mobility and effectiveness and, most importantly, protect our nation's sons and daughters when we send them into harm's way… We know that the American people will support you in protecting those who defend us. We certainly will," the highly decorated generals and admirals stated, a coalition that included retired Lt. General Hal Moore, who was recently portrayed by actor Mel Gibson in the movie We Were Soldiers.

"As we have seen firsthand in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries around the world, landmines pose a particularly grave threat to refugees and the internally displaced as they seek to return home and rebuild their lives. The United States should join the Mine Ban Treaty immediately, lending its considerable leadership and influence to eliminate a weapon that steals land, as well as lives and limbs," stated Kenneth H. Bacon, President of Refugees International and former Pentagon Spokesman.

The treaty received strong support from Congress in a recently released letter signed by 124 Members of the House of Representatives from both sides of the aisle. The correspondence from Congress came on the heels of a November letter from more than 500 veterans from fifty states urging the President to bring the US into compliance with the treaty. The letter was sent personally to the President by retired Lt. General Dave Palmer, a former Superintendent of West Point and Vice-Chair of the Veterans for Bush-Cheney National Coalition, and Richard Schultz, a landmine survivor and former legislative director of a major veterans service organization.

Read the Letter

The U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL) is a coalition of nearly 500 religious, veterans, medical, peace, humanitarian, and human rights organizations and more than 7,000 individual members who support U.S. participation in the Mine Ban Treaty. The campaign also encourages the government to increase U.S. funding for mine clearance and landmine victim assistance programs. The USCBL, a member of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines, is coordinated by and based at Physicians for Human Rights in Boston, Massachusetts.