bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998) — Spring 1998 // Printemps 1998, pp. 22–26
Donald Campbell, Deputy Minister: It really is a very great honour for me to introduce Jody Williams, who recently has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the extraordinary work that she has done in the campaign to ban land mines and to mobilize global opinion. I am also delighted that we have Steve Goose from Human Rights Watch, who has been one of the other key player in the International Campaign.
You came from a very long and honourable history in the NGO movement, having done a great deal of work in Central America. Moving from one or two organizations to mobilizing the work of over a thousand organizations in over 60 countries was an extraordinary effort. It also brought what Lloyd Axworthy is now calling “the new diplomacy”, which is the working together of governments and civil society in a way that has been rarely been done before.
When the Ottawa Process began Jody Williams and the campaign were among the first to endorse, applaud and push forward this movement. I would also like to pay tribute to the groups in Canada, in the Canadian Government and in this Department who have worked endlessly for this achievement. It is one of the most remarkable achievements in international foreign policy in the 20th century.
Jody Williams: I have been asked to focus on what is so different about the Ottawa process. I think you have an understanding overall of what is different about it but I will give my view from the NGO perspective.
In the first years, it was traditional NGO knocking at the doors of governments for them to look at the issue through the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), a treaty formulated in 1980. It was the one treaty which then attempted to control the use of this indiscriminate killer. The expert sessions went on for a few years before the review conference itself. We were grudgingly admitted into the UN halls but not allowed inside the meeting rooms. We spent these first years outside the doors, waiting for delegates to come out; being there full of information, providing them with the expertise that most of them then did not have.
The strength of this campaign was the coalition, made up of people in the field working on the land mine issue from Human Rights Watch, which had done the first systematic documentation of the impact of the weapon. We would come with those reports which showing the impact of the weapon on the ground.
In much interaction between governments and non-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations are seen as the adversary — the clambering masses trying to get government to do the right thing when they don’t really understand the complexity of government and how many issues really have to be looked at in making a decision. We acknowledged the issues for governments. We didn’t pretend that it wasn’t difficult. We did not say that the land mine did not have utility. We recognized that but we said under law it was irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that it is useful. Poison gas is useful. Probably nuclear weapons are useful. That was not the issue. But it was fairly traditional interaction until the Ottawa process.
This campaign has always had a strategy of concrete objectives that our NGOs could accomplish. If you are not really clear what you are doing next it’s very easy for energy and enthusiasm to dissipate. In our opinion, although the CCW process itself was a failure in terms of the review, throughout that time the pressure generated made governments take steps. During the CCW process all they would talk about were minimal changes.
The whole point of having governments come and review the treaty was because mines needed to be banned but none of them would say “ban”. We had only Belgium, the first country to legislate a total ban in 1995. Finally, others started to say “ban”
Mr. Goose thought we needed to get the pro-ban governments to come together and self-identify. Strength in numbers. We decided that it would be useful, in the waning days of the CCW, to bring together pro-ban governments. We invited them and they came. By the time we had the third meeting there were 17 governments sitting down with this campaign and strategizing. It was the Canadian government in those meetings that said, “OK, we need to keep this momentum up. We agree with you. We need an objective. We need something we can keep working toward and our government is willing to host the strategy session in the fall.” This was after the failure of the CCW in May, 1996.
In all honesty I thought, “they’re going to want to ruin this movement. I know it, the government can’t possibly want to do this right”. Well that turned out not be the case.
We spent the summer working very closely with this government to plan what should happen in Ottawa in October. That was unique. Even before the amazing challenge by Minister Axworthy to the world. Your government had the courage to sit down with us and plan a government strategy session. It has really changed the way diplomacy, at least in this case, was done. We fought many times but we agreed with the essentials and we respected each others’ work. In Ottawa, 50 governments participated, with 24 observers and we were full members in the process. When the conference ended the world was stunned when Foreign Affairs Minister Axworthy stood up in the final five minutes and said, “We challenge the world to return to Canada in one year with a ban treaty negotiated to sign it here. We will sign it even if it is only a handful of governments.”
I still remember the faces of the US delegation. They rolled their eyes and looked at each other. Even pro-ban governments that were friends said this was not normal process. To make it even more horrifying to the diplomatic community, Minister Axworthy said, “and we are doing it with the NGOs. We are going to work in close partnership with the international campaign which has been the engine of this movement. We are going to negotiate a ban treaty.” And the rest is history.
The challenge was really tremendous leadership and you should be proud of your government. The risks that members of your government took in working so closely with us, even if it made governments uncomfortable, took a lot of courage.
The process could have collapsed in those first few months after the challenge. Many governments were angry that it was happening in a new way. Canada had to spend a lot of time reassuring them that it really would work. That also is leadership. They were going to put their political prestige, their time, their energy behind this process and make it work. There is much that happened in achieving this ban treaty. It was the participation with Canadian government officials thinking through the strategy. It was the Axworthy challenge. It was the whole force of the Canadian government to ensure that the challenge had teeth; that the government was going to stand by it; and it was going to give its allies the spine to participate in the process.
One of my favourite comments were the words of the French Ambassador who said that, “this is truly a historic moment. It was one of the few times in history when the action of state actually responded to the demands of civil society” and it is really true. If people take risks — and when I say people, I mean non-governmental organizations, individuals, governments — you can change the world. I think it is harder for governments to take risks than individuals because there is a whole bureaucracy, a whole way of doing things.
Steven Goose: There is widespread belief within the campaign that if it had not been for Canada and the efforts put forward by the Canadian government we would not have a treaty today. We also have a strong belief that if Canada doesn’t continue to show its leadership, and continue to spend its political capital making this issue a high priority, we won’t have true success. It is essential to have Ottawa continue to devote the energy in cooperation with governments if we are going to have this treaty entered into force rapidly.
We do think that this process could be a model for future activities. There are many things that are unique about the land mines ban movement that will not translate into other issues or other weapons. The core principal of governments and NGOs working cooperatively, of civil society making demands, of governments being willing to react to those demands and then working together to make things happen can be carried over to other areas.
I would like to just try to emphasize to you the importance of the treaty. This is the first time in history that a weapon that has been in widespread use will be banned There are hundreds of millions of antipersonnel land mines out there and we are going to ban them.
In the treaty process itself, rather than the Ottawa process overall, we managed to avoid the tyranny of consensus rules. There was never a vote, but knowing that you had to get two-thirds of those present to change what was then a very, very good draft ban treaty held people at bay and made it possible to move the thing forward
For this audience I would like to emphasize that we worked more closely with the government of Canada than any other government. There were many others that we worked closely with: Austria; South Africa; Norway; Mexico and a few others. Certainly no one more closely than with Bob
Lawson and Jill Sinclair, Mark
Gwozdecky, Deborah Chatsis and Ralph Lysyshyn. These people are the heroes of the movement and we are proud to have been associated with them.
Q: Why you? Why this issue? Why now?
J.W.: The post- Cold War period gave people a chance to look at other issues. The surrogate wars of the superpowers were negotiated down through the UN and peacekeeping missions;
NGOs and UN agencies went into Afghanistan,
Cambodia, Mozambique,
Angola. They found the legacy of the Cold War.
Millions and millions of land mines and sub-munitions left contaminating 70 countries of the world that are going to be blowing up civilians for a hundred years.
The land mine was a very graphic, easy way to get people to look at wars that are being fought today. The blazing tracers and all that on TV in the Gulf War is not bout de papier Vol. how most wars are fought. It’s hand-to-hand ugly, on the ground, the whole society gets involved. We were able to mobilize a large coalition because so many NGOs were affected — arms control, development, refugee, children, UNICEF — it was easy to pull them together.
Q: Canada is quite open and has been for a long time to working with Canadian NGO delegations as part of our political culture. What was your interaction like with developing country delegates and what lessons might you be able to draw from to broaden the base?
S.G.: In the early days we didn’t have the opportunity to have all that much interaction with delegates from the developing world because the CCW and its land mines protocol had almost no developing countries on board — I think there were only three African countries at these expert sessions. Some were observers but there were very few. Those who did come tended to gravitate to us because we were the people with information. Also, they came to us because they were the countries most affected by anti-personnel land mines. This is largely a developing world issue — certainly Bosnia, Croatia, others have some with people who were pressing to get rid of a weapon which was causing such devastation in their country.
Our interactions with those governments developed more in-country. This ban campaign became a means of helping to empower NGOs in countries like Mozambique and Angola. It gave them the means to learn how to lobby their governments. When the campaign started in Mozambique we hac eople who were afraid to walk a petition around, to have it signed, people who were afraid to sign a petition, and now the land mines campaign in Mozambique is one of the most vibrant around. One of the hidden benefits of this campaign is the degree to which it has helped NGOs in the developing world become move active members of civil society.
Q: Did you face much opposition from corporations and industry?
S.G.: The fact is that we received almost no opposition from arms manufacturers. I think this is one of the reasons why this campaign has been successful. This weapon really has very limited military utility and it is not a big business for companies. In most countries there simply hasn’t been a land mine manufacturers’ lobby to hold on to the weapon.
In the past year the campaign has tried to focus not just on lobbying governments but also on lobbying individual companies. In the US for example, we launched the Stigmatization Campaign against the manufacturers of anti-personnel land mines. Human Rights Watch issued a report which identified 48 companies manufacturing components for anti-personnel land mines. We entered into a dialogue with 17 which agreed to get out of the business before we published our report just because we talked to them. The public relations disaster of being named a producer was more powerful than the very small amount of profit made from anti-personnel land mines. Motorola was the first company to say that it would get out of the business. Having a high profile company like that brought a lot of others along as well.
Q: What about the financing of this initiative, particularly in the early stages when the possibility of success was perhaps not as tangible as it is now?
J.W.: In the very early days I did the fund raising as well as trying to get NGOs on board. In the US there are a number of foundations which fund progressive issues and I received a not insignificant amount of money to start the campaign. Our costs have been minimal as well. When we have had our conferences; for example, the first one in London in May 1993, we had 70 people representing 40 NGOs. The next one was in Geneva and was backed by UNICEF. By the time we got to Cambodia we had 400 NGOs from 40 countries. Then we had a lot of support from government, from missions in the country. The pro-ban states were helping to fund those conferences. Had we not been successful it would have been like any fund raising, which is not that easy.
Q: Do you think that the Korean peninsula is a special case?
J.W.: I’m just going to say no, I don’t think it is a special case. Mr. Goose is a Korea expert, so I will let him answer the special case question.
S.G.: Korea may be a special case in a geopolitical, geostrategic sense, but it certainly is not a special case in terms of the importance of land mines or the way land mines will be used. If Korea were to be given a special exception within the treaty you would have to be able to make the case that, in Korea and only in Korea, does the military utility of the weapon outweigh the humanitarian costs.
Our real belief for the US is that Korea is something of an excuse. They know that’s how they get an emotional response, they can sell Korea to Congress. If you have an exception for Korea you’re going to have exceptions in all other kinds of places. I identified 36 countries which have had to worry, have either had a neighboring country invade or regular incursions. The idea of having an aggressive neighbor is not uncommon in the world.
Q: What is the significance of remaining hold-outs to the process after the treaty is signed? What are the prospects of ever persuading them in the end to sign on?
S.G.: No treaty is signed or enters into force with true universality. It is not unusual to have countries of concern staying outside of a treaty. This treaty is going to have a majority of the major producers and exporters of anti-personnel land mines on board. If you look at the dozen or so countries which have produced and exported mines over the past 25 years — the mines that are in the ground now — most of them will sign this treaty. The major NATO and the major former Warsaw Pact producers and exporters. More important, we are going to have a huge number of the key users of this weapon. real success of the treaty is that Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritria, Bosnia, Croatia are signing this treaty. They are agreeing never again to use and to destroy their stockpiles within four years. Russia has said that it will sign. That will put tremendous pressure on the US, which said that it will ban this weapon by the year 2006. We’ll press them to do it sooner, by signing this treaty and not by trying to dilute the ban treaty. We’re going to have as much success with universalizing this treaty as any other major arms control or humanitarian law treaty, only get it done in a very much shorter period of time.
Q: Could you comment on the concept that Canada has actually modeled the new diplomacy — Canada’s role in having done this in relation to the Americans?
J.W.: It was the courage of the Canadian Government to step outside of normal diplomatic channels. The US wanted the ban treaty negotiated in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva so it could control the process. The CD operates on consensus. Russia and China were there. These are the same Governments which blocked any movement in the CCW — to negotiate a ban treaty with them would take twenty or thirty years.
When we were in the final days in Oslo and the US was really trying to push its cold war diplomacy, Clinton making calls; Madeleine Albright making calls; Berger, from the National Security Council really pressing the world to accommodate the US. It would have been governments responding the way they always do to the superpower and it was awesome to watch governments say no. They took a huge amount of pressure and we were very concerned. Foreign Ministers from small nations that had never heard from the United States were suddenly getting calls from Madeleine Albright. They would often call us and say, “Madeleine Albright called my Foreign Minister and she wants us to help, what should we do?” We said, “Do the right thing. Say no.” It was very, very tense. I am still stunned that Clinton, given the opposition, would put his personal prestige on the line and make those calls. In our view, the US Government never understood the Ottawa process — never accepted that it was really going to work, that governments would hang together and say no to the United States. They miscalculated it right from the beginning. Miscalculated when they made the decision to go to Oslo. They went because of public pressure. They did not understand that they were not going to win. I was very proud to be part of that history.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998) — Spring 1998 // Printemps 1998, pp. 22–26. Read the rest of this issue →
