Both the risks and the significance of that outcome were underscored last week when a major U.N. conference on mines ended with minimal achievements. The campaign to bar American use of land mines had its first significant victory in 1992, when George Bush signed a bill sponsored by Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. The legislation outlawed the export of U.S.-made antipersonnel mines for one year. Later, Leahy succeeded in extending the law through 1997. Then in 1995 he won the votes for a one-year ban on the use of all mines, except along international borders and in demilitarized zones, to take effect in 1999.
Some powerful facts support that assertion.
Perhaps 110 million mines lurk in 64 nations around the world, and each year they kill or maim about 30,000 people, usually civilians. The heaviest concentrations of mines are in poor countries like Cambodia, Somalia, Bosnia, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Angola that have survived years or even decades of civil war. Five million new mines are laid each year, and only 100,000 are cleared. That vicious, exponential math exacts a human toll long after conflict ends. Still, the notion that the U.S. should forswear the use of mines is unpopular among many at the Pentagon.