Bagging the Peace again

Bagging the Peace again
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
October 23, 2005

Mohammed ElBaradei and the IAEA winning the 2005 peace prize takes one back to 1997, when the award of the Peace Nobel to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines startled the world.

"So the 1997 Nobel Prize recognised both a cause and the simple human beings behind it."

HIDDEN MENACE: The result of a landmine explosion in the Tral area in Jammu and Kashmir. PHOTO: NISSAR AHMAD
AS I join my U.N. colleagues in celebrating the Nobel Committee's decision to award the 2005 peace prize to Mohammed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), my mind goes back to 1997, when the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines startled the world. Organisations have won the Peace Prize before — indeed, I have been privileged to serve two that have, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which won in 1981, and the United Nations, whose peace-keeping operations were laureates in 1988 and which itself, together with its Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, won in 2001. But the U.N. and the IAEA are of course pillars of the international establishment, inter-governmental bodies working with the support and co-operation of the powers that be. The International Committee to Ban Landmines (ICBL), however, was a grassroots outfit, the international equivalent of a people's uprising. It was enough to see its co-ordinator, Jody Williams, interviewed on the morning of the announcement, standing in her overgrown garden in Vermont in bare feet and dungarees, to realise how extraordinary her achievement was.
The deadliest "conventional weapons"

Anti-personnel land mines are perhaps the deadliest of the so-called "conventional weapons". (This is a term that has always bothered me: if it is "conventional" to blow people up and rend innocent children from limb to limb, it is clearly a convention the world must outgrow.) But left to the world's Governments, landmines would have continued to wreak havoc unchecked. And not just in wars — landmines actually kill more people in peacetime, because they lie around long after the warriors have forgotten why they put them there and where they put them. Overwhelmingly, it's women and children who are killed, maimed or crippled by anti-personnel landmines going off unexpectedly on main roads, in fields, under country paths — wherever combatants thought they would serve some immediate purpose whose long-term impact never crossed their minds.
The statistics are horrible enough: thousands of deaths each year, and millions of undiscovered landmines waiting silently to explode in numerous war-zones around the world, mostly in developing countries. The grassroots volunteers set about ending this scourge by means of a vigorous global campaign to pressurise Governments. Experts scoffed at this freelance diplomacy, but through public consciousness-raising, Jody Williams and her e-mail network got one conscience-stricken Government, Canada's, to support them. Of course only Governments could sign a treaty to ban landmines, but they were pushed and prodded by ordinary people giving vent to the simple human emotion of outrage. Eventually, 102 countries were represented at the conference that signed a convention on the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines.
What is striking about this process is that the elimination of land-mines became a truly global cause from the bottom up rather than the top down, propelled by the demands of ordinary citizens everywhere rather than by the legalese and diplomatic compromises of other treaty-making processes. Even the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, paid tribute to the work of the campaigners as "evidence that ordinary people and public opinion can lead Governments on issues like this".
There are those who retort that Governments have good reason to resist a ban on landmines in the interests of the security of their soldiers. But landmines are not merely laid in neatly-ordered, well-mapped rows across demilitarised zones (DMZs): they are the weapons of choice in guerrilla wars, ethnic conflicts, local insurgencies, wars that rage beyond the reach of raison d'etat, and they exact a terrible human toll. Across the world, there is increasing awareness that it is humanity itself that is held hostage to the plague of landmines. The images of suffering and mutilation, of limbless children and deformed young women, have been in the media for years, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Linked to development

Developing countries are too often doubly afflicted, by poverty and war; both leave their scars on human beings, except that the wounds caused by landmines can erupt at any time. In places like Angola and Cambodia, durable peace and lasting reconstruction are inconceivable as long as landmines litter the land, their lurking menace a permanent threat to the innocent and unwary. Until landmines are eliminated, refugees will be less able to return, idle fields will be less accessible for sowing and planting, and normality itself will be less easy to restore, since the shadow of fear will continue to cast itself on ordinary people.
So the 1997 Nobel Prize recognised both a cause and the simple human beings behind it. A world completely free of landmines still seems a distant dream, but the efforts of Jody Williams and her ragtag coalition helped make it a less elusive prospect. So let us not cavil that this year's laureates have not yet ended the threat of nuclear war. Trying to rein in the nuclear menace — which the IAEA does every day — is an equally valuable contribution to making the world, our world, a safer place.