And yet in Kuito today little has changed. Inside the ground-floor ward set aside for land-mine victims, a sickening odor still fills the provincial hospital. The wounded lie on more than 30 cots. Eleven-year-old Albert Cabinda was playing behind his house
last December when an exploding mine shredded his right arm and chest. Angelo Tombeo Chimbaka, 26, was going to the field to plant tomatoes when he stepped where he thought it was safe. It wasn’t. Now he sits up in his sheetless bed, wearing a Tupac Shakur T shirt, without a right leg. Manuel Jose Almeda, 36, was in a truck on the road to Cingua to buy potatoes when a mine exploded. The shrapnel blew out huge chunks of his left leg. “I’m lucky,” says Almeda. “Other people died.” David Sissinge is a nurse on the ward. “There are more and more victims,” he says, “all from mines.” But what about the campaign that Diana made famous, the one to ban land mines and assist their maimed and crippled victims? Sissinge draws a blank. “If you say so,” he says with a shrug.
There’s no denying that the Ottawa Convention was a signal humanitarian achievement. Few would quarrel with the Nobel Committee’s decision to honor both the American anti-land-mine campaigner Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines with the peace prize. But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that the post-Ottawa picture is not altogether a pretty one. The vast sums of money pledged at the time of the Ottawa accord–$500 million–have been held up by bureaucratic inertia, domestic politics and some nasty squabbling among the very same nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that had pulled together so harmoniously in the run-up to the treaty signing. Moreover, the overall land-mine problem has in some ways worsened, not improved, since December 1997. Williams staunchly rejects these and other criticisms of the campaign. “Why would I ever think that it isn’t a success?” she said in an interview. “I find it interesting that people still want to find the worm in the apple.”
In fact, there are a number of worms in the apple. Angola, one of the most mined countries in the world, signed the Ottawa Convention. With its 25-year-old civil war flaring up again, mines continue to be laid in the country, adding to its 32,000 land-mine amputees. Though it denies it, Cambodia, another signatory, is suspected of continuing to lay mines as well. Furthermore, mine-clearance efforts there are running out of money just as 20,000 Cambodians begin moving back into heavily mined territory that was a battleground until the collapse of the Khmer Rouge last year (accompanying story).
In Mozambique, the situation is just as bleak. The Missingir Dam de-mining project has been delayed for nearly a year as the government, the United Nations Development Program and the South African de-mining company Mechem trade charges of mismanagement. Some government agencies that parcel out Ottawa money are even having second thoughts about funding land-mine projects as opposed to broader health-care programs. In a report last November, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency said it was considering cutting off funds to a mine-clearance program in Laos: “More people are killed in motorcycle-related accidents, and [the number of land-mine injuries] is just a fraction of the casualties caused by malaria.” Then there is what Sverre Johan Kvale, the Sarajevo representative of Norwegian People’s Aid, one of the world’s biggest de-mining organizations, calls “the CNN effect.” With Diana gone and world attention as fickle as always, he says, “we see what we call donor fatigue. It’s kind of like the focus is moving all the time.”
Once the Ottawa signing “solved” the land-mine problem, the world’s attention moved on to other matters. “Do I think momentum has flagged? Yes, I do,” says Tim Rieser, a congressional staff expert on the land-mine issue in Washington. “But I also think that was predictable.” Why such a letdown? Partly, says Rieser, because of a “pretty serious internal trauma” within the anti-land-mine movement. The splits began developing before the ink was dry in Ottawa. Most of the fights have been over money, directly or indirectly. As Williams, the ICBL and others headed into the Ottawa finale, it became clear that the world’s wealthier countries would be committing major money to the cause. Even the United States, which didn’t sign the treaty because Washington believes land mines are crucial to the American defense of South Korea, couldn’t resist the Diana-fueled political correctness of the cause–and stood ready to hand out aid.
The triumph at Ottawa was the result of three sets of groups working together: de-mining NGOs, victim-assistance groups and the so-called political campaigners, like Jody Williams. Pre-Ottawa, the campaigners had lined up government support and lobbied the treaty into existence; post- Ottawa, their job would be to attract additional signatories, promote ratification and keep public awareness high. With $500 million in pledges on the table to carry on their work, all the groups quickly fell out over how the money would be divided. Matthew Scott, an NGO public-policy officer in Canada, is critical of the so-called campaigners; his own organization, World Vision, is one of them. He says that while mine-clearance groups go begging, the campaigners are “funded like never before” and spend too much time on the conference circuit–there were 22 international conferences in the first six months of 1998 alone.
The rivalry has gotten ugly. Lou McGrath, executive director of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a Britain-based organization, is one the feistiest champions of the de-mining contingent. He says de-mining NGOs are getting short shrift not only from Ottawa money but also the Diana Memorial Fund, which announced it was giving £1 million for victim assistance, but nothing for mine clearance. “People think we are getting the support we need,” says McGrath. “It’s just not true.” Jody Williams has attracted criticism for her sometimes abrasive style and her spending habits. The mine-clearance organizations and the campaigners are arguing even over the number of land mines buried around the world. Pre-Ottawa, the campaigners tossed around the figure of 110 million. Some de-miners believe that the real number is 20 million or fewer; the de-miners’ concern is that the bigger numbers make their job look futile–and therefore curtail their funding. As with quarrelsome families, some of the worst spats tend to erupt on special anniversaries. In Ottawa last December, at a press conference to discuss the land-mine campaign one year after the Ottawa signing, McGrath grabbed a mike and lambasted Williams for spending too much money on fancy dinners and cocktail receptions.
MAG is one of the hardest-hit NGOs. It says it has had to cancel one project in Bosnia and scale down another in Angola because of funding problems. “We put a lot into the [ICBL] campaign,” says Tim Carstairs, communications director. “But we haven’t received any new money.” MAG is not alone. Says Guy Willoughby, director of the British-based Halo Trust, the largest de-mining NGO, with 3,000 mine clearers: “There has been a huge amount of talk about a huge amount of money. That money has not materialized.” In Angola, the de-mining NGOs are “so broke” that their expatriate staff has been working without a salary since the beginning of the year, according to a recent report prepared by the German NGO People Against Mines.
It’s no accident that Ottawa money is slow to reach NGOs on the ground in the countries that most need the help–the ones with the most mines and the most victims. Donor governments view much of the NGO community as amateurish; one NGO official admitted that his colleagues embrace “few accounting techniques that would survive in the business community.” At Ottawa, Japan pledged $80 million over five years, but it has put just $1.1 million into mine clearance. De-mining outfits, which rely a great deal on military expertise and ex-military personnel, are sometimes suspected of pursuing dual agendas for their home governments. NGOs that ran the Ottawa campaign so well are not necessarily well equipped to run big publicly funded operations, says Tom Rattenberg, a special adviser at the State of the World Forum, an NGO think tank in San Francisco. “We are sending these NGOs on a fool’s errand,” he warns.
As needy as they are, the Angolas and Cambodias of the world are also considered risky recipients of loans. Donor countries think twice about passing out de-mining equipment, since it includes explosives. “Explosives can be used for all sorts of things,” says Matt Murphy, a U.S. State Department political-military-affairs officer. “We have no way of knowing if they use them in the way they’re supposed to.” In a few cases, many aid experts believe, countries are unable to absorb more aid than they’re getting. Some donors feel that way about Cambodia, says Peter Swartling, a program officer at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. He says donors are concerned, among other things, about the difficulty of tracking funding to the Cambodian Mine Action Center, which employs some 3,000 people but only recently was given its own line in the national budget.
In fact, a good rule of thumb of Ottawa money is this: it flows fastest when it doesn’t have far to go. This has not helped far-flung mine-clearance programs and victim-assistance projects. But it’s been a boon for land-mine-related research and development–and a source of unending friction among those vying for Ottawa dollars. R&D money is something governments understand: it goes to people you know, and it stays home. Germany loves it: last year it designated $25 million for R&D, or 50 percent of its annual Ottawa contribution. Even Canada, which land-mine activists have long thought was on the side of the angels, triggered a controversy over R&D money. At Ottawa, it pledged $100 million over five years; $17 million has been set aside for R&D.
The problem with R&D is that it doesn’t sound, well, caring. “This is supposed to be a humanitarian response to a humanitarian crisis,” says Paul Hannon, executive director of Mines Action Canada, a coalition of 40 NGOs. To some people, money for R&D–which can include the search for alternatives, like mines packed with rubber pellets–sounds a lot like defense spending. In Canada’s case, the spending on land-mine alternatives is small and unalarming: $1.5 million for “nonlethal” computer simulation technology. Yet even that has raised eyebrows. “I’m not a very big proponent of [land-mine alternatives],” says Diane Marleau, who as Canada’s minister for international cooperation oversees the distribution of about half of her government’s Ottawa money. “I’m not the minister of national defense.”
Nor the minister for industry, either. But the anti-land-mine cause is big business, and commercial considerations have shaped a lot of post-Ottawa spending. That’s why a curious cheerleading contingent showed up in Ottawa as the signatories gathered in December 1997. Directly across the street from the signing ceremony was a convention of de-mining-equipment manufacturers. “It was crazy,” remembers Linda Tripp, a World Vision vice president. “We had been trying to get their attention for years.”
One of the manufacturers that showed up was Bofors Weapons Systems, a Swedish company. Like defense contractors around the world, it knew that cleaning up land mines was a growth industry, and it was hoping for a piece of the post-Ottawa pie. Bofors stopped manufacturing antipersonnel mines in 1974; it still makes antitank mines. Beginning in 1994, it spent more than $6 million to develop a bulldozerlike de-mining machine called the Mine Guzzler. Bofors says its machine can clear minefields at the rate of 7 to 10 square kilometers a year with 99 percent efficiency; that would take 500 men 30 months. But the one Mine Guzzler Bofors turned out sits idle in a garage north of Stockholm. An initiative to divert $1.2 million of Sweden’s Ottawa money into the Mine Guzzler program didn’t get government approval. Nobody else has come forward with any Ottawa money to buy or even road-test a Guzzler. “They’re all busy trying to talk the mines away,” Bofors sales director Allan Carlsson says acidly.
Perhaps most important, as the treaty goes into effect this week, more than 50 countries have not signed the Ottawa Convention. True, political pressure surrounding Ottawa has been sufficient, more or less, to keep in line nonsignatories like China and Russia, the United States and Israel. The result: “a de facto global export ban,” says Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch. On the other hand, the nonsignatories just happen to include, as Michael Leaveck of Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation puts it, “all the countries most likely to fight a war in the next 20 years.”
So there’s much work still to do. Ottawa was a remarkable rallying cry. To duplicate the success of the treaty once it came to the gritty business of mine clearance, to say nothing of mending the shattered victims of mines–this was perhaps an impossible dream. “We had broken records and shattered expectations with the ban,” says World Vision’s Matthew Scott. “Shouldn’t we expect to break records on the humanitarian side as well?” No, says Mike Edwards of the World Bank’s NGO Unit. “Social change,” he argues, “is a long haul, not a sprint, and anyone who is not prepared to run the marathon is in the wrong business.” They may quarrel about the pace of progress and squabble over the money, but the anti-land-mine troops who led Diana into battle and carried on after her death have no doubt that they’re in the right business. Now they’ve got to show that they can stick at it.
