Last Tuesday, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly revealed that President Obama would follow in President George W. Bush's footsteps and not sign the international Mine Ban Treaty. Many of us had hoped he would embrace President Clinton's pledge that the U.S. would join.
The 1997 treaty was a landmark accomplishment. For the first time in history, a group of governments and civil institutions joined together to ban a conventional weapon that had been used by virtually every fighting force in the world for decades.
Today, 156 nations are party to the treaty -- including Afghanistan, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, all of Europe except Finland (Poland has signed but not yet ratified), all of sub-Saharan Africa except Somalia, almost half of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa (including Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait and Algeria), and the entire Western Hemisphere, except for the United States and Cuba.
Kelly's startling revelation came during a briefing in advance of this week's treaty review conference in Cartagena, Colombia. As he explained: "This administration undertook a policy review, and we decided our land mine policy remains in effect."
A leader of my organization, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, called another State Department official after the disclosure looking for more information. Could it really be true that the U.S. would remain outside one of the most inclusive and comprehensive treaties put together in the last 50 years? The official confirmed that the review was over and that the Bush policy would prevail.
The next day, after an immediate firestorm of protest, Kelly backtracked, saying a review was "still underway." This weak attempt at damage control is hardly credible and has been discounted even by land-mine-ban champion Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) The best hope now is that the outcry is loud enough that the administration will credibly revisit the issue and conduct an open and meaningful review of existing policy. But the possibility of policy change remains highly uncertain.
So why won't the U.S. be joining so many of its allies in renouncing land mines? "We . . . determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign this convention," Kelly said in the briefing.
