A Superpower Responsibility

President Clinton is expected to decide soon whether the United States will join about 100 other countries in a Canadian-led initiative to impose a worldwide ban on antipersonnel mines. A treaty calling for such a ban is scheduled to be completed and signed in Ottawa by December. It’s important that American views be taken into account in the final agreement, something that can be assured only if the United States joins in negotiations over the next few months.

Antipersonnel mines have killed more people than nuclear and chemical weapons combined. It’s time to seek a universal ban on their use. The United States would be forsaking its global leadership responsibilities if it failed to take part in that effort.

Each year 26,000 or more people are killed or maimed by land mines, about 80% of them civilians. Of the 400 million mines that have been buried in the soil of more than 60 countries since the end of World War II, an estimated 110 million remain active, many in areas that have never been clearly identified as mine fields. Mines are a particular menace in Indochina, Africa and the Balkans, to local populations as well as to those who work in international mine-clearing operations.

As a 25-year-old Pentagon study that became known this week shows, mines do not discriminate. One-third of Army casualties in Vietnam were caused by mines, and 90% of the mines used against U.S. forces were of captured material of U.S. origin. In the Korean War, significant casualties occurred when U.S. troops sometimes had to pull back through their own unmarked minefields.

U.S. participation in the land mine negotiations is endorsed by a large bipartisan group of senators and by numerous former military commanders, including Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, who led the allied coalition in the Persian Gulf War. But the Pentagon is wary. For one thing, the United States now produces only “smart mines,” which can deactivate themselves and so pose little postwar threat to civilians. For another, mines planted long ago in the unpopulated zone separating North Korea and South Korea remain an important defensive tool.

These are understandable concerns. The place to raise them and argue for possible exceptions under the treaty is in the forum known as the Ottawa Process. A refusal to participate in that process only denies the United States a key role in shaping this important global initiative. It’s hard to see how that in any way serves American interests.