c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Earlier this month, Kathyrn Wolford spent much of her time at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Churchwide Assembly rounding up more signatures on petitions urging the United States to support a comprehensive ban on the production, use and sale of landmines.

Wolford, president of Lutheran World Relief, the joint international aid agency of the ELCA and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and her fellow anti-landmine activists have already gathered some 82,000 signatures. And tens thousands more have been gathered by other religious groups _ Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish.

The work of Wolford and the others appears to have paid off.

On Aug. 18, the White House announced that President Clinton had made an abrupt about face and the United States would not only drop its stiff opposition to a fast-track initiative aimed at securing an international landmines treaty by December but would join the effort.”The United States will participate in the Ottawa process negotiations on a treaty banning anti-personnel landmines,”the White House said in a brief, three-paragraph statement issued from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., as Clinton began his vacation.”It’s encouraging,”Wolford said.”It’s a step in the right direction. We would have been disappointed if he had decided any other way.” The Ottawa process is an initiative by the Canadian government, frustrated over the lack of progress in conventional disarmament talks being held under the auspices of the United States, under which nations will unilaterally sign a treaty committing themselves not to deploy landmines.

Canada has invited nations to a December treaty-signing conference and so far some 95 countries have said they will participate. Talks on the Canadian initiative are to begin Sept. 1 in Oslo.

Until the Aug. 18 announcement, the United States had adamantly opposed the Ottawa process, in part because it leaves little room for exceptions to the ban sought by the U.S. military and because Russia and China have said they will not sign the treaty.

Clinton’s reversal is a major victory for a lobbying effort barely visible inside the Washington Beltway. In the past couple of years, however, the initiative has slowly won a large and passionate following around the world.

This has been especially true in U.S churches and synagogues as their overseas missions and relief arms _ such as Lutheran World Relief, World Vision, Mercy Corps International, Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service _ have made the issue a top priority. The groups also have brought home to typical worshipers the homicidal reality of the impact on their work of landmines: There are 100 million or so mines strewn about the globe that kill or main someone _ the vast majority civilians, often children _ every 22 minutes.

Indeed, even as the White House made its announcement, wire services were reporting that a bus in Burundi struck a mine, killing 10 civilians. In another incident, two World Vision-sponsored children were killed and six others injured when they triggered a mine July 26 in Cambodia. “Six months ago, Ottawa wasn’t even on the map,”said John Carr, secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s department of social development and world peace.”Six weeks ago, Ottawa was said to be irrelevant.” But Ottawa became the political touchstone for a movement impatient with the slow and uncertain progress of parallel efforts _ backed by the Clinton administration _ through the United Nations disarmament conference talks in Geneva to draft a formal landmines treaty banning the weapons.

At least part of the reason for the administration’s reversal is that it was increasingly being portrayed as seeking to scuttle the Ottawa process.

For example, at the end of July, high-ranking Catholic officials, including Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, N.J., chairman of the bishops’ international policy committee, met with National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to hand-deliver a letter to Clinton from Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, urging the United States to become”fully engaged in the Ottawa process.” The July 31 meeting was only one of many U.S. religious leaders have had with White House personnel to press their case, and most groups said they were pleased with the Aug. 18 White House announcement.

But concern about what the United States will say and do in Oslo remains high.

Lutheran World Relief’s Wolford said activists will”carefully monitor the administration’s behavior.” According to Carr, the Aug. 18 statement”must lead to full U.S. commitment to a comprehensive and early ban on all antipersonnel landmines.”The purpose of the Ottawa process is to secure a comprehensive ban on landmines, not to seek exceptions for some mines, nor to delay the day when these indiscriminate weapons are banned,”he said.

Because the White House announcement did not commit the United States to signing the Ottawa agreement, some groups remain skeptical, fearing the U.S. will continue to press for exceptions and distinctions ignored by the Ottawa proposal.

Handicap International, the French-Belgian aid organization that provides artificial limbs for landmine victims, for example, said it feared Clinton’s reversal was a”ploy”to weaken the comprehensive ban being sought in the Ottawa accord, pointing to State Department comments that the United States would continue to press for an exception to deployment of mines in Korea, where it has 37,000 troops ranged along the border with North Korea. U.S. officials are also suggesting the treaty not go into force until Russia and China have signed it _ a position rejected by most anti-landmine groups because they argue it will slow down and paralyze the process.

Said Handicap International,”We prefer a strong treaty without the United States to a weak treaty with the United States.” MJP END ANDERSON