Office of the Press Secretary

Briefer: James P. Rubin

Landmines: US to Participate in Ottawa Process

QUESTION: Lots of subjects. Let me try you first on land mines. The White House is announcing - you know the White House is up in Martha's Vineyard, so you'll probably be getting a lot of questions that normally would go there, like this one. The White House is sending a team to Geneva on land mines. I wondered if you could go beyond their announcement and tell us, is the Administration happy with the pace of deliberations in Geneva? Might you go a different route? I ask because the Administration's interest in curbing land mines is well known.

MR. RUBIN: Yes, as you know, Secretary Albright has talked for many years about this subject, and in her travels around the world has made a point of talking about the damage that land mines in an uncontrolled environment has done to millions of people, or hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

The White House announcement is an important statement, and it's very important. Let me try to go through it in some detail for you. The United States has decided to participate in the Ottawa Process. Now, what that means is our previous position had been that we were going to be an observer in the Ottawa Process and leave the negotiation of a treaty to ban land mines - ban their transfer, production, stockpiling - to the CD, the Committee on Disarmament, in Geneva.

So the trip that is being taken, led by Deputy Assistant Secretary Eric Newsom, including senior director at the NSC, Robert Bell and other officials to Geneva is not about the CD process; it's about the Ottawa Process. They will be meeting with some 17 countries, including Canada, Norway, South Africa, some of our allies - Germany, France and the UK - to discuss how the United States can propose changes in the agreement that is emerging so that as it is negotiated in the month of September, we can be in a position to support that agreement and sign that agreement.

So this is an important development and it shows that the President's continuing leadership on land mines is making a difference. I would point you to the fact that he made a decision some time ago to seek a ban on land mines. The United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to change its practices of the Pentagon so that the land mines that are known as dumb land mines - that keep on killing long after they were intended to be used - will be destroyed, and that we will spend extraordinary amounts of money to destroy those and make sure that any land mines we do deploy are those that self-destruct.

Now, they will be going to this meeting and participating in the discussions, beginning September 1 in Oslo, on the treaty text with the goal of seeking to achieve our humanitarian international objective to ban land mines and ban their use and protect innocent children and innocent people from their effects. At the same time, we are the United States; we are a global power; we have global interests. They will be seeking to reconcile our humanitarian objectives which are real and profound with our national security objectives which are also important. Those include a geographic exception for anti-personnel land mines in Korea.

Korea is a place where the United States deploys forces in response to the fact that the war that went on there for a long time, our defense treaty with South Korea, the fact that North Korean forces are on a high state of alert and there is always a risk of attack from North Korea. Our planners, our defense officials, believe that anti-personnel land mines are required in order for us to fulfill this, frankly, United Nations' responsibility to protect the Korean Peninsula.

So that exception we will seek, and we hope that other countries understand that when you seek a ban and you want to achieve a ban, you have to be logical and thoughtful about what the exceptions might be. It strikes us as a perfectly reasonable exception, as one where you have a United Nations-generated force in a unique situation where there are unique dangers and that anti-personnel land mines at this point are the only tools that our officials, our Pentagon and our military believe can protect us from that genuine danger in the Korean Peninsula.

We will also be seeking to improve the treaty's verification provisions, particularly in the area of information exchange. The long and the short of it is that we are now going to be working very hard in this group led by Deputy Assistant Secretary Eric Newsom and including Bob Bell from the NSC to try to put the pedal to the metal and see whether we can negotiate the kind of treaty that will meet the humanitarian concerns the President and the Secretary have and also reconcile them with the important national security interests of the United States.

QUESTION: On the exception - is that the only area of exception? Somehow Cuba is in my head, but maybe I have it confused.

MR. RUBIN: I am not aware of a Cuba exception. We also will be trying to ensure that the land mines that are banned are anti-personnel land mines, and that there are no provisions that prevent - in the treaty, the definition of the treaty - that would apply to systems whose primary function is something else, such as protecting a particular location from jeeps or tanks or things like that.

So we will be looking to have an exception in the definition - not an exception --

QUESTION: Geographically?

MR. RUBIN: Not geographically, but an exception that will ensure that the anti-personnel land mine ban is about anti-personnel land mines. We will not be seeking an exception - contrary to a lot of reporting on this - for so-called smart land mines. We are seeking a treaty that bans land mines, anti-personnel land mines; and we're not seeking an exception for self-destructing, so-called smart land mines.

Yes.

QUESTION: But Jamie, like many of President Clinton's proposals, it looks good at first blush but once you peel back the covers, it turns out to not be at all what he was talking about. This is not a ban on land mines; this is a ban on land mines that the United States doesn't want to use anymore. How would you defend that?

MR. RUBIN: Well, first I would categorically reject your characterization of President Clinton's habits and proposals. But getting to the specifics, we believe that the United States has taken a leadership role on land mines. We do not believe that U.S. policies - the U.S. land mines that we produce for these purposes - are the ones that have caused the damage around the world that we've seen about on television, in newspapers and in the reports that the government has put out. It's not our land mines that are causing the grave damage to the limbs and lives of little children around the world; it is the land mines of other countries.

So in thinking about how to approach an issue like this, we have to bear in mind where the problem is. The problem isn't American land mines; the problem is land mines in other countries. Now, because that's the problem, we are taking the high ground and offering to give up a weapon that we do not believe has caused the problems that we all know about and gone to extraordinary length to pay the cost to adjust our policies so that we have a greater chance of getting other countries - the ones whose land mines are exported, or whose weapons are the ones that have caused many of these problems.

I'm not saying this is going to be an easy negotiation. I stated quite clearly that the exception for Korea is one we believe very strongly in, and it is an exception. But we believe the situation on the Korean Peninsula is such that having an exception like that is justified by the fact that -- let's remember why we're there. We're there in support of an international mandate from the United Nations. That strikes us as a reasonable exception to a treaty that is designed to prevent land mines from exploding years and years after they were used for a military operation in Angola or in Mozambique or in Cambodia or Bosnia.

That doesn't mean that this is going to be easy. There are a lot of other countries that will have their questions about this. But the purpose of sending this team over there is so that we can explain to them that we have made the decision to go for an early ban on land mines, even though many of the countries that we're concerned about - such as China and Russia and India and Pakistan and others - are not part of the Ottawa Process. They are in the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva.

Originally what we had said was because those are the countries whose practices caused the most risk, that we ought to focus on those efforts. Now, that is going slowly and in order to try to advance the process and make it quicker and earlier that a ban on land mines takes place and make it less likely that people's little children's legs are going to be blown off around the world, is for us to move the focus of attention to Ottawa and see whether the kind of treaty that we think fits our national security interest can be negotiated.

QUESTION: Just to clarify, the U.S. will not be seeking an exception for self-destructing land mines?

MR. RUBIN: Correct.

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