A Personal Interview with Susannah Sirkin, Deputy Director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)
 
Susannah Sirkin
 
Saamra: What is it that you specifically do for Physicians for Human Rights?
 
Susannah: Well I'm the Deputy Director so I do a little of everything. I oversee a lot of our investigations and the publishing of our reports, our communications work, I deal with a lot of our strategies. So I've been involved in the landmines campaign since before it started. [I] met early on in Somerville with Jody Williams when she came to talk to us about this idea of starting a campaign, whether we'd participate in it. Since that time we've been involved with helping also to bring the medical community on board. One of the roles of our organization is to get the physicians and other health professionals to understand the importance of these issues and how they can bring their reputations to bear on them. And so one of the pieces that we've contributed to this campaign is to bring groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, Surgeons, the American Medical Association, other physician groups to call for a ban. This weekend [in Salt Lake City] was the national meeting of the American Red Cross. Interestingly the American Red Cross has not yet called for a ban. Part of that is political because the US government hasn't signed the treaty the American Red Cross doesn't want to worry about putting itself in that kind of a position. A couple of our doctors are going to Salt Lake City to take that kind of position.
 
Dan: Maybe you could just tell us a little about what you and PHR have done with the ICBL?
 
Susannah: Well, PHR was interested in landmines [before the ICBL started. In 1991 PHR and] Jody Williams and some other organizations began to sort of talk amongst ourselves about the idea of calling for a ban and organizing around a ban. And at the time we thought it was really not going to take hold but that it was the right thing to do and we would at least start a conversation internationally about the horrors of this weapon. And since then PHR has continued to be very involved in documenting the consequences of landmines and in campaigning for a ban. We were one of the founders of the ICBL along with five other organizations.
 
Saamra: And do you know those other organizations?
 
Susannah: ...In the United States it was Human Rights Watch, PHR, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and then we had Medico International which is a German humanitarian group, and in Britain there was the Mines Advisory Group which is a humanitarian demining agency, and then in France there was Handicap International which has done a lot of work in prosthetics and rehabilitation of people who are disabled.
 
Dan: Was there a single incident or event that spurred the coalition?
 

Susannah: I think Cambodia was a pivotal point because when the repatriation was about to occur after the peace agreement was signed people started to realize that you couldn't send all these refugees, more than 1 million refugees, back to Cambodia when the country was covered with mines. That was probably one of the things that caused the momentum. But there was also the unique political environment in the aftermath of the Cold War that we could sort of organize, and this is what was really special about this campaign, that there was increasingly a recognition that non-governmental organizations had a major role to play in these international issues and there was room and space for us to act, and there was an incredible ability of small and middle sized governments, not the superpowers, to organize and call for something without the kind of pressure to take either US or Soviet sides that there would have been during the Cold War, where we would have told our allies "no we don't like this treaty, don't sign it or else...or else...or else", and similarly on the other side. There was this new room for all these countries in Africa or Asia and Latin America to organize and say, "we want to rid the world of landmines."

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Saamra: Why do you think the US is so unwilling to sign the ban?
 
Susannah: Two things: I think first of all the Pentagon doesn't like to get rid of any weapons, nor does any military and so they're going to resist it, and President Clinton has been unwilling to take a leadership role and say "this is what there needs to be beyond the pale and it should be outlawed and we'll deal with the consequences of that given that we have probably the most sophisticated military in the world, we can handle not having land mines." He's been unable to take that leadership for whatever reasons. I don't think that the arguments that the US has used are the real arguments, for instance the issue about North and South Korea which they've used as one of the main arguments for not having mines. I mean there are so many retired generals, who have said that we don't need landmines and they know what they're talking about.
 
Saamra: Do you think that in the future the US will sign the ban if enough international pressure is applied?
 
Susannah: I think they will. The US just announced last week that it intends to sign the treaty by 2006 if they can find an alternative [agreement on Korea]. Now that's a big if because we don't know what kind of investment is being made into finding an alternative, and what we know [will take a] long time given the momentum of the treaty. But I do believe that they will be forced to come to the table and sign the treaty, just because there is such an enormous momentum around this treaty. It will probably enter into force this year with 40 ratifications, later this summer. I think that Russia and the US will take a while to sign; I don't know about China.
 
Dan: Didn't Yeltsin already say that they would sign the treaty?
 
Susannah: He said [it] and then he backed off that statement. In fact we just finished a conference in Moscow yesterday to mobilize a much bigger landmines campaign- ban landmines campaign- in Russia. The Russian officials at the conference said they are not prepared to ban landmines right now, but they will if their security concerns are alleviated and if they have the financial wherewithal to destroy their stockpiles and things like that. There's going to be growing momentum, I believe.
 
Saamra: What is the current status of the landmine treaty and how many countries have ratified?
 
Susannah: Only about 13 have ratified have ratified as of today, but 126 have signed. There's two steps to having a treaty enter into force: there's signing which indicates an intent to ratify. In every country ratification procedures are different. If there's a democracy it involves a ratification agreement signed by the Parliament, or Congress or whatever, and also insuring that the treaty is consistent with domestic law. So at any rate, it will enter into force when there are 40 ratifications, and right now there are about 13 but we have whole bunch in line and we believe that sometime this summer the treaty will enter into force. That means that it's binding on those countries that have ratified and after a certain period of time we will consider it in most international roles and governments will consider it customary international law. It will be, sort of, the law of the world. Even for countries that haven't ratified it, it will be considered to be, you know, a problem. There will be a lot of pressure, in other words, for those countries that haven't, with two-thirds of the world signing it.

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Dan: What happens when it's international law, because [in] the US whenever we don't feel like following international law, we don't?
 

Susannah: There's a positive side to the US not signing it. I hate to say that because I'm very strongly supportive of the US signing it and I'm very disappointed that we haven't signed it, but the fact that they aren't signing it at this point and may sign it eventually demonstrates that when the US does sign a treaty like this they do intend to abide by it. They wouldn't just sign it willy-nilly. Some countries sign treaties, every treaty, and they violate them routinely. So I think that if and when we sign, we intend to abide by it. One of the important things that the ICBL is doing right now is developing a regime, a military regime, in other words, we intend to monitor compliance with the treaty. And we will really go after governments who violate the treaty they have signed.

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Dan: Now will it make much of a substantial difference once this treaty becomes international law, in terms of how many landmines are actually laid?
 
Susannah: Not necessarily. Not unless the vaguer parts of the treaty, having to do with all of the intentions to demine and treat survivors, and those are rather vague because they usually refer to a governments ability to do these things because they are very costly. But one of the most extraordinary results of the whole efforts to ban mines in term of the treaty is that in the process of signing and ratifying the treaty, in the conferences and Oslo and Ottawa, etc., governments have come forward with large donations to speed up demining and speed up rehabilitation of survivors. Even the US government, maybe especially the US government because we're not signing, there's a lot of guilt going on in Washington, and they just had a conference, the US government, a few weeks ago where the US made a big deal out of saying we had this demining 2010 initiative and we are going to accelerate the pace of demining dramatically and we expect that in 2010, this is what the US is saying right now, we will have a mine free world. That's pretty dramatic. I mean a few years ago nobody imagined that we would be remotely close to getting the mines out of the ground.
 
Dan: How realistic [is that goal]?
 
Susannah: I don't know. A lot of it depends on the kind of technology involved to accelerate the pace of demining. Right now demining is unbelievably slow, most of it is done manually. There are no magic bullets. It's a very slow paced, dangerous job to get the mines out of the ground, and enormously expensive, billions of dollars to get the mines out of the parts of the worlds where they're used. There are parts of the world, areas of geographic territories that will never be demined because it's much too difficult, like the mountains of Afghanistan. You just can't demine them. And there are places that will basically be no-man's land for decades.
 
Saamra: As far as the US contention that "smart mines" are OK to use, mines that would self-destruct after a certain period of time or that could be destroyed just by pressing a button, what does Physicians for Human Rights feel about that.
 
Susannah: We think all mines are dumb. Whether a mine self-destructs in x or y time doesn't prevent people being unnecessarily injured by it. Land shifts in courses of conflict and some of these self-destruct mines even if they do have all kinds of mechanisms for destroying themselves, they can be moved by weather and mud-slides. Just yesterday three South Korean soldiers were killed by land mines on the DMZ. This is the area that we're saying we need mines and these mines are causing unnecessary deaths on a daily basis. We're not for soldiers being killed unnecessarily by mines either.

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Saamra: As far as the treaty's words, I know that it specifically only speaks to countries not using landmines themselves, but what about countries like the US placing landmines in countries that have signed the treaty?
 
Susannah: That's prohibited. If a country has ratified the treaty, landmines can't be used on their territory. And that's actually an issue because the US has stockpiles and reserves of landmines in Western Europe, in countries that have signed the treaty and those countries will have to ask the US to remove their mines and the US has been lobbying those governments to allow the US to maintain those mines there. But it would be a violation of the treaty.
 
Saamra: And what would be the punishment or repercussions of someone violating the treaty?
 
Susannah: That's actually not clear. All of those measures need to be built into a monitoring-compliance regime. The UN is looking at that right now. Interestingly, even though it is not a treaty that came through a UN process, it went outside the normal arms control process within the UN, the UN has agreed to ensure compliance and help support compliance with the treaty.
 
Saamra: Is that a big victory for proponents of the treaty that the UN would..?
 
Susannah: Oh yeah, but they've always been supportive. Pretty much the UN has always been sort of in the wings, through various agencies. And now the UN has an enormous mine action program that involves numerous departments and numerous agencies within the UN. And Kofi Annan, the Secretary of the UN, was a prominent person at the podium of the treaty signing. It was a very unique and unprecedented combination of people at a treaty signing: the president and prime minister of Canada, which had initiated the idea for this treaty, the Secretary General of the UN, the president of the International Committee for the Red Cross and Jody Williams of the ICBL. It was really an unprecedented moment in international diplomacy.
 
Jesse: Is there any hope that the treaty will prevent, or at least slow nations that haven't signed it?
 
Susannah: Absolutely. That's already happened. Russia, in this conference last week, has already said that it will start to destroy certain stockpiles and that they will [only] produce certain kinds of mines in the future and that they will get rid from their arsenal of the most egregious, grotesque forms of mines which they have produced over the years. That's already happening. Even in the US, we've pulled back enormously.
 
Jesse: How easy is it for non-governmental, rebel groups to produce their own landmines?
 
Susannah: Well, that's a very scary thing. Certain mines are very easy to produce, they're cheap and they've been called a "poor man's weapon." One of the next new areas for the ICBL is what we call non-state actors. We're very concerned about mines getting into the hands of non-governmental individuals, groups, etc. In Bosnia people were mining their yards as a fence to prevent people from looting and stealing. People all over the world in different situations, especially in civil conflicts, are keeping landmines in the basement to use whenever they need them. Worse than that there are various factions where there are internal conflicts in different parts of the world where mines are being used by actors who are not going to be bound by any of treaty. There's a whole group within the ICBL that's studying this issue and trying to work on it. One of our hopes is that we'll be able to meet with certain kinds rebel groups and get them to sign their own version of the Ottawa treaty, a non-governmental or non-state actor version of the treaty. Some of these groups have agreed in principle not to use landmines.
 
Jesse: I guess the last thing we'd like to touch upon is the use of the media in the ICBL. It certainly seems to be one of its major success stories, if you just want to discuss...
 
Susannah: Well it's interesting, when we put out our report back in 1991, and subsequently in '92 and '94 the media never really paid much attention to this issue, but little by little there major articles about landmines and it started to become a new area for journalists to explore and we just keep feeding the media interest with new angles on the landmine problem. Fortunately for the campaign, sad to say it's a very visible and compelling issue, because unlike some aspects of nuclear weapons and other kinds of weapons, we often have the possibility to show visually what happens. Because landmines are so widely used in many, many countries you can go and do a story about victims and the effect on their lives and show the injuries and show the explosions and show the people cleaning up the mines, so it's a very dramatic story. And it's been enormously important to the development of the campaign that there were so many journalists interested and of course that accelerated when Princess Diana and other figures of international repute became involved in this issue.
 
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