A Global Campaign Regroups

Leaders of a broad movement to ban land mines retool its structure after a year of tension and success

The global campaign against land mines is seeking to chart its future and regain its momentum following a year of tremendous international achievement — and internal fractures exacerbated by that success.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines enjoyed a truly extraordinary year in 1997, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and securing an international treaty banning the mines (The Chronicle, October 30). But some members of the loosely structured coalition were disgruntled that the Nobel Committee — which awarded the $1-million prize jointly to the campaign and to its international coordinator, Jody Williams — did not spread the credit more widely. Ms. Williams herself clashed with one of the campaign’s founders and left the staff of his organization, where she had worked for the past six years. She is now using her share of the prize money to finance her work for the campaign.

Other members felt that the campaign was dominated by Americans and gave too little voice to people in developing nations.

In addition, the campaign — which has operated since its founding seven years ago as a coalition of widely diverse people and organizations without either a legal identity or a conventional headquarters — is struggling to adapt to its current high profile while balancing the concerns of its members, which now include more than 1,000 organizations in dozens of countries.

Seventy leaders of the campaign assembled in Frankfurt last month to sort through those issues and plot their strategy. In a decision both symbolic and pragmatic, they decided that the coalition’s loosely knit, decentralized structure did not require more than minor tinkering.

They rejected proposals to create a strong secretariat to coordinate the campaign’s next phase, or to carve up its membership into geographic regions — although they did agree that some minimal structure was necessary to conduct business. For one thing, the campaign’s share of the prize money is still in Oslo with the Nobel Committee, since no legal entity exists that is authorized to receive the funds.

“We’re very wary of dismantling this inclusive, open, non-bureaucratized coalition, although we recognize that we have to have some structure,” says Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights in Boston, who chaired one of the sessions at the Frankfurt meeting. “We may be on the cutting edge of creating a new kind of international agency.”

Several members of the campaign, however, fear that the decision to remain a loose coalition may hamstring the group’s effectiveness and prevent it from capitalizing fully on the prize it received last October. Without a more conventional structure, they warn, the campaign may have difficulty in attracting new support.

The movement to ban land mines has been effective in part because campaigns within each country conceived and implemented activities independently, without having to clear them through a central office, its leaders say.

The weight of their aggregate commitment was instrumental in persuading 123 countries to sign a treaty last December in Ottawa that would outlaw the manufacture, sale, and use of anti-personnel mines, which every year kill thousands of people, most of whom are civilians. Once 40 countries have ratified the treaty it will become international law.

The issue of setting up a strong central office was a politically sensitive one for the campaign. Some members from African and Asian countries where land mines are a constant threat feel strongly that it would be inappropriate to establish a headquarters in Europe or North America, where the peril is more abstract and distant. And others believe that modern telecommunications make a single physical office unnecessary.

“So far we’ve never had an office, and we’re still trying not to,” says Ms. Williams. “Why waste money on an office when you don’t need one?” As coordinator, Ms. Williams divided her time between the Washington, D.C., office of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which paid her salary and provided logistical support for the campaign; her home in rural Vermont; and frequent trips overseas, communicating with the network largely by electronic mail.

Ms. Williams adds: “This campaign is about getting a job done, not about building a permanent institution. It’s about building a coalition for a specific cause that is, hopefully, time-limited.”

But others see merit in traditional office structures. “E-mail has been a great tool and a great boon to organizing this campaign, but there’s still a need for street mail and for phones and faxes,” said Michael Leaveck, associate director of the Vietnam Veterans Foundation of America, who attended the Frankfurt meeting.

“We really have a choice here,” Mr. Leaveck continues. “If we don’t want to develop a strong central hierarchical structure, we have to face the fact that we’re not going to be able to capitalize to the extent we might want to on the development possibilities the Nobel Prize has afforded.”

Acting by consensus last month, campaign leaders decided to register the campaign as a non-profit organization and to place the prize money in trust, where its earnings could be used to support an expansion of the campaign — and also to attract more donations from governments, grant makers, and individual donors. Part of the income might go to help national campaigns in poor countries equip themselves with the technological tools to participate more fully in the effort.

“We’re hoping to use the Nobel money to leverage a great deal more money for this campaign,” says Steve Goose, a program director at Human Rights Watch, in Washington. “We will challenge donors to add to the trust so we can build an endowment to insure that the International Campaign to Ban Landmines will do its work till we have eliminated every last mine from the world.”

That use of the prize money was not universally applauded. “It’s sad that all we’ve decided to do is put it in a bank and collect interest,” says Mr. Leaveck. “We’re a very goal-oriented campaign, and we ought to be using whatever resources we have on our immediate, short-term goals.” He suggests that a better strategy might be to tap the principal, not just the earnings, to promote the growth of fledgling national campaigns.

Details about the fund and other matters are still to be decided. But among other decisions made by campaign leaders in Frankfurt:

* Two American women were named international coordinators, succeeding Ms. Williams. Susan B. Walker, Handicap International’s U.S. representative in Minneapolis, and Liz Bernstein, who works for Handicap International in Maputo, Mozambique, may eventually be joined by one or more additional coordinators.

* Ms. Williams and two other activists were named the campaign’s international ambassadors. While Ms. Williams focuses on expanding support for the international treaty, Tun Channereth, a Cambodian who lost both legs in a mine blast, will lead the effort for assisting victims of land-mine explosions, and Rae McGrath, a Briton who founded the Mines Advisory Group, will focus on the process of removing land mines already deployed.

* Membership in the committee that coordinates the campaign was broadened and expanded, from 10 groups to 16. The new members are based in Africa, Europe, North America, and — for the first time — South America and Japan.

Broadening the leadership reflects the greater emphasis the campaign is now placing on helping land-mine victims and eliminating existing mines. And the Frankfurt meeting, organizers hope, will help the campaign recover some lost ground.

Campaign leaders acknowledge that some of its energy was dissipated last year, when activists were exhausted by the hard work leading up to the treaty signing and dismayed by the turf battles and ego bruises that followed the awarding of the Nobel Prize.

Ms. Williams left the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in December amid policy disagreements with its founder, Bobby Muller. The foundation, in turn, has scaled back its participation in the international campaign in order to focus on activities in the United States.

But campaign leaders play down the effect of the split. “Certainly there are personality clashes,” says Ms. Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights. “When many players have given huge amounts of their time, their energy, and their creativity to an effort, it is always going to be difficult to see one name and one face connected with an effort this broad. But we’re talking of a relatively minor situation in the context of a huge campaign.”

Adds Ms. Walker: “There have been tensions in the campaign. Many of us have felt that the work that needed to be done wasn’t being tackled the way we’d like it to be. It’s been such a waste of time and energy.” But the Frankfurt meeting, she says, “refocused people on the task at hand.”

The divisions have not helped efforts to raise money for the campaign. It has been difficult for many of the groups that make up the campaign to take advantage of the publicity generated by the Nobel Prize and the treaty signing because the public — and even some of their own members — may not link them with the land-mine ban. And groups are loath to appear to be taking too much credit for an achievement that involved the work of hundreds of organizations.

What’s more, campaign leaders say, many people may think that the Ottawa treaty and Nobel Peace Prize marked the end of the campaign, rather than just the start of a new and costly phase of gaining new signatories for the treaty, securing its ratification, and focusing on clearing mines and helping people who have been harmed by explosions.

“We have an enormous task ahead of us,” says Ms. Sirkin. “No one is sitting on their laurels.”