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Address by HM
Queen Noor of Jordan Ladies and gentlemen, Doctors and scientists, Leaders and policy makers, Experts and advocates, And, most of all, landmine survivors and your families and friends. I would like to begin by announcing with great pride and hope that, as of this morning, the Jordanian Cabinet has approved the signing of the Ottawa convention on the prohibition of the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel mines and on their destruction. 127 countries have signed – now 128 – and, as of yesterday, Norway became the 24th country to ratify. The cabinet will now proceed with the constitutional arrangements for ratification. Welcome. It is for you, the survivors of the scourge of landmines, and to prevent others from suffering as you have suffered, that the rest of us are here today. You, who have come here from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, are the largest group of landmine casualties ever gathered in one place. But you are only a fraction of those whose worlds have been blasted by this menace. Some 300,000 people around the globe are living with shattered limbs and lives and the number is growing. Every month around 800 people are killed and 1200 maimed by landmines – a new tragedy every 20 minutes. Antipersonnel landmines harm primarily civilians. They contravene international humanitarian law, because they are designed to injure rather than kill, to maximize suffering. Their unusual shapes and colors make mines look like toys that attract the eyes and hands of small children. If these facts and statistics concerned an ongoing war or a new high-tech weapon, they would make daily headlines. Much global attention is focused on preventing new weapons of mass destruction, and with good reason. But less attention is paid to these weapons of mass destruction in slow motion that we already have –up to 100 million of them hidden in our fields, forests and playgrounds, and an equal number sitting in our warehouses. These indiscriminate killers constitute one of the greatest public health hazards of the late 20th century – a modern man-made epidemic. Landmines are the cruelest, most severe form of warfare: war that never ends, perpetual killing machines. Antipersonnel mines have an average life span of 50-100 years. Mines left behind after world war two half a century ago are still killing children in Egypt. Displaced families returning home in celebration and hope after years of war in Bosnia are torn apart without warning. When peace is declared, the guns and mortars are stilled, but no one turns off the mines. And because they are small, and destroy lives one by one, their horrific consequences go as unnoticed as the mines themselves. We are here to change that. You can help us to see the magnitude of this menace – to put a human face on this hidden evil. You know better than anyone the real cost of landmines. Not the $3 or $300 they cost to make, or even the $1,000 it can cost to get rid of it, or even the $1000 -$12000 for a prosthetic limb, but the less quantifiable costs. The multiple surgeries to salvage what remains of a leg; the trips a young child must make to the hospital to fit a new prosthesis, only to grow out of it and need another. . . And another. . . And another; The psychological scars and shattered dreams of someone whose body will never be whole again. And you know there are costs to communities as well: farmland made useless, livestock and wildlife constantly endangered, forests of needed firewood rendered off-limits. Landmines are generally placed in rural areas in order to shatter the morale and integrity of family, clan, tribe, and village. Even in long hoped-for peace, these insidious leftovers are a bitter reminder of past conflict and a threat to future progress. War-torn societies can never be rebuilt so long as a single step on mine-infested ground can be fatal. Those who make, sell and deploy landmines always claim they are a necessity of war. But these weapons, even if originally designed for a specific battlefield objective, have proliferated into a source of random terror that respects neither time nor territory, and does not distinguish between hostile combatants and schoolboys playing football. The situation is made worse by the fact that landmines, being cheap and easily obtained, are routinely used by informal militias and guerilla groups engaged in domestic conflicts, groups that are more likely to turn mines against civilians, and less likely to keep records of where they were planted. And even if they were intended for a legitimate military purpose, the ultimate, ghastly irony of landmines is that they don’t work. In 1995, the international committee of the red cross and red crescent (ICRC), alerted by surgeons in the field, in places like Angola, Cambodia and Afghanistan, that more than a quarter of their patients were landmine victims, commissioned a military study of the fundamental effectiveness of landmines. Examining 26 conflicts since 1940, the study found that anti-personnel landmines played no significant role in the outcome of any of them. More than 50 high ranking military figures from 20 countries, including Jordan, have endorsed the study’s conclusion: that the appalling suffering and waste caused by landmines far outweighs their questionable military utility. This meeting represents an unprecedented gathering of doctors, disability advocates, trainers and international and regional experts, who know that support and assistance for survivors must go beyond prosthetics and physical rehabilitation, to encompass mental and socio-economic rehabilitation. They are here to explore the most effective tools for retraining and restoring survivors as fully productive members of communities that are safe and free from fear. This is an unfortunately appropriate place for us to meet, because the Middle East is littered with, by estimates, more than half of the world’s deployed landmines. Having long campaigned against the human, environmental and economic waste of war in a region with the highest per capita military spending in the world, I thought I was inured to such dismal statistics. Even before I first came to Jordan, during my university years at the time of the Vietnam war, I saw many young men of my generation facing either the ravages of war or spending considerable time and energy devising creative ways of dodging the draft – a terrible waste of talent and sometimes lives. The first American soldiers to die in Vietnam and, later, in Bosnia, were killed by anti-personnel mines, and mines were responsible for a third of the u.s. Casualties in Vietnam overall. The tragic irony is that 90% of the landmines in these conflicts were largely of u.s. Manufacture or of components of u.s. Manufacture. I appreciated more directly the horror of landmines – and the human and economic waste they cause – after I came to live in Jordan in the mid-1970s. On my regular trips to the Jordan valley I had to drive past minefields fenced off by barbed wire. The minefields on our borders frightened and angered me then, and I am still infuriated today by the ongoing loss of life and limb suffered by soldiers and civilians alike. When Jerry White and Ken Rutherford of LSN approached me to host this international conference on landmines survivors, I thought I understood the true extent of the crisis in our region. I had long endorsed the international efforts to ban landmines begun in the late 1970s by the ICRC and a handful of other NGOs. In 1991 and 1992, 1000 NGOs working in 60 countries united to form the "international campaign to ban landmines" (ICBL). Last year the efforts of the ICRC, the ICBL, and countries like Austria, Belgium, Canada and Norway, joined by others culminated in the historic Ottawa Convention. My involvement with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Society here had made me aware of the ICRC campaign launched in 1994 followed by their decisive landmine study. Last year, I was heartened by the courageous humanitarian contribution of the late Princess of Wales in Angola and Bosnia, where her unique prominence sparked unprecedented international awareness of the suffering of landmine survivors. And, of course, we all were enormously encouraged when the international campaign to ban landmines won last year’s Nobel Peace prize. But none of this prepared me for the landmine statistics in my own country and this region as a whole. The Middle East is the landmine heartland of the world – Asia is only a distant second. This extensive proliferation of landmines reflects the deeper predicament of distrust, fear, and recurring violence in the Middle East. Here in Jordan, children and adults are routinely injured by mines. About ten percent of our population lives in areas still dangerous and economically unproductive because of landmines. Scarce agricultural lands and some of the most beautiful and sacred landscapes in Jordan, especially in the Jordan River valley, remain scarred and forbidden because of the danger of mines. The demining program in the Jordan valley has cleared 146 minefields with 64,000 mines, freeing up 3,100 acres of land for cultivation, mineral excavation and tourism. But the process is laborious, expensive and dangerous. For most situations, the most reliable removal technique remains a deminer lying on his stomach, prodding the ground with a stick. On a wider scale, Jordan has participated in all international conferences on eliminating landmines, initiated awareness programs in schools and university by the royal Jordanian corps of engineers, and through the Jordan national red crescent society, launched a project to establish a center for the rehabilitation and training of landmine survivors. Perhaps most important, Jordan has not imported landmines since 1974. And has never, and will never, export them. Jordan is also proud to be hosting this first Middle East International conference on antipersonnel mines, to raise regional and global awareness of the devastation they cause, to draw attention to the growing needs of survivors around the world and to develop plans and tools for meaningful assistance, the alleviation of suffering and the prevention of further injury and death. And that means working in every way possible to end the threat of landmines. The wide range of institutions, countries, and experts at this meeting reflects the worldwide nature of this threat, and the multi-disciplinary nature of the required response. We are only just beginning to get an accurate picture of the magnitude of this problem, and I hope that by holding this conference here, we can integrate our Middle Eastern experiences, needs and capabilities into the global fight. Our experience in Jordan is probably typical of many smaller states that are working to counter this scourge, but need the material and technical support of larger countries to complete the job. I would particularly like to recognize and applaud the examples of Austria, which formally legislated a total ban on landmine use in 1995, and Norway, Canada and Japan, which have committed significant material, moral and political assets to worldwide demining and advocacy efforts. The presence here in Amman this week of such a large gathering of landmine survivors and specialists from 30 countries attests to the scope of the landmines threat – but also to our collective determination to eradicate it from our world. I would like particularly to thank Ken Rutherford and Jerry White of the Landmine Survivors Network (LSN) for initiating and organizing this meeting, and the governments of Canada and Norway for sponsoring it. We are also grateful for the cooperation of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the Hashemite Charitable Society for Soldiers with Special Needs. I would like to thank all our panelists for their participation and hard work, and wish them thoughtful and productive discussions. We all look forward to the results and recommendations of the conference panels. It is with a great sense of privilege that I commit myself to join your efforts to seek to realize our shared goal of not only a worldwide ban on mines, but also a collective commitment to the survivors, to addressing their needs and recognizing their valuable role in society. On Monday, I will be joining some of you to observe mine clearance demonstrations by the Royal Jordanian Corps of Engineers in the Jordan valley. We will then visit Bethany, an ancient historic and religious site where demining was concluded in 1995. A few years ago, when I planned to visit near this newly rediscovered site, where John the Baptist preached and baptized, I was told that I would have to walk only on restricted pathways that had been cleared; the army had not yet completed demining the surrounding region’s stark but beautiful wilderness. I was struck by the irony of this in one of the world’s most spiritually significant landscapes, where prophets like Moses, and companions of the prophet Mohammed such as Abu ‘Ubeida bin Al-Jarrah preached. If, in recent years, Jesus were to have spent his 40 days in the wilderness, or Elijah to have crossed the river Jordan, or John the Baptist to have proclaimed his message of repentance, they would have had to survive not only the ancient tests of hunger and thirst but the modern threat of minefields. The prophet Mohammed said, "imatatu al-'atha 'an al-tareeq sadaqah": the removal of things that cause suffering from the path is a good deed." What was once a metaphorical, moral precept is now a literal necessity – a prophecy that has come too true for comfort. As we prepare to celebrate the bi-millennial anniversary of the birth of Christ, thank god we are working at last to remove the evil desecrating the ground where he and other holy figures traveled and preached. God willing, those who wish to follow in their footsteps must never again need to fear for their lives. God bless you, and grant you wisdom in your deliberations, and strength in all your endeavors. . |
