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DISARMAMENT: Civil Society Participation Makes a Difference – Expert

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Sep 9 2003 (IPS) - Multilateral disarmament efforts struck dissonant chords Tuesday when two annual reports were presented, one with good news on landmine eradication, the other with bad news on nuclear weapons.

The discord exists because the old mechanisms for disarmament ignore the changes that are taking place in the world, such as the emergence of a powerful civil society, says Patricia Lewis, director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

On the one hand, the international movement to eradicate landmines had encouraging news in its report, presented Tuesday in Washington. In the past year there was a sharp decline in the use of these explosives worldwide, and minefield-clearing efforts had increased 30 percent.

Rarely has a message of the international community been so clear and consistent on disarmament, stating that it would no longer tolerate these ”vile and murderous” weapons, said Belgian diplomat Jean Lint, who this year presides the secretariat of the Ottawa Convention, also known as the Mine Ban Treaty (MBT).

In contrast, the Conference on Disarmament (CD), the highest multilateral forum dedicated to halting the arms race, wrapped up its annual sessions Tuesday in the same state of stagnation that has dominated the body for nearly seven years.

The current chair of the CD, Japanese diplomat Kuniko Inoguchi, admitted that she is resigned to the fact that the current international dynamics do not necessarily favour world peace.

For the seventh consecutive year, the Conference has failed to agree on a work plan, despite the fact that the world faces threats of nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, and the use of biological and chemical weapons, chastised Mohammed Salem Dembri, Algeria’s representative at the sessions.

The CD’s mandate covers nuclear weapons, including negotiations on issues related to fissile materials used in manufacturing nuclear warheads, nuclear disarmament in general and the race for domination in outer space.

All of these matters are considered ”very highly political,” noted UNIDIR chief Lewis.

In contrast, the use of landmines is a ”military issue” because of how and where they are employed. ”But I think that many of the world’s militaries have understood that landmines are not a militarily useful weapon,” said the expert.

The signing of the MBT in 1997, in the wake of an international mobilisation led by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), is seen as the only successful multilateral negotiations on disarmament in recent years.

The treaty entered into force in September 1998 and has been signed by more than 140 countries.

”You could argue that nuclear weapons are not a militarily useful weapon either,” said Lewis with a note of irony. ”But they are seen as a very useful political weapon. A weapon of deterrence, weapon of leverage, weapon of high politics.”

An important reason behind the paralysis of the CD is the exclusion of NGOs, she said. ”The voice of civil society is not taken into account during the deliberations. The reality of life is not often in front of the negotiators.”

In contrast, ”in the mine ban treaty negotiations, and in all the subsequent meetings, the voice of real people and their real concerns are always present in the room. The negotiators can’t escape from that reality.”

This is not the case in the discussions on nuclear weapons or in any of the forums that have dealt with nuclear disarmament, ”and I thing that’s significant,” said the British expert.

Furthermore, the CD and many of its 66 members act as if the Cold War was not over, commented a diplomat who requested anonymity.

”The old positions remain,” and in many cases the members are ”stuck and atrophied”, said Lewis in comments to IPS.

”We have old structures. We still have the Western Group, the Eastern Group, the Non- Aligned, and many countries have shifted around within those structures,” despite the fact that many others have moved beyond these groupings, she said.

The Ottawa Convention on landmines has another important characteristic, which is that sticky issues can be resolved by putting them to a vote. ”And when there’s a threat to go to a vote, immediately people find consensus,” noted Lewis.

But in the Conference on Disarmament ”what we have is the abuse of the consensus rule,” which allows the threat of the veto. ”The concerns of one country can completely override the vast majority of opinion” in the CD.

Today, this is considered a non-democratic process, Lewis said.

As a result, in its final document for this year’s sessions, presented Tuesday, the CD acknowledges that, once again, the participants did not agree on a work plan and did not re-establish or create any mechanisms for dealing with the issues on the agenda.

Lewis, in summing up the annual sessions, said that, ”In terms of the reality of the ordinary person on the street, they would say, another ‘wasted year’.”

Meanwhile, activists with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), recipient of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, were celebrating the progress outlined in the report the group released in Washington.

Sixty-nine countries destroyed more than 52 million stockpiled landmines, the number of countries producing landmines fell from more than 50 to just 15 in 2002, and since 1990 there have been no major exports of these explosive devices.

But ICBL spokeswoman Susan B. Walker noted that since May 2002, six countries continued to utilise anti-personnel mines: Burma (Myanmar), India, Iraq, Nepal, Pakistan and Russia.