Presiding Bishop joins call for review of U.S. policy on landmines and cluster munitions

By Joe Bjordal February 10, 2009 [Episcopal News Service]

Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has joined with leaders of 67 national organizations in calling on President Barack Obama to reconsider United States opposition to global treaties prohibiting the use, transfer and production of landmines and cluster munitions.

In a letter, delivered on February 10, the leaders called on the president to launch a review of the past administration's decisions to "stand outside of" two international treaties: the Convention on Cluster Munitions, completed and signed by 95 countries in December 2008, and the Mine Ban Treaty, signed by all but 39 countries in the world in March 1999.

"The closest allies of the United States negotiated the Convention on Cluster Munitions based on their conclusion that these indiscriminate and unreliable weapons post an unacceptable threat to civilian populations during and long after combat operations have ceased—in much the same way as do landmines," say the leaders in the letter.

"Reconsidering these two treaties—and eliminating the threat that U.S. forces might use weapons that most of the world had condemned—would greatly aid efforts to reassert our nation's moral leadership."

The letter was organized by the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL), a coalition of religious, veterans, medical, peace, humanitarian, and human rights organizations and thousands of individual members who support U.S. participation in the Mine Ban Treaty. The campaign also encourages the government to increase U.S. funding for mine clearance and landmine victim assistance programs. The USCBL, a member of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines, is coordinated by and based at the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington, DC.

Joining Jefferts Schori in signing the letter were heads of communion of six other major U. S. church bodies including Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson. Robert Radtke, president of Episcopal Relief and Development, was also a signer.

Other signers represent the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, CARE, Oxfam America, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and Veterans for Peace.

The Episcopal Church passed a resolution calling for a ban on the use of landmines at the 71st General Convention, meeting in Indianapolis in 1994. The resolution also called for the establishment of an international fund to promote and finance landmine awareness, clearance, and eradication programs.

Following release of the letter, Unites States senators Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein and Representative James McGovern will reintroduce the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, legislation that would prohibit the use by U.S. troops of highly unreliable cluster munitions that leave behind large numbers of landmine-like cluster submunitions on the ground, as well as any use of cluster munitions in civilian-populated areas.

Leahy and McGovern have also been leaders in congressional efforts over the past 15 years to restrict U.S. use and export of antipersonnel landmines.

-- Joe Bjordal is Episcopal Life Media correspondent in the dioceses of Provinces V and VI. He is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.