The Ban Bus

This is actually a media story for which I did not receive the title but it gives a nice update on the South Bend activities. The Ban Bus did Ann Arbor, MI yesterday (13th) and today is in Cleveland, OH. I also want to advise that the 18 November landmine art exhibit at the Very Special Arts Gallery on Connecticut Ave has been postponed till probably the firth week of December. But please come to the events on the 19th (film screening, american and george washington university). Thanks, Mary Wareham, Coordinator, US Campaign to Ban Landmines.

By Gene Stowe
Landmine opponents from four nations urged a Notre Dame audience Wednesday to lobby for U.S. support of a move to ban “mass murder in slow motion.” The Ban Bus, a cross-country campaign for the cause already highlighted by Princess Diana and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, stopped in South Bend on its way to Ottawa, where a ban treaty will be signed next month. “We have gotten very, very good reaction,” said Mette Eliseussen of Norway, who has been on the bus since it left Berkeley in late October.

“They’re very surprised to hear the U.S.A. is not going to sign.” More than 100 nations will sign the agreement to ban the weapons. President Clinton has not agreed to sign, although bills for the ban are winning strong support in Congress. John Rodsted of Australia, a freelance photographer who became involved in the movement after seeing the destruction of landmines in Cambodia, Laos and Burma, said activists finally convinced his country to sign. “Out of all the things the human race is capable of doing to each other, the one that stands out is landmines,” Rodsted said. “Ninety percent of the injuries are post-war and civilian.

“There’s no such thing as a mine accident. They’re deliberate acts. Mines have been called mass murder in slow motion.” Rodsted showed slides and pictures of landmine victims in Bosnia, including two sisters who were injured on their way to work and a boy who had been gathering firewood near his home-a year after the war had ended. “What manufacturer, politician or general decides a 13-year-old boy is the enemy?” he said. “The mines are a continuing thorn in the side of peace. We are sick to death of it.”

About 50 people attended the talk by Ban Bus riders, sponsored by the Center for Social Concerns and the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at Notre Dame.

Jackie Curran of South Bend, whose daughter Patty Curran, a Maryknoll lay associate, is director of Wat Than Skill Training for Landmine Disabled in Cambodia, arranged the visit. At a display in the Hesburgh Center for International Studies, Eliseussen showed postcards to President Clinton drawn by children in Afghanistan, where some 10 million mines are buried. “I’ve been working in Afghanistan for two years with Save the Children,” she said. “Our program in Kabul, Afghanistan, is to teach kids about the dangers of land mines.”

…[Through 1994 and 1995].., 50 people a day were killed or injured by mines. Now, 40 to 60 a month are injured in the city: Sixty percent of them are children. “Lots of children get blown up while they’re climbing the trees,” she says. “There is no such place as a safe place in Kabul. “This is these children’s only chance to tell the world what’s going on.”

Michael Hands of Britain, a former soldier who has worked as a de-miner to clear territory of landmines, said they kill or wound some 26,000 people a year. “I’m not a pacifist,” Hands said. “As a soldier-a former soldier-I cannot warrant the use of these weapons.” Many generals, and all Vietnam veterans in the Senate, support the ban. Municipal governments in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Flagstaff, Tucson and New Haven, Conn., have voted to urge the banning of land mines, along with the state legislatures of California, Maine and Massachusetts.

Paul Biatti, [its actually Piatti] who works in Los Angeles for the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, said his 8-year-old daughter inspired him to join the movement. “Her children’s children’s children can be killed or maimed by a mine that was laid before I was born,” Biatti explained. “That’s my motivation.”

Article published on World Wide Faith News:
Anti-Landmines Campaign Arrives in Philadelphia Nov. 20, 1997