Tutu Declares 'Safer' Landmines Still Unacceptable
Episcopal News Service. December 12, 1995 [95-1333C]
(SAAN) Archbishop Desmond Tutu of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa recently criticized a new South African government proposal to make "safer" weapons by developing "self-destructing and self-deactivating" anti-personnel mines. Addressing his diocesan council in Cape Town, he commended a recent government decision to introduce a permanent ban on the export or sale of "long-lived" anti-personnel landmines. But the proposal to replace them with "short-lived" or "smart" mines was "just not good enough," he added. "Anti-personnel mines are an obscenity," he said. "They maim or kill unarmed women and children and civilian non-combatants in contravention of hallowed conventions, and they make normal life impossible where they have been installed." Tutu declared that the government must be called on "for a total ban on the production, manufacture, stockpiling and trade of all anti-personnel landmines." The archbishop's clash with the government on the issue has its roots in a conference on landmines organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Harare, Ethiopia, in March, where he spoke out strongly against the weapons.