Princess Diana's Minefields

By Charles Bierbauer/CNN

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Sep. 5) -- When she was just the fairy princess, Princess Diana was captivating. When she became the tragic princess, in divorce and in death, her tale became much more compelling.

The happy child is a joy. The child in sorrow and pain makes us ache, if only with the distant, uncomprehending sympathy for a news image from a faraway field of battle. That is where Princess Diana and the waifs of war crossed paths.

Diana had chosen to focus attention on victims of land mines. They are often children without a hand, a foot, an eye or worse. Last month the Princess of Wales was in Bosnia which, after years of civil war, has more than its share of land mine victims.

"Poverty I have seen in many places, but not war damage of this kind," the princess told those travelling with her.

When it came to causes -- she was also among the first to reach out to AIDS sufferers -- Princess Diana did not shun the tough for the easier, though important, causes -- literacy or "just say no" to drugs -- that others in the public eye have chosen. It was as though Diana's own brittleness urged her to comfort those whom fate has broken.

There are ample and eager eulogies to the deceased princess and abundant opinions about her death in the media these days. This is not another attempt to analyze that tragedy. I never met her. Never came close. Lunched with Prince Charles once in London more than 20 years ago. The prince was charming on the occasion. Some years ago Prince Charles took on the demise of architectural esthetics as one of his causes. He had a point. His father, Prince Philip, has long been a champion of the world's wildlife. Is it fair to note their choice of buildings and animals, where Diana chose people?

As the world mourns Diana this week, diplomats from more than 100 countries have been meeting in Oslo, Norway, to seek an international treaty to ban land mines.

Land mines are blamed for 26,000 deaths or injuries yearly. As many as 100 million may be scattered around the earth. They threaten those societies that are typically least prepared to survive them or remove them.

"I urge you to pursue with even greater determination this people's crusade that Princess Diana did so much to promote," United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan pleaded. Her loss, Annan said, "has robbed our global cause of one of its most compelling voices."

The most dissonant voice on the land mine issue may be that of the United States. President Bill Clinton only recently reversed his administration's policy to join the Oslo conference. Though the Pentagon has lost ground on the issue of retaining land mines, the U.S. still has reservations about a treaty and wants special exceptions.

The White House said the U.S. would attend and attempt "to secure an agreement that achieves our humanitarian goals while protecting our national security interests."

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, laments that the U.S. has managed to turn itself into "the bad guys on this issue" though it has spent millions helping other countries remove mines and has unilaterally taken some mines out of its own arsenal.

The U.S. is prepared to eliminate "dumb" mines, the kind that sit and wait for the unsuspecting tread perhaps years after they were laid.

It favors "smart" mines that self-destruct in as little as 48 hours rendering themselves harmless.

The U.S. is prepared to eliminate anti-personnel mines, the kind most likely to harm the innocent.

It still values anti-tank mines, the kind that can slow an invasion.

The U.S. is prepared to eliminate mines throughout most of the world where they do far more harm than good.

It wants an exception from any treaty to keep mines on the Korean peninsula where they are salted through the buffer zone that separates a South Korean ally from its hostile North Korean neighbor.

"Korea is unique ... the last vestige of the Cold War," the U.S. commander in Korea General John Tilelli sought to explain this week in Washington. "I believe the use of land mines in Korea is humanitarian in the sense that they protect the lives of U.S. and South Korean troops, as well as the South Korean people."

This will not be an easy treaty to negotiate. If the U.S. is to get an exception, others will want one. The Turks want mines to fend off the Kurds. Cold War or no, the Finns are not yet ready to disarm their long border with Russia. The Russians and Chinese are not even attending the conference in Norway.

Yet there is strong sentiment in Congress for the kind of treaty the Clinton Administration hopes to avoid.

"There's no way we can ask for a treaty that has one standard for the United States and another for the rest of the world," says Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont who is leading the effort to ban mines universally. Leahy is holding back his legislation to see if the U.S. can come to terms with other nations.

Land mines are designed to catch the unsuspecting. That's also true of political land mines.

At a Democratic fund-raiser this summer Vice President Al Gore engaged singer Emmylou Harris in chitchat. Harris wasn't interested in small talk. She wanted to know whether Gore would support a ban on land mines.

Princess Diana might have cut through all the glamour and glitter to ask the same question.

In reality, few weapons are ever completely banned. Or if banned, completely removed from reckless hands. As Diana's death shows, the automobile remains a deadly weapon in reckless hands.

Yet when the flowers have been swept away, the candles have melted, the headlines have shifted to something else, will Princess Diana's brief life have a lasting benefit somewhere more obscure than the palaces and houses of couture?

As a result will some child somewhere walk rather than limp? And perhaps have a princess to thank.