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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

She Led Campaign From A Farmhouse Clinton Fights Pact Laureate, Diana Championed

Elsa C. Arnett Knight-Ridder

Most winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are heads of state or diplomats or great moral leaders who have worked to end a specific and dreadful conflict.

Jody Williams is none of those things. Williams, who on Friday was awarded the world’s most prestigious prize, is a plain-spoken human-rights activist who has toiled nearly unknown to most people from her remote Vermont farmhouse.

Williams, and the organizations she works with, have ignited enormous international pressure for every nation to get rid of its land mines. On Friday, Williams used her new platform to chastise President Clinton for supporting the U.S. use of land mines in Korea.

“I hope that this award will make it crystal clear to the president that the U.S. is on the wrong side of humanity on this issue - he’s siding with countries like Iran, Libya and China, instead of the United Kingdom, France and Germany,” Williams said from her two-story farmhouse in Putney, Vt.

The issue is a potent one for many Americans, and many more people around the world who have been moved by pictures of maimed children and crippled civilians all injured by hidden explosives.

Princess Diana brought even more attention to the issue this year - visiting people wounded by the thousands of mines in Angola and Bosnia. The glamorous princess and the tenacious Williams could not be more different. But both worked to make the public aware of the 110 million land mines that kill or wound an average of 70 people a day, or 26,000 people worldwide each year.

Just three weeks before her Aug. 31 death in a Paris car crash, Diana was comforting land mine victims in Bosnia.

The 1997 Nobel Prize now makes Williams the most visible spokesperson for the cause. But she hasn’t worked alone.

She and her organization, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, laid the groundwork more than six years ago.

She was among the political and humanitarian activists who came together in November 1991, at the Washington office of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Having seen firsthand the toll that land mines were taking on civilians in Central America and Asia, they decided to do something about it.

Williams ran the tiny operation out of her farmhouse, and her determination helped it grow into a network of more than 1,000 human-rights, humanitarian, peace, veterans, religious and medical groups worldwide.

The group’s effort reached its pinnacle last month in Oslo, Norway, when delegates from 89 countries approved the treaty that also requires countries to find and deactivate those mines that they have planted. It will be the widest international ban of a weapon since poison gas was prohibited after World War I.

The Nobel Committee that awarded the prize said that Williams and her group “started a process which in the space of a few years changed a ban on anti-personnel mines from a vision to a feasible reality.”

The treaty, the committee said, “is to a considerable extent a result of their important work.”

Though the White House said it will not waver from its refusal to sign the treaty, Russian President Boris Yeltsin on Friday eased his opposition and said he was leaning toward signing the plan.

The United States has said it is committed to defending democracy in South Korea. Sprinkling the Korean Peninsula with land mines is essential to that task because the North Korean military outnumbers U.S. and South Korean forces, the State Department has said.

But Andrew Cooper, a former United Nations land mine researcher now working at Human Rights Watch, a New York-based human-rights group, said that Clinton’s claim of saving democracy is a weak excuse for keeping an obsolete, unnecessarily deadly weapon that preys mostly on women and children who wander into fields in search of food and water.

“Saying you need land mines in Korea is like saying you’ll fight World War III with Civil War cannons,” Cooper said. “This leaves Clinton looking isolated and sulking in a corner.”

Other holdouts to the treaty include Cuba, Iraq and Pakistan.

In Congress, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who supported Williams’ Nobel nomination and has sponsored legislation to stop placing new U.S. anti-personnel land mines beginning in 2000, said the group, Princess Diana and others “have given rise to laws, to a movement, and now to an international treaty. In just a decade, a potent new humanitarian force has emerged around this goal that blends the best of civil society, individual advocacy and government action.”