Royal Purple

Issue date: 4/2/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Haley Smith Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams spoke to students March 19 in Young Auditorium about her role as coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Williams won the Peace Prize in 1997 for founding ICBL.

A well-occupied Irvin L. Young Auditorium greeted Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams March 19 where she spoke about her instrumental role as the founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

As Williams began to speak, she pointed out that she is shocked at times that people act as though she was the only one involved with the landmine ban.

"Sometimes I get introduced, and I get really confused," Williams said. "And when people talk about me as if, single-handedly, I changed the world on landmines I get really really confused because it wasn't me alone-it was thousands of people just like me in 90 countries around the world working together to ban antipersonnel landmines."

The ICBL could never have been so successful had there not been ordinary people around the world who saw a problem and rose to the occasion. As the Vietnam War ended and American troops returned home, one soldier stayed behind. He is the universal soldier, as Williams called him, a throwback to the Donovan Leitch song of the 1960s.

That universal soldier possesses an ominous form. Small and circular, made of metal, buried underneath the ground-waiting for a foot. Long after machine gun fire was silenced and B-52s ceased to rain hellfire on Vietnamese soil, these "soldiers" were still killing. No longer were they killing American GIs or Viet Cong forces, but ordinary civilians.

The ICBL stepped in as a coalition of the willing to fight the landmine use and to care for individuals and their families that lost life, limb or livelihood due to an encounter with a landmine.

In 1997, governments from across the globe signed the Ottawa Treaty agreeing to halt the use of landmines. The treaty is officially titled The Convention on the Prohibition, Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and Their Destruction.

In addition to explaining the history of the landmine campaign, Williams also spoke on issues the world has always faced that she feels should be handled more intelligently and maturely than they are. She spoke of a world in which people's basic needs are met.

"A basic house, that could be a house with a dirt floor, a basic house that stands up that shelters your children," Williams said. "It means a decent job for the breadwinners of the family so that they have pride in what they do.

"So they have pride in being able to give to their children. It means a basic education through sixth grade … it means basic health care. In many of these countries it means getting basic vaccinations."

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