Food and Events

"Issues surrounding development and the arms industry are notoriously controversial. Then we ran a small stall at the Christian rock festival Greenbelt, at which we asked people to write to their MP about it It's hard to persuade people to do that. So we were astonished when 600 sat down, there and then, and did it. We realised we had hit upon something which people felt was a black-and-white issue."That year the British aid agencies set up the UK Working Group on Landmines and the ball began to roll. Cafod made it the subject of a Month of Action during Lent in 1994 Others outside the church became involved. The British Medical Journal pronounced them a particularly revolting weapon because they drive "dirt, bacteria, clothing and metal and plastic fragments into the tissue causing secondary infections".

In Geneva Unicef, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross pleaded for a total ban as part of a review of the 1981 UN Inhumane Weapons Convention.In Britain the Government announced a partial export moratorium in response to the mounting international pressure but it refused to include "smart" mines or mines which are dropped from the air. Land-mines were "legitimate defensive weapons" if "responsibly" used. John Major stalled over ratifying the fairly feeble 1981 Inhumane Weapons protocol until the last moment, and then signed only to allow Britain to qualify for a place at the review conference.In March 1995 Cafod launched a national campaign designed to embarrass Britain into backing calls for a comprehensive ban on producing and exporting land-mines. It brought a young Cambodian who lost both his legs to a landmine to Downing Street to hand in a poignant petition, bearing the signatures of 280,000 of his compatriots. The war has left a land-mine in Cambodia for every man, woman and child, it said Cardinal Hume wrote to the Prime Minister on the subject. The campaign was also launched in London, Maidstone, York, Leeds, Sheffield, Cambridge, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol and Cardiff.

Two months later the Pope called for a total ban on land-mines.In September, on the eve of the intergovernmental review conference in Vienna for the Inhumane Weapons Convention, Cherie Booth, the Catholic wife of the Labour leader Tony Blair, released thousands of black balloons over the capital, a vigil was held in Westminster cathedral and, as the conference began, Cafod delivered 65,000 protest cards in the shape of butterfly bombs to the Ministry of Defence.In parliament the Opposition took up the issue, and at the Labour Party conference the party's MPs and MEPs set up a mock battlefield on Brighton beach in a campaign to ban the production and export of anti-personnel landmines. "Land-mines remain an effective defensive weapon," insisted David Davis, the Foreign Office Minister "Our own Armed Forces have them and need them. If they had to do without land-mines, our forces would be weakened."But that line of argument was to collapse, too. In March last year, not long after British MPs formed a cross-party group to campaign on mines, the US military announced it was to reconsider its opposition to a worldwide ban.