I first met Rae McGrath, the swash-buckling founder of the Mines Advisory Group, in 1992, when he was inspecting minefields in the ruins of Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. The year after, I met him again in Switzerland, where we were among those attending a conference organized by the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, to bring together the pioneers in the campaign against anti-personnel mines.

In the five years since then there have been dozens more conferences, seminars and committee meetings. In that time the founders of the Landmine campaign, most of them present at that meeting in Montreux – including Jody Williams and Bobby Muller of The Vietnam Veterans of America, Steve Goose and Ken Anderson of Human Rights Watch and Cornelio Sommaruga of the ICRC – have taken the mines issue from the killing fields of the third world to the negotiating tables of the international legal system. Thanks to them everyone is now aware of the evil of mines. Thanks to them the process of ridding the world of these weapons has begun.

Last week I saw Rae McGrath at the culmination of all those meetings: the signing of the Landmine Ban Treaty in Ottawa. The treaty is a slender document, sixteen pages long: it’s short but sweet, free of the caveats and exceptions that frequently spatchcock arms control legislation. It has been negotiated in what, in the glacially slow world of arms control, is an unprecedentedly short time. And it has already been signed by a hundred and twenty states, two thirds of the countries in the world. But Rae and many other campaigners are still not happy, and they are right.

On paper the landmines treaty is a remarkable achievement. It’s the first time that a weapon in common use has been withdrawn from the arsenal. It also the first time that the manufacture, possession, transfer and use of an armament have been banned in a single, unambiguous piece of legislation. The relentless pressure of the campaigners kept the treaty free of obvious loopholes; the diligence of a few governments – notably Canada, Belgium and Norway – pushed it through. But this is where the problems start. Signing an international treaty is one thing, but no treaty is legally effective until it is ratified. Forty countries have to ratify a treaty for it to enter into force. A six-month wait follows. Only then does it become legally binding. Ten or twenty year delays in ratification are not uncommon in international agreements. To get all the countries that signed in Ottawa to ratify the landmine treaty could take a long time. In that time deployment may increase, stockpiles may grow and injuries from landmines continue to rise.

The treaty also excludes several weapons that, arguably, are just as immoral as anti-personnel landmines: anti-tank mines, which can also blow up minibuses and ox-carts (or your new SUV or 4×4 for that matter) and cluster bombs. Cluster bombs scatter small explosive shrapnel devices over the landscape which, if they do not detonate during their descent, may lie in wait indefinitely for passers-by, just like mines do.

And there are the hold-out countries. The United States, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel and Finland, among others, have declined to put their signature to the treaty. The first five are, historically, the world’s biggest mine manufacturers. Some, like Russia, have said they will sign, but not yet. Others, such as the United States, demanded exceptions for certain potential theatres of war – specifically the demilitarized zone between north and south Korea – and for certain kinds of mine. These exceptions the negotiators of the treaty rightly refused to make. And there is the further problem that most current landmine use occurs in internal conflicts, in civil wars where at least one party is not a government. Getting such non-state actors to respect the ban poses a novel difficulty which the system of international legislation is ill-equipped to deal with.

Ensuring compliance among those who sign and ratify could be a problem too. If Saddam Hussein can evade UN inspection of chemical and biological weapons facilities, how much easier will it be for illegal landmine assembly to take place, with or without the connivance of governments. Anti-personnel landmines are simple technology; simpler to make than CDs; their components as easy to transport as narcotics. Without universal agreement and an organization with global reach to monitor the Treaty, landmine production and use could continue even if every country in the world signed the treaty.

None of this detracts from its importance. Landmines have now been comprehensively stigmatized; a new kind of fast-track arms control process has begun. The campaign has also drawn attention to the wider problem of the global spread of so-called small arms – the arms that currently feed wars in dozens of the unlucky countries of the world. Anything that raises the curtain on this vast and nefarious trade, which implicates every western country, is to be welcomed. The Landmines Campaign cannot rest. The Ottawa Treaty is not the end, but the beginning. With a lot of luck and hard work, it could mark the starting point of the reassertion by civil society of control over the global arms industry. ★