More than 125 nations yesterday began signing a historic treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, weapons that the Canadian Prime Minister, Mr Jean Chretien, said caused "extermination in slow motion".
The Canadian Foreign Minister, Mr Lloyd Axworthy, who has lobbied tirelessly for the ban over the past year, was the first to sign, and Mr Chretien immediately presented Canada's instrument of ratification to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan.
Mr Chretien said that more than 125 countries would sign the treaty yesterday and today, but the world's biggest military powers - the United States, Russia and China - were only observers at the treaty conference.
Most Middle East countries, including Iraq, Iran, Israel and Syria, as well as Afghanistan, were also not signing, but most of Africa, Latin America and Europe were. Ireland and Canada were among the first to sign.
???etien said. "They will be the cries of the victims of landmines - from the rice fields of Cambodia to the suburbs of Kabul, from the mountainsides of Sarajevo to the plains of Mozambique."
The number of signatories is more than twice the number of countries that originally backed the ban. Nations have rushed to sign on, just 14 months after Mr Axworthy challenged participants at a conference in the same hall to return to Ottawa to sign a ban at the end of 1997.
The anti-landmine activist, Ms Jody Williams, said that Mr Axworthy's challenge initially had horrified the diplomatic community because it went outside the slow-grinding disarmament conference at the UN in Geneva.
"Who would have expected that within such a short time, the governments of the world would have responded to a band of NGOs calling for a ban on a weapon in widespread use?" asked Ms Williams, an American representing the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which in October won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Momentum for a ban built through 1997, and the cause was popularised by the work of Princess Diana, who had drawn attention to amputees.
"The late Princess of Wales seized the attention of the world when she exposed the human cost of landmines," Mr Chretien said.
Chris Dooley adds: The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, said Ireland would host an international meeting next year to assess the state of the anti-personnel mine problem as well as progress on the clearance of mines.
Speaking in Ottawa, Mr Andrews said the meeting, to be held in Dublin in the autumn, would be organised with the government of Canada and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
He said international public opinion would not tolerate for much longer the absence of countries from the roll-call of states which were party "to this most significant instrument for the abolition of lethal devices which serve no military purpose".