We should all be grateful to the Princess of Wales. She is the acid-test, the barometer, the sure guide to where all people of decency should stand on an issue. When she fills our television screens and our newspapers stating what is good and right and proper, my heart is filled with moral certainty. I look to her for guidance: and if she's agin it, I'm for it. I never realised I had such a soft spot for land-mines until she spoke out about them as she always does, so movingly, so photogenically, those big baby-eyes welling with perfectly shaped tears as they swivel obliquely for that perfect camera angle. She is the world's greatest photopath, a woman who can imitate the symptoms of genuine emotions or feelings at the drop of a camera-shutter.
We should be grateful to her for placing the debate over land-mines firmly where it belongs: in the region of unrealistic, soupy, dewy-eyed sentimentality. Her opinions on land-mines are just about as relevant as our own recent ratification of the nuclear non-proliferation accord, Tanzania's undertaking to refrain from biochemical weapons-testing on the moon and Chad's promise to keep its hands off the Falklands.
But a photopathic monster like Diana addles wits on any topic she turns her eyes on. Brains cease when she massages the hand of an Aids victim, or strokes the forehead of a doomed infant, or hugs legless sisters in Bosnia. That is the gift of the true photopath; one picture with her stunning eyes inevitably administers cot-death to any nascent questions about the reality behind the picture.
Hannibal Lecter
Let us brave - if we dare - the stunning gaze of the photopath, more deadly by far than anything Hannibal Lecter could manage. Please. Be Brave. Look carefully as we step forward into the moral minefield of this debate on mines and whatever you do not look into her eyes.
All right. Are you ready? Good. Then answer me this: who planted all those landmines in Bosnia? Was it the Russians, the Chinese, the US? Or was it the people of Bosnia? Why did they plant them? Because they enjoy planting landmines? Because they thought they might turn into cabbages? Or because at the time military commanders thought that they were a necessary, short-term defence for exposed flanks?
The issue here is not whether land-mines are good things or bad things. We know the answer to that one. They are bad things, evil things, and you don't need the word of the photopath to discover that. If they weren't evil things, they would be of no use as weapons. Their job is to be evil, to deter penetration by enemy soldiers; and, if only psychologically, they can be very successful indeed. Soldiers detest them, and rightly. My one passage through even a largely-cleared minefield near Sarajevo was an essay in perfect terror.
Minefields are popular with defending soldiers because they work when you need them most - now and in the immediate future. Instead of having to deploy men 24 hours a day in defensive positions, you have these ruthless mechanical sentries which will kill themselves and any intruders without a moment's hesitation. They are the perfect warriors: they have no feelings, they do not sleep, they will die in the exercise of their duty. And they answer short-term needs perfectly.
Long-term consequences
Who, when fighting for the survival of nation or people, will worry about the long-term consequences of a short-term tactic, provided that the long term-consequences do not do the enemy's job? Do you think that the limbless Bosnian Muslims who were being photopathically hugged within an inch of their lives by Diana did not deeply regret that Srebenice had not been ringed with an impenetrable field of mines which would have prevented it falling to the Serbs two years ago?
What do you think? Do you think that it would have been better by far if Srebenice had been protected by a minefield so that its men and boys could not, under the careless gaze of the UN, be taken away for mass slaughter? Who would you trust? A minefield or the UN?
Better than genocide
Even if minefields are of only limited use - and they are - would military commanders not say: "They are better than nothing. They are better than genocide. They are better than what happened at Srebenice"? The debate about land-mines and minefields does not come down to the worthless tears of a photopath. It comes down to the Srebenice question; and the opinions of those of us not faced with a Srebenice are simply irrelevant. For the moment, the US - which is not engaged in a war, and has no border disputes with anybody - is against landmines. But if it had lonely outposts of outmanned marines in the Cochin Highlands, you can be sure US sappers would be festooning jungle tracks with booby-traps.
Apart from Africa, the world is living in the most benign epoch in its history. In our common benignity, we can agree on the abominable awfulness of the land-mine, and the tragedy of the maimed and limbless of Cambodia, Angola, Bosnia. And we can sign a land-mine-banning accord with the same pious enthusiasm as Chad might forswear an interest in the Falklands. But with the awful reality of war, such an accord would end up being about as valueless as the smile on the face of a photopath. For what the accord actually means is: we ban them until we need them.