Jody Williams Quotes

Every day women and children are killed and maimed by landmines long after wars are over.

Land mines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the land mine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian---a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal. The crux of the problem is that while the use of the weapon might be militarily justifiable during the day of the battle, or even the two weeks of the battle, or maybe even the two months of the battle, once peace is declared the land mine does not recognize that peace. The land mine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the eternal sentry. The war ends; the land mine goes on killing.

War in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.

When it comes to civilian deaths, violent hostilities play no favorites.

You must keep in mind that Pakistan has suffered the aftermaths of the Cold War, and that Cold War had left deep imprints on our society. We were the worst sufferers from the ills of the Afghan war.

Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal.

By the late 1980s, there was the beginning of awareness about a significant global landmine problem, and small steps were being taken to try to deal with the problem.

Landmines are different from other conventional weapons. When a war is over, the landmines stay in the ground and continue to kill - for decades.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

If women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

Women, children, monks and other non-combatants are to be spared during war and no longer taken prisoner.

If the innocent people who died in the attack on Afghanistan, and those who have been dying from lack of food and medical care in Iraq, are considered collaterals, are not the 3,000 who died in New York and the 200 in Bali also just collaterals, whose deaths are necessary for the operations to succeed?

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.

How long do Syrian families have to live in fear that their children will be killed or tortured, before the Security Council will act? How many people need to die before the consciences of world capitals are stirred?

Unfortunately, violence begets violence. And this is how the war on terrorism seems to be going at this juncture. A lot of people are losing their lives. Many children are losing their parents. Too many houses are being destroyed. And, unfortunately, the arms industry seems to flourish.

Images of burning Red Cross and UN buildings struck by US bombs contrasted with images of thousands of desperately poor Afghan women carrying sickly and starving children out of Afghanistan as they flee the might of the US military is tearing at international public confidence in our war against terrorism.

The world is too little aware of the waste of life, limb and land which anti-personnel landmines are causing among some of the poorest people on earth.

More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

Land mines, torture equipment, cluster bombs, chemical weapons are weapons designed to inflict pain and death on human beings. Most victims are civilians, women and children. How can arms manufacturers, weapons designers, plant managers, politicians, who have families of their own whom they love, be so insensitive when it comes to the suffering of other human beings?

Not only do these abominable weapons lie buried in silence and in their millions waiting to kill or maim innocent women and children; but the presence or even the fear of the presence of a single landmine can prevent the cultivation of an entire field, rob a whole village of its livelihood, place yet another obstacle on a country's road to reconstruction and development

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently along the course of the last five, six years.

Whenever you have war, you often have more deaths because the medical system and the food system breaks down, than you have directly through violence.