Nobel prize is a triumph for the landmine 'good kids'

The Nobel Committee yesterday awarded the Peace Prize to campaigners for a ban on landmines. The award is a tribute to the success of the campaign so far - where Diana, Princess of Wales, played a key role. It shows how a popular cause can triumph over governments, arms manufacturers and the military.

Yesterday's award is a vindication of those who believe in winning unwinnable victories. In the words of the Nobel committee's citation, it honours "a process which in the space of a few years changed a ban on anti-personnel mines from a vision to a feasible reality". Those who just a few years ago were portrayed by leading politicians as naive dreamers can celebrate. "A new way of moving humanitarian mountains," said a Norwegian minister, describing the significance of yesterday's award.

At her home in Vermont, Jody Williams, co-ordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, was "a little stunned" by the news. Ms Williams is joint recipient together with the campaign, of the pounds 600,000 prize. In London, the Mines Advisory Group, one of six co-founders of the campaign in 1992, was "very, very honoured".

An important figurehead for the campaign was Diana, Princess of Wales, whose family said that they were delighted. Her visit to Angola on behalf of the British Red Cross thrust the issue into the public eye as never before. Photographs of the Princess of Wales's walk through an Angolan minefield dominated front pages around the world in January - and became even more famous, after her death. As the Red Cross noted yesterday, her visit was "a turning point". There were even suggestions that she should be awarded a posthumous peace prize (an impossibility under Nobel rules). But the Nobel committee was keen yesterday to emphasise that this was not just a posthumous award for Diana: "There were very many people involved."

The first initiative for the campaign began just six years ago. In 1991, the New York-based Human Rights Watch published The Coward's War, calling for a worldwide ban on landmines. Two months later, Ms Williams - who had always been "the classic good kid", in her own phrase - agreed to spearhead the campaign.

For Ms Williams, who celebrated her 47th birthday on Thursday, the news came as "a hell of a birthday present". She started her life in campaigning work 15 years ago, when she was handed a leaflet as she left the subway in Washington. She became involved in pressure groups critical of United States policy in central America. Through that work, she met leaders of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation who were helping landmine victims obtain artificial limbs. That, in turn, led to the realisation that "just putting limbs on people was [ineffective] if you don't go to the heart of the problem".

In Britain, the Tory government was less than enthusiastic about a ban, saying that landmines were "legitimate defensive weapons". Michael Portillo, the former defence secretary, ruefully acknowledged this week that the government had sometimes seemed "indifferent to moral arguments", and that was certainly true of landmines. When Diana visited Angola, the junior defence minister Earl Howe described her as a "loose cannon".

But the politicians' contempt backfired, as the campaign gained momentum. It worked with many people at local level all over the world; and it had an issue that seized the popular imagination, as direct and easily soluble. It was also adept at using the media. The draft version of the landmine treaty, to be signed in Ottawa in December, was finally agreed by 90 countries at a three-week conference in Oslo last month.

The award of the prize was not universally acclaimed. The Halo Trust, which works on landmine clearance, said they were disappointed by the award, claiming the ICBL had "given the idea to people in the West that something is being done about the issue when actually nothing is being done other than talk and paperwork".

However, the knock-on effects of yesterday's historic announcement are likely to be considerable. Within hours, President Boris Yeltsin declared that a previously reluctant Russia was ready to sign. For the moment, the US remains in the odious company of China, North Korea, and Iraq in opposing the terms of the ban. Washington yesterday expressed its admiration for Ms Williams. But President Bill Clinton was said to be "rock-solid confident" that the US should not sign up for the Ottawa treaty. Washington argues that a ban would force it to defuse minefields along the border between North and South Korea, thus weakening the safety of US troops.

Ms Williams said she would telephone President Clinton to press the case, and expressed the hope that those countries which have not yet agreed to sign the treaty would now do so. "This is what humanity is calling for," she said.

She remains tough on the US President - embarrassingly, for the would- be moral White House. "The US continues to try to maintain the fiction that it is a leader on the issue of eliminating land mines ... How can you be a leader if you are not part of the process?"