Last updated 09:30, Friday, 25 July 2008

“We were playing a game by the railroad track on the hillside, we had to hop up the hill, we each took our turn.The innocent, eye-prickling testimony of a six-year-old girl blown up by a mine as she played with her friends was part of Rae McGrath’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning acceptance speech.

Rae McGrath

“I was hopping and then there was a flash – a very bright light – and I thought there was a bang but my ears hurt and I could not tell. It was frightening and my friends ran away and I ran after them.

“But I fell over which made me more scared and I got up very quickly and then fell over.....and I slipped down the hill and I could hear my friends shouting and there was a strange smell and I started crying, I wanted my Mother because I couldn’t get up and run away or even sit up properly.

“Then I saw that something was wrong with my leg – it was twisted and very dirty and I saw it was bleeding - then I forget.

“When I woke up my face was wet, my mother was holding me very close and her tears were dropping on me. She said ‘Don’t worry, you will be all right’.

“I hurt a lot but I was happy then”.

The ultimate accolade was awarded for the campaign for a worldwide ban on landmines by the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and other charities.

Chok Chuan lost her left leg and suffered other injuries to her body as she skipped near a railway line in Cambodia in 1991.

Sipping a mug of tea in the centuries-old cottage in Langrigg, near Aspatria, that he shares with wife Debbie and their teenage children Liam and Emma, Rae recalls the youngster instantly.

It’s surprising that the memory is so quick and so sharp in his mind’s eye.

This is a man who has seen and heard enough hurt and pain to last scores of lifetimes.

Most people have passports stamped with destinations of beach or mountain resorts.

Rae has a roll-call of war-zones and disaster areas – Ethiopia...Iraq ... Afghanistan ... Sudan ... Banda Aceh ... Eritrea ... Angola...

Since setting up MAG in 1989 and establishing its first office in Cockermouth two years later, Rae has talked with Princess Di, walked with diplomats and bargained with generals and guerrillas.

After a series of jobs in his home town of Liverpool, he spent 17 years in the army, then worked in development, particularly post-conflict development.

The army taught him one key lesson: “There was this realisation that comes with field engineering that physically, there is nothing really impossible.

“There might be good reasons why you can’t do something, but that does not mean it can’t be done. There is nothing that you can’t resolve.”

He worked for Save The Children during the Ethiopia famine of 1984 and got the idea of clearing mines when he was carrying out humanitarian work in Afghanistan, following the withdrawal of the Russians in 1988/9.

“I realised the scale of things – you would travel round and there would not be one village where there were not one or two kids missing limbs because of the mines,” he explained.

“I had this determination that somehow we had to get surveys carried out.”

He worked with 30 local agricultural surveyors to plot the danger areas and trained people how to clear the mines.

It was between time in Afghanistan and Cambodia that he and Debbie bought a small cottage just outside Cockermouth.

MAG was started there, before moving to a small office on Cockermouth Main Street, above the Northern Rock bank.

“We were a bit more sustainable than Northern Rock!” he laughed.

“We had no idea we were going to be so successful.”

The call for a ban on landmines turned into a shout of victory in 1997 when more than 120 world governments agreed to a global ban.

And there were cheers when Rae picked up the Nobel Peace Prize that year on behalf of the organisation – standing on the same stage as Dr Martin Luther King, Albert Schweitzer, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev.

He had left the organisation in 1996 and explained: “MAG was established, de-mining as a humanitarian issue was established and I did not want a lifetime of being a senior executive in a Non-Governmental Organisation.”

Focussing his attention on the horrific after-effects of unexploded cluster bombs seemed a logical next step.

“There is no difference between anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions,” he reasoned.

“The treaty on the landmines laid the groundwork for cluster munitions.

“Now we have the treaty for cluster munitions, it has not just dealt with that weapon,but made it much harder to produce that weapon.

“Governments are going to have to be much more careful about how they choose their weaponry.”

He is not concerned that superpowers such as America and China have not signed the landmines treaty, or that the US is now stalling on the idea of scrapping cluster bombs.

The US did not attend May’s meeting, nor did Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan.

The Pentagon’s response to the banning agreement by 111 countries has been to promise to phase out the amount of unexploded bomblets the munitions contain.

It claims that total elimination would be “unacceptable”.

Under the agreement, which will be signed in a treaty in Oslo in December, all stockpiles of cluster bombs will be destroyed within eight years.

Rae said: “Although some countries have not signed up to the landmines treaty, they have not used any since because they have effectively been demonised and the same will happen with cluster munitions.

“They have been stigmatised to such an extent that the political and diplomatic repercussions of their use will be huge.”

There is also the problem that it is one thing to ban the use of landmines and cluster bombs – and quite another to dispose of them.

The UN calculates there are some 100 million landmines and similar devices in the world today.

The effect of the humanitarian work carried out with quiet determination by Rae and Debbie for MAG, the British Red Cross, Save The Children, World Vision and other charities is immeasurable and will continue to have a positive effect on the lives of thousands upon thousands of people in future.

The Nobel award is an extraordinary achievement, but Rae, who is now International Spokesperson on Cluster Munitions for the French charity Handicap International, shrugs it aside.

“The most important thing for me about my whole involvement in all this was not to do with the treaty, but with reaching a point where there was never any doubt that you could never go backwards and you are not going to have anti-personnel mines again.

“We have made a difference and yeah, it’s great.

“Someone said ‘you can retire now, not many people get to have an influence on two major international pieces of legislation.’

“But the two most important things for me are the conceptualisation of banning the mines,which was really borne out of frustration, and the experiences of working with the communities, rather than dancing around with diplomats. I don’t like diplomats.”

He blames diplomats and civil servants more than politicians for the decades of inaction and inertia over the issues of landmines and cluster bombs.

He sees himself as an outsider who is free to criticise and point out the failings of any authority.

He is dismissive of Sir Bob Geldof and Bono for joining G8 leaders and being “captured” by the establishment – weakening their cause to end Third World poverty.

“I’m hugely suspicious of authority,” he says cheerfully.

“A bit of Cumbria has rubbed off on me, I see them all as outsiders and I’m an insider and they would have to talk to me for 300 years before I accept them!”

One person from ‘the Establishment’ who he did manage to get on with was Diana, Princess of Wales. Though he admits, it was a marriage of convenience, with both sides benefiting from the publicity.

Diana had already hit the headlines and rattled the Conservative Government in 1997 when she was pictured walking through a cleared minefield and meeting victims as part of a Red Cross-backed trip to Angola.

Rae was determined to get her to speak out against the use of the mines and was granted an audience at Kensington Palace where he convinced her to make a keynote speech at a conference he had yet to organise!

“It came into my head as I was talking to her and after the meeting I had to sit on a park bench and organise it,” he smiled.

“What had happened in Angola was good, but we now had a new Labour Government and her backing held Tony Blair and his government’s feet to the fire to commit to banning the mines.

“Her speech was worldwide news and put landmines on the front pages just when we needed it.

“I found her quite good fun, easy to talk to and honest. She did not make any secret of the fact that there was a secondary reason for her to be involved in big causes.”

Rae is saddened at the lack of aid richer nations offer to poor and potentially unstable countries.

Rather than provide help for infrastructure and industries, millions – or billions – are poured into military conflict, he says.

“If we look around the world now at places struggling and instead of waiting for a war and selling weapons, imagine if we used our engineering capabilities and invested in these places.

“You see these things happening and the real problem is that we have a greater commitment to war than we have to peace.

“That has provided the course of my life and driven it in the direction it has taken.”

Over the years he has been involved in helping victims of famine, war and flooding and admits his earliest experiences have affected him most.

“There was a kid we found up in the hills in Afghanistan who had just had his foot blown off by a ‘Butterfly’ mine. He was alone with his goats. He was just a kid missing from the village. He was missing for nine or 10 days.

“The horror of it was that his foot had blown off and he would have slowly bled to death.

“You get a kid of 10 or something and something like that happening ... that for me was a big moment in my own personal work.”

The casually indiscriminate after-effects of battlefield weapons was brought home to him while he was working in Iraq.

“We were in the north Iraq Kurdish areas and there were kids in one village with huge minefields stopping them from going to school a couple of kilometres away.

“We cleared a two metre-wide lane through the mines so the kids could go to school.

“But just the idea of doing that and expecting kids – some quite small – to stay within a two metre track for several kilometres....

“You realise our ability to damage communities incidentally which had nothing to do with conflict and our inability to resolve them.

“It was left to a handful of people from northern England and some locals to respond to that.”

Given that he’s seen more pain and suffering to last several lifetimes, he’s remarkably easy-going with a ready smile and a healthy cynicism towards governments and ‘the Establishment’.

Does he not get depressed at man’s enduring inhumanity?

His smile straightened as he fixed me through his glasses: “You get into areas of conflict or natural disaster and after getting over the horror of what you see, what always strikes you is the resilience of people.

“And the poorer people are and the less they have, the more resilient they are.

I don’t give in.”

The next time he returned to Cambodia, Chok Chuan had been fitted with a false leg and I asked how she was coping.

“Like a lot of these people, they just amaze you with their resilience and they get on with their lives in a way we couldn’t.”

Handicap International – www.handicap-international.org.uk