Motorola, "horrified" at the discovery that a 10-cent piece of hardware it made was being used to build land mines, has joined 16 other US-based electronics firms in a Human Rights Watch effort to get high-tech companies to stop supplying components for the deadly devices.
The rights group's campaign is aimed at ending a slaughter that claims an average of 70 victims, civilians and soldiers alike, every day. The group credits Motorola with being the first US company to take voluntary steps to keep its products out of mine-makers' hands.
"We were horrified, shocked," recalls Ken Phillips, communications director of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, about the company's discovery that "a little 10-cent logic gate" it made wound up in Chinese-made mines used in Cambodia. "We didn't want to be a part of it anymore."
Motorola, like virtually all of the US companies that supply components used in land mines, does not depend on the work, especially as defense contracts dwindle.
"It was a tiny piece of a tiny, shrinking piece of our business," says Phillips. But the decision to stop selling to land-mine manufacturers, he says, "was not based on sales dollars, but on what was the right moral decision for this corporation. It was an opportunity to do something about a global tragedy, and we've been gratified by the response."
"It's very unusual for defense contractors and civilian corporations to involve themselves in voluntarily renouncing a technology that's not been banned yet," said Andrew Cooper, author of a Human Rights Watch report identifying companies involved in the production of land-mine components. "But Motorola, to its credit, said we're not going to wait for the government, these weapons are an abomination and we won't be part of making them."
Land mines are an enduring legacy of wars long over as well as one of the most destructive elements in ongoing conflicts. An estimated 110 million mines are hidden in fields and roads in nations from Angola to Bosnia, many capable of detonating at any moment for decades to come. Countries like Cambodia and Afghanistan, where United Nations mine-sweeping programs have painstakingly begun to clear the booby-trapped countryside, are filled with amputees - children and adults who stumbled, unsuspectingly, on land mines planted years ago.
Cooper, who has traveled around the world to meet with arms dealers, land-mine designers, and weapons manufacturers who make their living off mines, says Motorola exemplifies a growing realization in the business that land mines are a "barbaric" weapon whose use cannot be justified. "They're feeling the stigmatization," he said. "These are middle-class, educated people who have children - they don't want to be considered war criminals. So they talk to me. 'Who did you buy from, who did you sell to, where are they now?'"
Cooper's efforts and the work of the over 800 members of the international coalition against land mines seem to be paying off, as corporations join Motorola in abandoning their involvement. Next on the agenda for Human Rights Watch: an international ban on the manufacturing and stockpiling of the weapons, to be discussed in December.
Besides Motorola, the other US firms cooperating in the Human Rights Watch effort are: ASC Capacitors (Nebraska); AVX Corp. (South Carolina); Compensated Devices Inc. (Massachusetts); Dyno Nobel Inc. (Utah); Hughes Aircraft (Virginia); Kalmus and Associates Inc. (Illinois); Kemet Corp. (South Carolina), Mathews Associates Inc. (Florida); MascoTech (Michigan); Microsemi Corp. (Arizona); Olin Ordnance (Florida); Plastics Products Co. Inc. (Minnesota); S&K Electronics (Montana); Siliconix Inc. (California); S W Electronics & Manufacturing Corp. (New Jersey); and TLSI Inc. (New York).
