U.S. Department of State and Warner Bros. Deliver TV Public Service Messages on Mine Risk Education and Mine Survivor Social Integration for Cambodians

Thank you for that introduction, Ambassador Eng. And thank you for offering your support for this project that will benefit the people of Cambodia, particularly the children.

Good morning and thank you all for coming.

I am honored today to represent the U.S. Department of State on behalf of Assistant Secretary Lincoln Bloomfield, Special Representative of the President and Secretary of State for Mine Action.

Of course, Linc is not the only luminary who was unfortunately unable to join us in person today. There are two individuals whose efforts were truly indispensable in creating the public service messages we are about to see and I just want to recognize their efforts. These are lifelong personal heroes of mine, so I am delighted to have an opportunity to thank Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Earlier today, Cambodians of all ages met Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck for the first time when these public service announcements made their official debut at a rehabilitation center near Phnom Penh.

Bugs and Daffy, in turn, found a new co-star – a young Cambodian boy named Rith. Together, these three cartoon characters will be teaching a valuable lesson to all Cambodians – and we hope, they will be saving lives and limbs.

Cambodia is a country where the legacy of war is a terrible and daily reality. Even after years of peace, there are still hundreds of thousands of landmines and some 2 ˝ million pieces of unexploded ordnance scattered around a country of 13 million people, smaller in size than Oklahoma. Even knowing those grim statistics, it still comes as a shock when you hear that one in every 241 Cambodians is an amputee.

Only an extraordinary effort is going to save the next generation of Cambodians from a similar, sad fate. To take on a problem of such magnitude, we needed to come up with novel programs and creative solutions.

And so we did.

Now, I realize there may be a few skeptics in the room who don’t believe that novelty and government bureaucracy can mix. And it’s true, we had a little help from our friends at Warner Brothers. But more to the point, what you see in this project is a partnership – of commitment and of creativity on the part of all involved.

Indeed, today is the culmination of years of planning, field research, concept development and consultation. Humanitarian organizations, animators and artists, diplomats from a number of countries, and yes, bureaucrats – all had a hand in this success. And if you’ll forgive me for going through the details, I want to give you a sense of the people who played a part. Because I think this project can be a model for future success in humanitarian mine action, and in other endeavors.

In 1998, Ambassador Don Steinberg, the previous Special Representative for Mine Action, and Sandy Reisenbach, then serving as Warner Brothers' Executive Vice President for Marketing, first discussed the possibility of enlisting Warner Brothers’ expertise in reaching people of all ages in a mine risk education campaign.

Jerry Levin, then serving as CEO of Time Warner, agreed to lend Warner Brothers’ talented animation artists and its valuable stable of Looney Tunes characters to this good cause.

The State Department then met with key NGOs and other groups with expertise in mine risk education and physical rehabilitation to help us determine if this initiative was worth pursuing, and what sorts of things we should do and not do to ensure that our message was effective. We are indebted to a number of groups for their invaluable advice, including CARE, World Education, Landmine Survivors Network, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. AID's Leahy War Victims Fund, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation – whose rehabilitation center near Phnomh Penh provided the venue for the true debut earlier today.

Lloyd Feinberg, Manager of the Leahy War Victims Fund, convinced us that it would be useful if one of the messages could also address the issue of social reintegration of landmine survivors. So we designed one message to do that.

We also convened a meeting of the stakeholders – Ambassadors from about 15 mine affected countries – to make sure that such a public service message would be a useful way to reinforce their own national mine action activities. The overwhelming answer was "yes."

Ambassador Eng was at that important meeting and agreed that Cambodia would be the right place to launch this effort. Ambassador Eng, again thank you for the support that you have lent to this project.

The Cambodian Government will be responsible for arranging the broadcast of these messages on Cambodian television nationwide. Videotape and DVD copies of the messages will also be distributed to the Cambodian Mine Action Center and other NGOs in Cambodia, which will show the cartoons in towns and villages where the inhabitants live in dangerous proximity to landmines and unexploded ordnance.

We look forward to learning more about how the Cambodian people react to these two messages. In the meantime, though, we will settle for your reaction. As for my colleagues and I, we are delighted at how wonderful these announcements are and at the great partnership that produced them. So to all of you here today who did have a hand in this, thank you very much – from the governments of the United States and Cambodia, NGOs, and the talented folks at Warner Brothers – whom I think we all envy. After all, you have the privilege of working with such enticing characters every day. We should all be so fortunate.

I believe we are all fortunate, indeed, to have had the opportunity to work on such a meaningful and life-saving project.

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