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Cluster Bomb Treaty

Alex Doherty — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 14:15:19 +0000

The UK has been the third biggest user of cluster bombs in the last decade, but was among the 111 governments that adopted the treaty in Dublin and played a significant role in ensuring that the negotiations were successful. Two days before the end of the negotiations, Gordon Brown announced the withdrawal from service of the UK’s remaining cluster bombs, influencing the decision of many other governments participating in the conference. Now the UK must sign the treaty in December and implement national legislation.

Expectations

Considered the most significant disarmament and humanitarian treaty of the decade, the final text exceeded all expectations, banning the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster bombs and containing the strongest provisions for victim assistance ever agreed in international humanitarian law. Campaigners from around the world, survivors of cluster bombs, former military personnel, Nobel Peace Laureates and clearance operators cheered alongside government delegates as, one by one, 111 nations formally endorsed the treaty. Just the beginning Delivering the Cluster Munition Convention was a momentous and historic step, but the work of governments and individuals around
the world is really just beginning. To become binding in international law, 30 governments must ratify the treaty after it is signed in Oslo in December 2008. The UK government has confirmed that it will be among the countries that sign the treaty in December. Now the UK must implement national legislation to prohibit cluster bombs enabling early ratification, encourage other countries to sign the treaty and take national steps to start abiding by the terms of the treaty. Taking a leadership role in this way will help to internationally stigmatise the weapons and prevent other countries that have not signed from using cluster bombs, notably the US.

Cluster bombs

Cluster bombs have consistently caused excessive deaths and injuries to civilians both during and after conflict. Designed to break open in mid-air and scatter up to hundreds of smaller bombs over wide areas, cluster bombs cannot distinguish between military targets and civilians. Many do not explode on impact, thus continuing to kill and injure innocent people long after conflict has ended. Furthermore, widespread contamination of residential, agricultural and industrial land makes it virtually impossible for people to rebuild their lives after conflict. Often it is the poorest communities that are the most victimised by the weapon. In signing the treaty governments are committing not only to prevent future harm to civilians from cluster bombs, but, in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law, also to ensure clearance of contaminated land and medical, financial and socioeconomic support to those people who should never have been harmed. By signing the treaty our government will directly improve the lives of thousands of people worldwide. All governments mustvnow turn the treaty’s text into reality.

Support needed

Every signature is needed in Oslo later this year if the world is truly going to set a new international standard. Only with wide adherence to legally binding international law will the world stigmatise cluster bombs so that it is no longer politically or morally acceptable for any country to use them. Stigmatisation is key to ensuring that states, like the US, China and Russia, abide by the standard set by the treaty even though they refuse to sign it. The Cluster Munition Coalition, the global network of organisations campaigning to ban cluster bombs, launched the People’s Treaty as soon as the treaty had been negotiated in May. It is a worldwide petition urging governments to honour their promises and legally commit themselves to banning cluster bombs but also to clearing contaminated land and providing victim assistance. People across the world must sign the petition to show their intention to make sure governments live up to their obligations. You can sign the People’s Treaty at http://www.minesactioncanada.org/peoples_treaty.

For more on the Cluster
Munition Coalition see
www.stopclustermunitions.org

A Cluster of Excuses

Ellie Keen — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:24:35 +0000

Since the first day here at the negotiations in Dublin the UK has appeared determined to undermine efforts to achieve an effective and comprehensive international treaty banning cluster munitions. It is becoming increasingly hard to see how the Oslo process is going to come up with a good treaty – at least one with the UK on board – unless the British delegation starts to compromise. Without having Princess Diana championing humanitarianism, as in the days of the mine ban treaty, getting the UK on board has been akin to dental surgery without an anaesthetic.

For sure, in diplomacy it takes time for directions to filter down from policymakers to the diplomats, but time is running out. We have a week left and it looks like the UK delegation has not even read the newspapers. Prime minister Gordon Brown’s widely reported pre-by-election statement this week asking the defence ministry to review its position on clusters indicated a shift, but the UK delegates have remained unmoved. Brown might want to call them up. Then again, his apparent concession may just have been an election gimmick, in which case shame on him.

Cluster munitions leave de facto landmines when their duds scatter, often over a wide area. Today they cause a far greater threat to civilian lives and livelihoods than land mines. With 156 states party to the Mine Ban Treaty, the world has already agreed mines are illegal. Their use has been so stigmatised that even non-parties to the treaty like the US, China and Russia are reluctant to use them.

Clusters, however, are still used in massive numbers. It is hard to imagine the deadly legacy of one million cluster duds hidden in the homes, gardens, and fields of southern Lebanon. I tiptoed through those terrifying booby-trapped killing fields in the course of investigations for Human Rights Watch. It will take years of work to clear the land of the bitter fruit of conflict. They maim and kill, but they also mean you cannot farm the land or walk the fields.

Imagine if the green and pleasant pastures of England were suddenly off limits, the hospitals filled with injured, the morgues with the dead. And even when life started to turn around, the farmers had to sit idly by contemplating their unplanted fields, unable to make a living for fear of stepping on a hidden bomb.

There is a macabre surrealism to listening to the delegations of so-called “like-minded states” talking about the enormous exemptions they want to ram through in this treaty. Some delegations use terms like “dangerous duds” as if every live bomb were not dangerous. But this “like-minded” bloc looking for maximum exemptions is crumbling. Only the UK is really holding on to a no-compromise position.

The UK is fixated with “self-destruct devices”, insisting that they work. But the simple fact is that self-destruct mechanisms do not work. In Basra and Lebanon the vaunted M85 cluster munitions failed so miserably their dud rate was 10 times higher than advertised. It is absurd to claim that these munitions don’t cause unacceptable harm to civilians.

I have to wonder if the members of the British delegation or their political masters would be comfortable with their children playing in the fields of southern Lebanon. I am scared to walk even in the cleared areas – and I am a grown-up with a soldier’s training.

The British delegates here say their cluster rockets are “different” because they fly straight and the pilot sees where they are aimed, and instead of covering a football field they only cover an area the size of a few homes. And with only nine sub-munitions the rockets cannot be so bad as the bombs with over 600. That is all very well and good. But you don’t fire just one, and an Apache carries enough rockets for a volley of 684 cluster munitions in total. And the effect is the same – when they strike they explode over a target raining down over an area, no matter the size, and leave unexploded duds behind.

It is clear the US is pushing the British government hard to insert a massive loophole in the treaty that would allow parties to conduct joint military operations with non-parties even if those non-parties used clusters in joint operations. The UK is thus trying to shape the treaty to say cluster munitions are so bad they must be illegal, but if the US uses them, then Britain must be allowed to help. This is nonsense.

Before it is too late, the UK needs to start showing some humanitarian principles and some political backbone. As a close ally of the US and a major military player on the global stage, it is important that the UK remains on board the Oslo process. But it is also essential that the UK follow up on Brown’s helpful statement this week and drop its efforts to drive an American coach and horse through the treaty. Rather than standing up for narrow US interests, the UK needs to start standing for the interests of the victims – past, present and future – of these horrible weapons.

UK: Don’t Water Down Cluster Ban Treaty

Ellie Keen — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:22:29 +0000

The Cluster Munition Coalition, which Human Rights Watch cofounded in 2003, is holding a Global Day of Action on April 19 to raise awareness about the dangers of the weapon and to mobilize support for a comprehensive ban treaty.

The conference to negotiate the treaty will be held in Dublin on May 19-30, and at least 100 nations are expected to participate. The treaty will ban the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster munitions, and will also require clearance of contaminated areas and assistance to affected communities.

“The UK’s support for this treaty is very significant,” said Steve Goose, director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch. “But its efforts to water down some important provisions in the treaty could end up being very harmful.”

Cluster munitions are large weapons that release dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions. Air-dropped or ground-launched, they cause two major humanitarian problems. First, their indiscriminant wide-area effect virtually guarantees civilian casualties when they are used in or near populated areas. Second, many of the submunitions do not explode on impact as designed but lie around like landmines, causing civilian casualties for months or years to come.

The UK used 70 air-launched and 2,100 ground-launched cluster munitions, containing 113,190 submunitions, in southern Iraq in March and April 2003. Human Rights Watch documented dozens of civilian casualties caused by UK clusters in and around Basra.

The UK government supports the cluster munitions treaty but is trying to win an exception for its helicopter-launched CRV-7 cluster munition rockets. While the negative humanitarian impact of these weapons is all too easy to predict, the UK has not made a convincing case that these CRV-7 rockets – which have never been used by the UK in combat – are essential to the UK’s future war-fighting capability.

The CRV-7 cluster rocket itself is not guided, nor are the individual submunitions it contains. Moreover, the submunitions do not have any fail-safe mechanisms to lessen dangers to civilians. The UK recently noted that it has already withdrawn two types of cluster munitions from service because “neither system has target discrimination capability nor a self-destruction, self-neutralization or self-deactivation capability.” The same is true of the CRV-7.

“The UK wants a special exception for its pet cluster munition rocket system, but those rockets can be as deadly as anything this treaty seeks to prohibit,” said Goose “By pursuing this exemption, the UK could weaken the treaty substantially.”

UK negotiators are also seeking to delete or severely weaken a provision in the draft treaty text that would prohibit a treaty member from assisting in the use of cluster munitions by other governments during joint military operations. The United States, which has not participated at all in the Oslo Process, has nevertheless aggressively lobbied with many governments for its “interoperability” concerns to be addressed in the treaty, insisting that its ability to use cluster munitions in NATO and other coalition operations not be impeded in any way.

“Nearly all European governments are supporting this treaty because it bans a weapon that creates huge humanitarian suffering,” said Goose. “If they really believe that to be the case, then NATO shouldn’t be using clusters, either. The UK government should not bend to the bullying of Washington.”

The UK has also indicated that it opposes the provisions in the draft treaty text requiring states parties to provide victim assistance and assigning special responsibility for clearing contaminated areas to those who used the weapons.

Just over one year ago in Oslo, Norway, 46 states agreed to conclude a treaty by the end of 2008 that bans cluster munitions “that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” The treaty was then developed and discussed in subsequent international meetings in Peru, Austria, and New Zealand, as well as regional meetings in Cambodia, Costa Rica, Serbia, Belgium, Zambia, and most recently Mexico (April 16-17).

Following the conclusion of the negotiations in Dublin, the treaty will be opened for signature in Oslo on December 2-3, 2008.

Ignoring Our Victims

James Quinney — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:01:42 +0000

At the end of last year, I was invited to write a guest editorial for the excellent Friends of Lebanon society. F.O.L. is a London based group, without any political or religious affiliation, whose aim is simply to work towards a better and more peaceful Lebanon. F.O.L. have been doing some great work trying to put pressure on the UK government to ban the continued use of cluster bombs, which I wrote a bit about in my last blog posting. What follows is my reaction to the Government office’s wholly inadequate response to the petition started by F.O.L. to ban the manufacture and continued use of the M85 submunition…

The British journalist William Digby, writing in 1901, looking back at the role of the British Empire in the 19th century, prophesized that for future historians its principal and most notorious monument would be the merciless and unnecessary deaths of millions of people in the third world at the hands of their imperial overlords. Writing at that time, it seems Digby could not foresee the scale of the efforts to reconstruct the history of these years so as to place the role of Britain in a more favorable light. A recent article in the Financial Times notes that, outside of Britain, crises in Pakistan and Kenya have elicited a “wave of criticism about Britain’s relations with its former colonies”, but within Britain itself the “self-regardingly rosy account of our imperialist heritage” is the accepted norm.

These days, the most commonly held opinion, as expressed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown (then Chancellor) and relayed with enthusiasm by the Daily Mail (Britain’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper), is that “Britain no longer [has] to make excuses for its record as a colonial power”. Rather than dwelling on the calculated policies of slave labor, concentration camps, forced migration and mass starvation, we should instead focus on “great British values” of “freedom, tolerance, civic duty – to be admired as some of our most successful exports”. The occasion for these comments was a visit to the former British colony of Tanzania, the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, having given his personal backing to the sale of a British-made military air traffic control system to Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest countries, some years previously. The deal, worth £28 million to the notorious British arms firm, BAE Systems is one of the “great British exports” that Mr. Brown neglected to mention. It obviously does not do to draw attention to this kind of callous profiteering from a country so poor that half the population has no access to running water and children die from preventable diseases.

It is a guiding principle of our intellectual culture, that we must devote enormous energy to exposing the atrocities of officially designated enemies, but we must take great pains to avoid this practice in the case of our own crimes. By logical extension, it requires virtually no evidence to write of “Britain’s reputation as both a respecter and champion of human rights” (‘Rights and wrongs’, The Guardian, March 6, 2000). In the overwhelming majority of the commentary that arises on the subject this benevolence is just implicitly assumed. However, this “self-regardingly rosy account” has little in common with the really existing goals of Britain’s foreign policy, which in conjunction with our US “senior partner”, mainly revolve around ensuring the global economy benefits Western businesses. From these goals flow many policies that consign much of the world’s population to the status of, what historian Mark Curtis defines as ‘unpeople’ – the hidden victims of British policy.

With this in mind we may turn to the official response issued by the Prime Minister’s Office to the petition calling for a ban on the manufacture and continued use of M85 submunitions. As the world’s second-largest arms exporter, the UK is hardly at the “forefront of international non-proliferation”, as the response claims. Last year the NGO Saferworld documented that we have exported at least £45 billion worth of arms in the past 10 years, with little concern as to their final destination. This could also be just the tip of the iceberg as government statistics show the destination of only a quarter of all arms exports – the public are simply not told where the rest goes. The government has consistently armed states violating human rights. In the past three years Britain has exported arms to 19 of the 20 countries identified in the Foreign Office’s own annual human rights report as “countries of concern”.

Similarly, we may evaluate the government’s “efforts to reduce the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions” by their widespread and continued use against populated areas in Iraq, causing enormous and entirely predictable levels of civilian casualties. In the first three weeks of the air war on Iraq, Human Rights Watch reports that in addition to the US, “The British used an additional seventy air-launched and 2,100 ground-launched cluster munitions, containing 113,190 submunitions. Although cluster munition strikes are particularly dangerous in populated areas, U.S. and U.K. ground forces repeatedly used these weapons in attacks on Iraqi positions in residential neighborhoods.”

The top UK market research company ORB has recently reported that the number of post-invasion violent deaths in Occupied Iraq could be well over a million people, this being consonant with an estimate of 0.8 million violent deaths (as of October 2007) from top American medical epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins and Columbia, published in the top medical journal The Lancet and endorsed in a public letter by 27 top medical experts. According to statistics provided by The Lancet study’s authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes. These air strikes have left the country littered with live bomblets from US and British attacks, injuring at least 15 people a day since Saddam Hussein’s government fell on April 9 2003, the vast majority of which have been children.

Not only have we yet to hear one word of regret or remorse from any of the major architects of Britain’s participation in this supreme international crime, but they have also gone to some effort to downplay credible evidence of its extent. As the Financial Times accurately reported, the government repeatedly tried to discredit the Lancet study, even though “the same sampling method has been used by the same team in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo and produced credible results.” This, we are to understand, is what the government defines as striving “to reduce civilian casualties to the minimum” – by scrupulously ignoring their existence.

Another example of contemporary Newspeak employed by the British government, is the cynical attempt to bargain for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all modern makes. The government’s claim that it is “committed to improving reliability of all munitions, including cluster munitions, with the aim of achieving lower failure rates and leaving less unexploded ordnance” is demonstrably at odds with the current operational use of cluster bombs in contemporary conflict.

Despite claims about the reliability and low failure rates of the M85, UN forces working to clear cluster bombs in Lebanon have reported finding “large numbers of unexploded M85 submunitions that have failed to detonate as designed and failed to self destruct afterwards. In effect these submunitions are more dangerous than other types because the self destruct mechanism makes them more problematic to deal with.” What is more, where as landmines are usually laid down in more or less expected places, unexploded bomblets dropped from the sky can wind up virtually anywhere.

In 2006 Israeli forces strategically used M85s as a kind of modern alternative to landmines, deliberately rendering large areas of Southern Lebanon uninhabitable. Human Rights Watch reported that 90% of the total cluster bombs dropped by Israeli forces were done so in the 72 hours after the UN Security Council passed the resolution that effectively ended the war. The veteran Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport has since reported that his newspaper, Haaretz, has evidence that Israeli forces use of cluster munitions was “pre-planned” and undertaken without regard to the location of Hizbullah positions.

Similarly the British journalist, Patrick Cockburn, reported in 2006 that “casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon’s farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.” He also does not fail to ask: “Why did the Israeli army do it? The number of cluster bombs fired must have been greater than 1.2 million because, in addition to those fired in rockets, many more were fired in 155mm artillery shells. One Israeli gunner said he had been told to ‘flood’ the area at which they were firing but was given no specific targets.”

Against this backdrop of Israel’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon’s social infrastructure, in 2006 the UK licensed £14.5 million’s worth of arms for export to Israel while simultaneously providing Tel Aviv with the political cover to continue the war by delaying the ceasefire for as long as possible and thereby ensuring maximum carnage. The Financial Times reported on July 27th that delegates at an international conference in Rome, which aimed to bring an end to the destruction, had said “virtually all countries had sought a quick end to hostilities but were forced to agree to a milder statement by the US”. Tony Blair, in the face of criticism from his cabinet, also resisted calls to endorse an immediate unconditional ceasefire or to condemn the Israeli bombing.

A report by the British foreign affairs committee in August of last year noted that a quicker response from the government in July 2006 “could have led to reduced casualties amongst both Israeli and Lebanese civilians whilst still working towards a long-term solution to the crisis” although stopped short of mentioning any direct culpability. A more honest account might have noted that while Bush and Blair were hindering diplomatic efforts to bring about an immediate ceasefire in Rome, the onslaught on Lebanon, and on Gaza continued unhindered – and in fact was militarily aided by the US and UK. The Times reported on July 28th 2006 that “The [British] Government will allow more American aircraft carrying arms to Israel to stop over in Britain… Both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Downing Street suggested that two more requests by America to send planes carrying missiles as well as components over the next fortnight will go through.”

In his introduction to Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote that in Britain: “there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.” Now, as it was then, the “self-regardingly rosy” account of Britain’s role in the world is the prevailing orthodoxy, but unless we face up to the reality of British foreign policy, the amount of “unpeople” in the world is likely to rise to truly appalling and unprecedented numbers. We are lucky in Britain to live in a relatively free society and with that freedom comes a level of responsibility (as those in power who choose to forgo this responsibility themselves are constantly reminding us). We may forgive commissars in Soviet era Russia for subordinating themselves to the prevailing orthodoxy; they could at least plead fear in extenuation. In open societies like ours however, the only possible defence for such inaction is cowardice.

Cluster Bombs Are An Evil We Must Ban Outright

Tim Holmes — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:29:57 +0000

Welcome to Cluster’s last stand – the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s.

This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers – most notably Russia, the US and China – are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps.

Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow “bomblets”, each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as “steel rain” over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit.

These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can’t aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam’s men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone – anyone – to stumble across them.

Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-coloured toys. That’s what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell.

Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother – where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were lucky: they lost only limbs, not their lives. Some 255 Lebanese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding.

They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead.

War is sometimes justified, to save life – but not if it needlessly slaughters as it goes, and leaves a legacy of death for generations. So how soon can we get a ban on these lingering people-shredders? Pessimists should remember that when a ban on landmines was first mooted in the 1980s, it was mocked as a utopian fantasy. Today, only the leper state of Burma is laying them anew.

There are two potential tracks to end cluster-bombs. One is the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CWW), which almost every country is signed up to. The pro-cluster bomb states are adopting a “go slow, aim low” approach to these talks, obstructing any progress. Frustrated with this failure, last year Norway broke away and set up a rival Oslo Process, as they did with landmines. It now looks like they will get most of the world, but not the very worst offenders, to sign up to a ban next year.

The British government is the most high-profile cluster-bombing state to take part in the Oslo Process. At first, it looked like they wouldn’t show – but at the last minute they did. Gordon Brown pledged to ban “cluster bombs that cause unacceptable civilian casualties”. It looks like a heartening pledge, but it contains a whopping loophole – what is “unacceptable harm”?

Simon Conway, the former soldier who is now director of Landmine Action, says it seems like the British strategy “was made up on the back of a fag packet”.

The British have started bargaining for a definition of cluster bombs that would simply exclude all the cluster bombs they happen to have left on the shelf. The army has a lot of cluster bombs with a self-destruct mechanism, where the bomblet supposedly disables itself after 15 seconds if it doesn’t explode on impact. So the government proposed that cluster bombs with a “fail rate” of less than one per cent should be permitted. This definition has also been picked up by the Democrats in the US Congress, who are passing legislation with the same clause.

That still means a typical cluster-rocket strike would leave 40 landmine-style duds on the ground – and even that hasn’t ever been achieved in practice. The cluster-bombs dropped on Leban-on were marketed by the Israelis as having a less than one per cent fail rate. The Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and British Explosive Ordinance conducted a detailed study, and found that it actually topped 10 per cent.

The British have also tried a different get-out clause. They argued that if a cluster bomb releases fewer than 10 submunitions, then it shouldn’t be called a cluster bomb. It turns out that each CRV7 rocket stockpiled by the British army has – surprise! – nine submunitions. But this redefinition would be pure sophistry. It is fired from a rocket pod that can shoot 19 rockets at a time – meaning it can dump 171 pieces of submunitions on an area. And you can fit four rocket pods into a helicopter at once – so in practice, using these bombs, you could still be indiscriminately dumping 684 submunitions on an area at once.

If we set the bar this low, the ban will be worthless. Privately, the British government excuses its behaviour by arguing that it is necessary to set a lower standard so they can coax the US and Russia to sign up.

We would never have banned any unacceptable weapons with this strategy. When a treaty was created to ban dum-dum bullets in 1899, only nine countries signed up – but gradually, other countries were pressured to join. Similarly, the US has never signed up to the landmine ban – but since it was agreed firmly by the rest of the world in 1997, they have been shamed into not using them. If we hadn’t shown that commitment, if we had filled it with loopholes and sub-clauses, the US would have seen it as a green light to carry on laying landmines regardless.

Next year we need a cast-iron ban. But if the British government carries on with its wriggling and writhing, we may end up with nothing better than a cluster-bomb con.

UK defends cluster bombs

James Quinney — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 15:22:14 +0000

"It's an amazingly relentless and terrible thing, war from the air" wrote Gertrude Bell in 1917, marvelling at the speed and efficiency with which RAF bombers could burn an entire village to the ground in a matter of minutes. Bell was part of the Iraq British High Commission advisory group, charged with the task of drawing up the borders of Iraq in order to ensure that Britain would keep control of the oil resources of the North so that they wouldn’t go to Turkey. At the time Iraq was Britain's testing ground for the use of aircraft against guerrilla fighters and their villages, although similar tactics were also employed by the British against resistance fighters in Afghanistan. Sir John Maffrey, chief of colonial Britain’s Northwest Frontier Province (now Pakistan’s troubled tribal zone along the Afghan border) was told by regional airforce headquarters that international law did not apply “against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare”.

It is depressing to think, as we move into the 21st century, British foreign policy has remained largely invariant, with the same disdain being shown for the lives of those who happen to get in the way of the pursuit of our grand designs. Hundreds of individual stories exist, as yet mostly untold, of how the proximity of civilian populations to what British and US war planners deemed a “military target” has led to high numbers of innocent civilians being killed. Ghulam and Rabia Hazrat, for example, lived on the outskirts of Kabul near a Taliban military base. One day, a US missile landed in the family’s courtyard and the neighborhood was showered with cluster bombs. Mrs. Hazrat remembers: "there was no warning. I was in the kitchen making dough when I heard a big explosion. I came out and saw a big cloud of dust and saw my children lying on the ground. Two of them were dead and two died later in the hospital."

It does not take access to special military intelligence to realise that the decision of British planners to bomb perceived military targets in urban areas, using weapons with great destructive blast and fragmentation power, will result in heavy civilian casualties. There are indications that the US/UK air war against Iraq has taken an especially grievous toll on Iraqi children. According to statistics provided by The Lancet study's authors, 50% of all violent deaths of Iraqi children under 15 years of age, between March 2003 and June 2006, were due to coalition air strikes. On top of this, air strikes have left the country littered with live bomblets from US and British attacks, injuring at least 15 people a day since Saddam Hussein's government fell on April 9 2003, the vast majority of which have been children.

As HRW researcher Bonnie Docherty pointed out in an interview with BBC radio, the use of cluster bombs is frequently illegal especially when employed in civilian areas. They almost always result in terrible civilian harm — both the damage inflicted during the original strike and that suffered from duds that later explode in the targeted area.

Last month, while Gordon Brown was telling an audience of businessmen at Mansion House that he wanted to work towards an international ban on the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions “which cause unacceptable harm to civilians”, officials working for his administration were at the Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, negotiating for the continued use of the controversial Israeli-made M85 cluster munitions.
Ahead of a conference in Vienna this week, aimed at hammering out a ban on cluster bombs, a British spokesperson has informed Al Jazeera that the government has once again reneged on its commitment to a ban on these weapons that “cause unacceptable harm to civilians”.

Despite the claims of manufacturers and the British government that these weapons are safe for civilians, evidence from the UN team coordinating the clear-up of unexploded bombs said: “We can categorically state that we are finding large numbers of unexploded M85 submunitions that have failed to detonate as designed and failed to self destruct afterwards. In effect these submunitions are more dangerous than other types because the self destruct mechanism makes them more problematic to deal with.”

The deadline to sign a petition to ban the manufacture and continued use of M85 sub-munitions comes up on the 18th of this month.