All I Want For Christmas

Leaders from around the world are meeting in Oslo, Norway to sign a treaty banning most modern forms of cluster bombs. The BBC informs us:

“Campaigners are hailing the treaty as a major breakthrough.Richard Moyes of the Cluster Munition Coalition, a global alliance of some 300 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), calls it “the biggest humanitarian treaty of the last decade”.

Certainly the treaty is ambitious in scope. Not only does it ban the stockpiling, use and transfer of virtually all existing cluster bombs, but it also provides for the clearing up of countries littered with unexploded munitions. And all of it to be achieved within the next eight years.”

Interestingly, Reuters reports:

“Israel inadvertently galvanized an international campaign to ban cluster munitions by hastily raining bomblets over south Lebanon before a U.N.-agreed halt to its 2006 war with Hezbollah fighters could take effect.

“It was the massive use of cluster munitions in the last 72 hours of that conflict that outraged the world,” Mary Wareham of the New York-based Human Rights Watch group told Reuters.”

According to activists, Norway initiated negotiations on a treaty outlawing cluster munitions to which about 100 nations — excluding Israel, the United States, Russia and China — are due to sign up in Oslo.

We have biological, nuclear and chemical weapons, so what’s the big deal about cluster bombs?

Basically, any unexploded bomblets which haven’t utterly shredded every living thing within their range, effectively turn into landmines, and, like landmines, are designed to detonate on contact, causing death and injury to civilians, even many years after the conflict has ended.

And the big problem is, cluster bombs, like Dubya, are prone to failure. A lot of failure. Statistics on cluster bombs from Kosovo, the Gulf War, US military trials, the Vietnam War and the UK government’s own figures from the Falklands war, indicate that between 9 and 30 % of bomblets fail to explode on impact.

This is partly due to defects in manufacture, errors in storage, moving and loading - but a critical factor is the environment into which they are dropped. The bomblets are designed to explode on impact but a soft surface such as mud, sand or snow, or the presence of trees or overgrowth can lead to substantial failures.

Most heartbreaking is the fact that many are brightly colored, have ribbons attached to them as part of the trigger and are the size of a soda can, and are therefore particularly attractive to children.

In a study of 24 countries and regions, Handicap International, the Nobel Prize-winning NGO, said the controversial weapons, which it has been campaigning to have banned, had killed, wounded or maimed 11,044 people of whom 98 percent were civilians. And of that number, a quarter of them were children.

This child's name is Ali Ismaeel Abbas

Tragically, the under-reporting of victims in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam means the real total could be almost 10 times higher.

While never technically at war with Laos, between 1964 and 1973, the US Air Force dropped 260 million cluster bombs on Laos, or the equivalent of a fully-loaded B-52 bomber’s payload dropped every eight minutes for nine years.

More than 30 years after the Vietnam War, there are still 500,000 tonnes of unexploded bombs in Laos. The country is literally littered with unexploded ordinance, or UXOs, and it is generally accepted to be an even greater danger to the people of Laos and Cambodia than landmines.

During the bombing of Kosovo, NATO aircraft dropped 1,392 cluster bomb dispensers containing 289,536 bomblets. Government ministers insisted that only 5% of these would fail to explode, based on information provided by manufacturers. And we all know arms manufacturers are good, honest people! However, NATO now admit that between 8% and 12% failed, leaving as many as 34,744 live bomblets on the ground.

Despite compelling evidence from an official US government assessment of the Gulf War that unguided bombs dropped from medium to high altitudes were likely to miss the target and cause civilian casualties, this is exactly what was done in Kosovo.

More than half of all the bombs used by the RAF in Kosovo were unguided cluster bombs. According to the Ministry of Defence, 31% of cluster bombs dropped on Kosovo missed the target. That amounts to 25,000 bomblets. During the Kosovo conflict, NATO cluster bombs are estimated to have killed between 90 and 150 civilians.

An Afghan child maimed by cluster bombs

According to the UN, Afghanistan is already one of the countries most severely affected by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). Prior to October 7, 2001, the known contaminated area was estimated at 724 million square meters, including 344 million square meters classified as high priority land for clearance.

From 1990 through 2000, more than 225,000 landmines and 1.3 million pieces of unexploded ordnance (including submunition duds) were detected and destroyed. The Taliban and the United Front (Northern Alliance) have both used surface-delivered cluster munitions, fired from BM-21 122mm multiple rocket launchers, which certainly has not helped matters.

It is a terrible but plain fact that Afghanistan is one of the top three most-mined countries on the planet. Approximately 200,000 civilians have died and 400,000 have been disabled in mine or cluster bomb incidents in Afghanistan. And approximately 6,000 more will lose their lives or limbs every year in the war battered country due to mine incidents, according to a report issued by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan-mine clearance programme (UNOCHA).

In Afghanistan alone, about 20 civilians, including children and women, are daily victims to mines and cluster bomblets, at least half of whom will lose their lives due to lack of medical facilities. Thanks to mines and bomblets, access has been denied or restricted to more than 488 square kilometers of land, including agricultural fields, irrigation canals roads and residential areas.

Over 30% mine and cluster bomblet victims in Afghanistan are children.

It is a monstrous and shameful tragedy that many landmine and UXO victims, including children, undergo surgery without anaesthetic because their family cannot afford to pay for medicines. And they are the lucky ones who can access medical care, most cannot, and die in agony, their parents and families unable to save them, nor to mitigate their pain.

United Nations estimates that of the 4 million submunitions fired by Israeli forces, at least 100,000 cluster bomblets failed to explode in Lebanon, with most landing during the final 72 hours of the war in 2006. Handicap International says cluster munitions still cause between two and three casualties a day in south Lebanon.

In South Lebanon, nearly 90 percent of land used for farming and shepherding is contaminated with unexploded cluster submunitions. Cluster bombs are still killing and maiming people in south Lebanon, a hilly region of towns and farming villages where nearly all the land is used for crops or grazing.

Zahra, 11, Lebanon

The American position?

According Human Rights Watch, the U.S. inventory alone contains more than one billion individual submunitions. The United States has more than forty different types of air and surface-delivered cluster bombs and submunitions. It is thought that at least eighteen nations produce cluster munitions and more than four dozen have stockpiles of the weapons.

Despite resistance from the Pentagon, some members of Congress, however, are beginning to question the use of cluster munitions, particularly in and around civilian areas. Notably, during the 109th Congress, on September 6, 2006, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced to the FY 2007 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 5631), to “protect civilian lives from unexploded cluster munitions.” The amendment was cosponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and would have prevented funds from being spent to acquire, utilize, sell, or transfer cluster munitions, unless the Pentagon ensured that the munitions would not be used in or near any concentrated population of civilians, whether permanent or temporary. Unfortunately, the amendment was rejected by a vote of 30 – 70.

While the Feinstein-Leahy amendment failed to pass the Senate, the attempt is an encouraging recognition that U.S. policymakers are beginning to see that cluster munitions – like fire bombs and landmines – are a separate class of weapons that deserves additional and urgent attention. And comprehensive banning.