Britain is determined to protect its right to kill civilians at random
The British and US governments will today join forces in Geneva to block an
international ban on cluster bombs
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 7, 2006
The Guardian
The central mystery of the modern state is this. The necessary resources,
both economic and political, will always be found for the purpose of
terminating life. The project of preserving it will always struggle. When
did you last see a soldier shaking a tin for a new rifle, or a sponsored
marathon raising money for nuclear weapons? But we must beg and cajole each
other for funds whenever a hospital wants a new dialysis machine. If the
money and determination expended on waging war with Iraq had been used to
tackle climate change, our carbon emissions would already be in free fall.
If as much money were spent on foreign aid as on fighter planes, no one
would ever go hungry.
When the state was run by warrior kings, this was comprehensible: they owed
their existence to overwhelming force. Now weapons budgets and foreign wars
are, if anything, an electoral liability. But the pattern has never been
broken.
In Geneva today, at the new review of the conventional weapons treaty, the
British government will be using the full force of its diplomacy to ensure
that civilians continue to be killed, by blocking a ban on the use of
cluster bombs. Sweden, supported by Austria, Mexico and New Zealand, has
proposed a convention making their deployment illegal, like the Ottawa
treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. But the UK, working with the US,
China and Russia, has spent the past week trying to prevent negotiations
from being opened. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Most of the cluster bombs
dropped during the past 40 years have been delivered by Britain's two
principal allies - the US and Israel - in the "war on terror". And the UK
used hundreds of thousands of them during the two Gulf wars.
Cluster munitions are tiny bombs - generally about the size of a drinks can
- packed inside bigger bombs or artillery shells. They scatter over several
hectares and they are meant to be used to destroy tanks and planes and to
wipe out anti-aircraft positions. There are two particular problems.
The first is that the bombs, being widely dispersed, cannot be accurately
targeted. The second is that many of them don't detonate when they hit the
ground. Officially, cluster bombs have a failure rate of between 5% and 7%.
In reality it's much higher. Between 20% and 25% of the cluster munitions
Nato forces dropped during the Kosovo conflict failed to go off when they
landed. The failure rate of the bombs dropped by the US in Indochina was
roughly 30%. Of the cluster bombs that Israel scattered over Lebanon, 40%
did not detonate.
The unexploded bombs then sit and wait to be defused - leg by human leg.
They are as devastating to civilian populations as landmines, or possibly
worse, because far more of them have been dropped. Even 30 years or more
after they land - as the people of Vietnam and Laos know - they can still be
detonated by the slightest concussion.
A report published last week by the independent organisation Handicap
International estimates that around 100,000 people have been killed or
wounded by cluster bombs. Of the known casualties, 98% are civilians. Most
of them are hit when farming, walking or clearing the rubble where their
homes used to be. Many of the victims are children, partly because the bombs
look like toys. Handicap's report tells terrible and heartbreaking stories
of children finding these munitions and playing catch with them, or using
them as boules or marbles. Those who survive are often blinded, lose limbs
or suffer horrible abdominal injuries.
Among the case histories in the report is that of a family in Kosovo who
went to swim in a lake a few kilometres from their village. One of the
children, a six-year-old called Adnan, found a metal can on the bank and
showed it to his family. It exploded. His father and older brother were
killed and Adnan was gravely wounded. His sister later returned to the lake
to collect the family's belongings, stepped on another Nato cluster bomb and
was killed.
The economic effects of cluster bombs can also be deadly. Like landmines
they put many agricultural areas out of bounds, because of the risk of
detonating one while ploughing or harvesting. In some parts of Lebanon the
fields have remained unharvested this year. Cluster bombs dropped on to the
rubble of Lebanese towns have made reconstruction slow and dangerous.
The numbers of cluster bombs deployed are mind-boggling. The US air force
released 19m over Cambodia, 70m in Vietnam and 208m in Laos. Over much
shorter periods, the US and the UK dropped some 54m cluster bombs on Iraq
during the 1991 Gulf war and around 2m during the 2003 Iraq invasion. Israel
scattered 4m cluster bombs over Lebanon during its latest invasion earlier
this year, almost all of them during the final 72 hours. It looked like
revenge, or an attempt (like its deliberate bombing of the Jiyeh power
plant, causing a massive oil spill) to cripple Lebanon's economy. Since the
invasion, more than two Lebanese civilians have been blown up by cluster
bombs each day on average.
The only other nation which has used cluster bombs extensively since the
second world war is Russia, which dropped large quantities in Afghanistan,
and which scatters them in Chechnya, sometimes deliberately bombing market
places and other civilian targets. Apart from that they've been deployed in
small numbers by Sudan, Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Serb forces,
Hizbullah and warring factions in Tajikistan. What good company we keep.
These weapons are arguably already illegal. A protocol to the Geneva
conventions prohibits attacks which "are of a nature to strike military
objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction" and "which
may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to
civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would
be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage
anticipated". I think 98% would be a fair definition of "excessive".
But their deployment will continue until there is a specific treaty banning
them. It's clear the US and UK governments know their use is wrong. Handicap
International reports that the Coalition Provisional Authority (the
administration set up by the US to govern Iraq in 2003) "strongly
discouraged casualty data collection, especially in relation to cluster
submunitions". During a debate in the House of Lords last month, the Foreign
Office minister, Lord Triesman, made such a feeble show of justifying their
use that you couldn't help suspecting he was batting for the other side. The
only justification he could find was that, unlike landmines, cluster bombs
are not intended to lie around undetonated.
Two days ago, a letter sent to the defence minister by the international
development secretary, Hilary Benn, was leaked to the press. He argued that
"cluster munitions have a very serious humanitarian impact, pushing at the
boundaries of international humanitarian law. It is difficult then to see
how we can hold so prominent a position against landmines, yet somehow
continue to advocate that use of cluster munitions is acceptable."
But Benn appears to be alone. The foreign office maintains that "existing
humanitarian law is sufficient for the conduct of military operations,
including the use of cluster munitions, and no treaty is required". The
government seems unable to break its habit of killing.
--
Irwin Davidson
Strasbourg, France.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
