[Tlc] L-UXEO and munitions

Thu Dec 4 09:08:56 PST 2008

FYI.
Thanks,
justin

2008-1204 - Asia Times - Laos on anti-munitions vanguard

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JL04Ae01.html

Southeast Asia
Dec 4, 2008

Laos on anti-munitions vanguard
By Nick Cumming-Bruce

GENEVA - The signing ceremony for a new international disarmament treaty taking place in Oslo, Norway, on Wednesday provides the improbable platform for long-reclusive Laos to step out on an international stage and take a role promoting the treaty in Southeast Asia.

About 100 countries are expected to sign a convention banning cluster munitions following an intensive two-year campaign driven by non-government organizations and the government of Norway. Activists point to the engagement of Laos as one sign of the extraordinary momentum achieved by the campaign to ban this controversial weapon that is still heavily stocked in the arsenals of the world's leading military powers.

"The Lao government is second only to Norway in embracing this convention," said Thomas Nash, coordinator of the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC), supported by some 300 civil society organizations in 80 countries which has spearheaded the campaign.

In a Southeast Asian context, organizations working with Laos say its role is evidence of a desire by leaders better known for their opaque and cautious style of government to come out of their diplomatic shell and gain recognition for a state overshadowed by such powerful and assertive neighbors as China and Vietnam.

Discussions started more than four years on a treaty banning cluster munitions - bombs or artillery shells that contain up to several hundred small "bomblets", or sub-munitions, that scatter over wide areas. The inaccuracy of the weapon and high rate of failure to detonate meant cluster munitions, like anti-personnel mines, posed a deadly threat to civilians for years, even decades, after the conflict that first prompted their use.

The campaign only took off, however, after Israel's 2006 war with Lebanon when the United Nations estimated Israel fired some four million US-made, Vietnam War-era cluster munitions, saturating huge swathes of agricultural and residential land with unexploded bomblets that have since caused scores of civilian casualties and created a lethal hazard to be cleared at great financial cost.

Norway convened the first of four conferences in the so-called Oslo process to negotiate a treaty in February 2007, attracting only 46 countries, and facing stiff resistance from the US, a leading producer, stockpiler and supplier of the weapon, which lobbied allies to shun the treaty. Only 20 months later, CMC estimates 100 countries from all continents, including leading North Atlantic Treaty Organization members such as Britain, France and Germany, are lining up to sign.

Modeled on the 1997 convention banning landmines, it prohibits the use, production, stockpiling or transfer of cluster munitions. The treaty enters into force six months after 30 countries have ratified it and CMC ambitiously hopes to see the convention pass that milestone before the end of 2009.

China, Russia and the US have stayed well clear of the treaty, joined by such other major Asian stockpilers of the weapon including South Korea, India and Pakistan. Yet campaigners are hopeful that the new treaty, like the ban on landmines, will stigmatize the weapon to a degree that deters its use.

Explosive presentation
Laos became actively engaged only at the second conference in Lima, Peru, in May 2007. At the time, nobody knew what position the bomb-littered country would take. Indeed, the speech the Lao delegation delivered supporting the treaty on that occasion was so forthright and so out of character with the timid reticence that previously characterized Laos' approach to regional and international issues that observers wondered if it had accurately represented official thinking or got carried away with the occasion and exceeded its brief.

At subsequent meetings aimed at negotiating the terms of the cluster ban, however, Laos emerged as a firm supporter of a tough measure against the efforts by many of the signatory European countries to weaken the scope of the treaty to allow them to keep certain weapons or to spin out the eight-year period allowed for getting rid of their stockpiles.

In these debates, Laos' participation had symbolic value to the campaign as the voice of the country most affected by this weapon. The US hit Laos with the most intensive aerial bombardment in the history of warfare. Congressional records show that the US dropped 2 million tons of ordnance on the country between 1964 and 1973, including more than 260 million cluster bomblets.

More than 30 years and many thousands of casualties later, cluster bombs and unexploded ordnance continue to kill and maim, claiming 90 known new casualties in 2007, and pose a stubborn obstacle to open up land for agriculture, infrastructure or harvesting the country's rich and largely untapped mineral wealth. UN agencies say a close correlation exists between bomb contamination and poverty in one of the world's least developed countries.

With those credentials and its active support for an international ban on the weapon, Laos has already provided the venue for a regional conference on the treaty putting a government that has hitherto taken its diplomatic cue from Vietnam out in front of its neighbors. "We hope they will become one of the movers promoting this treaty as a new norm and as a regional leader," says CMC's Nash.

Vietnam, also heavily contaminated by unexploded ordnance and slowly, suspiciously opening its doors to international engagement in the task of cleaning it up, has shown interest in the treaty but has made no move to sign it. Thailand, already a signatory of the landmine ban convention, has followed the cluster ban debate but is ill-placed in the present political crisis to reach any decision on whether or not to join it.

And Cambodia has said it will sign but on the eve of the Oslo ceremony appeared to be wavering as a result of what Phnom Penh-based sources close to the debate described as reluctance on the part of its military.

Laos' interest in the treaty meanwhile has a pecuniary dimension: it hopes that its signing will encourage aid donors to sustain and even increase financial support for the slow and costly business of clearing up the lethal legacy of the war. So it should, responds the CMC. "If the treaty is to be worth something, it's got to make a difference for Laos," says Nash.

But Laos' participation is also prompted by a wider awareness of the risks of isolation when it shares borders squeezed by populous, economically aggressive and more powerful neighbors, argues the Bangkok-based director of an international organization working closely with Laos on humanitarian issues.

"In the past two to three years the attitude of the Lao government has changed incredibly," the program director says, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They want to communicate with the world, they want to be part of things now. They've discovered that if you're not you go under."

Nick Cumming-Bruce is a Geneva-based journalist with decades of experience reporting from Southeast Asia.

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu