[Tlc] L-cluster bombs

Tue May 6 08:29:07 PDT 2008

FYI. Long article on cluster bombs in Laos.
Best,
justin

2008-0506 - Asia Times - The politics of cluster bombs

http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/JE06Ae01.html

The politics of cluster bombs
By Brian McCartan

XIENG KHUANG, Laos - Nang Wan lies in a hospital bed in this remote area's provincial hospital, her body covered in small black wounds. The 35-year-old woman was digging a shallow drainage ditch around her house on April 16 when her world exploded.

Her youngest, five-year-old, son was killed instantly in the blast. Her other two young children are in the room across the hall, with shrapnel wounds to their bodies and faces. Their injuries are tragically common in this northern province of Laos, a legacy of the country's war with the United States.

During the US's so-called "Secret War" in Laos, which spanned from 1964-1973, the US military dropped more than 2.4 million tons of bombs on the country, including around 270 million cluster bomb sub-munitions. According to the government-run unexploded ordnance (UXO) disposal organization UXO-Lao, 4,837 people have been killed or injured by cluster munitions, many of them decades after the war's end.

The tragedy that continues in Laos has been repeated in countries across the globe, from the Western Sahara to Sudan, Chechnya to Lebanon. In each one of these conflicts the legacy is felt by the civilian population. Unexploded cluster munitions wait at or just below the surface of the ground to be stepped or hit with a shovel or plow. All of the munitions are unstable and become increasingly more so with time, often set off by the slightest movement or touch.

The brief 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon saw some of the most extensive use yet of cluster munitions, mostly by Israel, in highly populated areas. Civilian casualties caused by these weapons, both during the war and after, have refocused global attention on the weapons' most frequent users and producers, including in recent or ongoing conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Later this month, around 90 countries are expected to sign the Ban on Cluster Munitions Treaty at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. The likely signatories include some of Europe's biggest traditional users and stockpilers of the weapons, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom - the most frequent user that has entered the process.

The meeting is part of a multilateral negotiation known as the Oslo Process, which was initiated by 30 countries in February 2007 after their previous attempts to ban the weapons through a Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons' (CCW) mechanism failed. The convention was signed by 106 countries that seeks to restrict the use of fragmentation weapons, landmines, incendiary and blinding laser weapons and works for the removal of unexploded ordnance.

The Oslo Declaration, signed by 46 countries in February 2007, calls for the conclusion of a legally binding treaty by 2008 that prohibits the use and stockpiling of cluster munitions, as well as provides for care and rehabilitation of survivors and the clearance of unexploded munitions.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the weapons should be banned due to their inaccuracy, unreliability and massive numbers in global circulation. As militaries have over time become more efficient in their destruction, the risk to civilian populations from cluster munitions has grown exponentially.

In Kosovo in 1999 around 290,000 sub-munitions were dropped over a 10-week period by North Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft. During the five weeks of the 2006 conflict in Lebanon, as many as four million sub-munitions were spread by Israel across the country's southern regions, according to the ICRC.

Cluster munitions were also used in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and over 10,000 were used in Iraq during the US's 2003 invasion. According to the ICRC, at least 24 states are now contaminated. The Cluster Munitions Coalition, a network of civil society and rights organizations engaged with the ICRC to secure a ban on the weapons, claims that cluster munitions caused the greatest share of civilian casualties in Kosovo 1999 and Iraq in 2003.

Bomb lovers unite
There are an estimated 3 billion cluster munitions in stockpiles held by at least 75 different countries worldwide. At least 34 countries are known to have produced over 210 different types of cluster munitions. According to rights advocacy group Human Rights Watch, the US currently has over one billion individual sub-munitions in their stockpiles, contained within over 40 types of surface or air deliverable cluster bombs, rockets, artillery shells and missiles.

Some of the world's most powerful militaries, including the United States, Russia, China, India and Pakistan, remain firmly outside of the Oslo process. The US is currently engaged in two conflicts in Asia where it has used cluster bombs - Afghanistan and Iraq. Pressure has been brought to bear on these military powers by the media and international aid and rights groups, exposure which some contend convinced European countries to back the process.

After extensive negative media attention and in-depth investigations by Human Rights Watch, the US stopped using cluster munitions in Afghanistan after its invasion and their use in Iraq was quantitatively limited compared to the first Gulf War, although US ground forces have been censured for their more indiscriminate use in populated areas.

The US continues to argue that an international instrument for dealing with cluster munitions already exists - the CCW. In a February 2008 White Paper, the US outlined its policy on cluster munitions, which said any new treaty would be superfluous and could have a negative effect on other international mechanisms aimed at unexploded ordnance.

It also argued that in certain situations cluster munitions may be more effective and cause fewer civilian casualties than regular bombs and that it is working to improve the reliability of its cluster bombs, making an outright ban on their use unnecessary. The White Paper also claimed that the US is already addressing the cluster bomb issue by spending more money than any other country on the cleanup of unexploded bomblets - most of which are produced in the US and have been used by the US and its clients.

The US and other nations currently outside the Oslo process insist that they want to work through the CCW, which because of its consensus-driven mechanisms and member veto power over new initiatives means almost no important or binding agreements have originated at the body. Nor is the idea of banning cluster munitions especially new: the ICRC initially raised the issue during the Indochina War in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since their initial use by the German air force in 1943, cluster munitions have been used in over 20 conflicts including by UN forces during the Korean War by the UN forces, in Afghanistan by the former USSR, in the Falklands by the UK, and more recently in Chechnya by Russia and in Sudan by the Sudanese government and Angola.

The proposed new treaty calls for the prohibition on the use, development, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions. It also will require signatory nations to destroy their current stocks of the weapons and includes provisions for assistance to victims, clearance of unexploded sub-munitions and activities to minimize the impact of unexploded remnants on civilian populations.

Although still a matter of debate, including disagreement over how many "bomblets" necessarily constitute a "cluster", the ICRC's definition of cluster munitions states that they are "weapons consisting of a container that opens in the air and scatters explosive sub-munitions or bomblets over a wide area" and may be delivered by aircraft, artillery or missiles.

Some countries are already arguing for exceptions to be included for self-destruction munitions and so-called "smart" sub-munitions. For the ICRC, exceptions are allowable if the technology can be proven. However, so far manufacturers have a poor track record in the field; many of the munitions used by Israel in Lebanon produced by the United States, Israel and China failed to self-destruct.

Explosive divide
The bigger debate, however, surrounds the treaty's interoperability clauses, which if passed in its current draft form will ban countries' militaries who are signatories from conducting joint operations with other militaries who do use cluster munitions. This issue has already caused problems during military operations in Afghanistan where nations adhering to the Landmine Ban Treaty have been required to operate alongside the United States, which is not a signatory to that pact.

Once the treaty is signed in Dublin, the US and other non-signatory nations may find themselves having to go it alone on military operations where the potential exists for cluster munitions use, or goaded into the decision not to use the munitions to keep key partners in military coalitions, something which has become crucial in the multinational NATO operation now underway in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

Only 15 of the estimated 75 nations that stockpile cluster munitions have actually used them in conflict. Many countries' stockpiles contain models that are now 20 years or older and with age are becoming increasingly unreliable and unstable. Meanwhile, the ICRC and others note that even the most advanced cluster munitions fail.

Guarantees of low failure rates given by big cluster munitions manufacturers, including the US's Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Textron, Gen Corp, France's Thales Group, China's Northern Industries Company (Norinco), are usually based on tests in conditions often completely different to those where the munitions are dropped in combat, according to experts. Freshly plowed fields, trees and muddy rice paddies often cushion the bombs' impact, preventing them from detonating.

Munitions experts note that unexploded bomblets are often more dangerous than landmines because they are designed to kill rather than maim. For Peter Herby, head of the ICRC Arms Unit, "It's bad enough when civilians get caught up and injured in conflict. But for us it's repugnant when killing goes on for years and decades simply because of the wrong choice of weapon."

As many as a million sub-munitions are estimated to have failed in Lebanon, meaning the civilian landscape there is now littered with explosive debris. According to the United Nations, as of December 2007 they have caused 19 deaths and 170 injuries among civilians. Human Rights Watch claims that more than 1,600 Kuwaitis and Iraqis have been killed and 2,500 injured from cluster munitions after the first US-led Gulf War.

There have been 13,000 confirmed deaths or injuries from cluster munitions globally, with the vast majority in Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. The large footprint of cluster munitions, experts say, is what makes them so lethal and rights groups say raises issues of whether governments who use them should one day be held liable for the damage wrought and clearance costs.

Unlike regular bombs that have a specific target, cluster munitions are designed to spread their bomblets over an area sometimes as big as two football fields. Originally designed for a war in Europe between huge armies and that never materialized, they have instead been widely used in counterinsurgency campaigns and smaller civil conflicts.

Depending on the type, there can be 600 or more sub-munitions in a so-called container. This large area combined with a failure rate of as high as 30-40% has resulted in large areas of land being contaminated and uninhabitable until cleared. Meanwhile, the arduous and time-consuming process of clearing unexploded sub-munitions has in many areas exacerbated already grinding poverty and made economic development and reconstruction after war even more difficult.

Within Southeast Asia, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia are still suffering from the after effects of cluster bombs dropped on their countries by the US over 35 years ago. The legacy of the weapons' use has been thousands of deaths and injuries as well as retarded economic development in various affected areas.

That's the case in picturesque Ban Vene village on Laos' Plain of Jars. Sawatdi, an ordnance disposal team leader for UXO-Lao who only gave his last name, said that over a one-month period his team had cleared 83,000 square meters of contaminated farmland that had nonetheless been used by farmers for years. He says his team found and removed 87 unexploded bomblets left over from the US war - all of them BLU-26 cluster bomblets.

He says that over the past 10 years of operations, UXO-Lao has only cleared 130 square kilometers - or less than one-tenth of 1% of the country's total land mass - out of a total estimated 87,000 kilometers affected. Yong Chanthalangsy, spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs in Laos, said, "With its limited capacity, it will take Laos 100 years to clear the [cluster munitions]." At current rates of disposal, that's a sadly optimistic projection.

Brian McCartan is a freelance journalist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He may be reached at brianpm at comcast.net.

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Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
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