OSLO, Nov 26: Around 100 governments are expected to sign a treaty in Norway next week banning cluster munitions that have killed and maimed tens of thousands of people.
The big military and arms-producing powers, the United States, China and Russia, will be conspicuously absent from the Dec 3-4 signing ceremony at Oslo’s City Hall, though many of Washington’s Nato allies will sign the convention.
Cluster bombs contain up to hundreds of submunitions or “bomblets” that blanket wide areas, which proponents of the ban say makes them indiscriminate killers. They are dropped from aircraft or launched by artillery on the ground.
“We have a new piece of international law that bans a whole category of weapons — that doesn’t happen very often,” said Thomas Nash, coordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition, an umbrella group for organisations that worked for the ban.
The real horror of cluster munitions, campaigners say, is that the submunitions often fail to detonate on impact, and duds on the ground are easily triggered and maim and kill civilians for decades after they are fired in combat.
The treaty, adopted by 107 states in Dublin in May, comes 11 years after the Ottawa convention that banned landmines and won the Nobel Peace Prize for campaigners.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which Nash’s CMC dubs the “most significant disarmament and humanitarian treaty of the decade,” will require signatories to renounce the use, production, stockpiling and trade in the weapons.
It also requires states to assist victims, family members of victims and communities affected by the weapons.
LETHAL DEBRIS: Millions of cluster bombs containing billions of submunitions are stockpiled by at least 77 states, 34 countries are known to have produced them, and they have been used in more than 30 countries or regions, the CMC said.
Expected signatories include about half the stockpilers and producers, Nash said. “By a stroke of the pen here in Oslo we are taking away 50 per cent of the potential users.”
The CMC says the victims over the decades number in the tens of thousands, but the real numbers will never be known.
“More and more it is the unexploded bomblets from cluster bombs that we are clearing,” said Grethe Oestern of Norwegian People’s Aid, which clears landmines and cluster munitions around the world.
“They are small, have intriguing colours and children tend to be attracted to them and pick them up,” said Oestern. “They often hurt groups of people in one single explosion.”
Laos is the country most saturated with cluster munitions dating from the Vietnam War and the weapon’s most recent widespread use was in Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 2006.
Nash said Russia and Georgia used cluster munitions during their conflict this year over South Ossetia, though Russia denies it while Georgia has admitted to using them.
Nash said he was hopeful that the United States would move towards adopting the treaty under future President Barack Obama.—Reuters
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