VARIOUS: International conference aimed at securing a ban on cluster bombs opens in Dublin

Record ID: 356430

  • Title: VARIOUS: International conference aimed at securing a ban on cluster bombs opens in Dublin
  • Date: 19th May 2008
  • Summary: (BN08) ADCHIT, SOUTHERN LEBANON (RECENT) (REUTERS) CONTROLLED BLAST FOR CLUSTER BOMBS / SMOKE RISING
  • Embargoed: 3rd June 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: International Relations,Defence / Military
  • Reuters ID: LVAE1NRSL4O9AUE50K61EVLSLY6D
  • Story Text: Delegates from over one hundred countries meet to consider a ban on cluster bombs, as activists welcome "the biggest meeting on humanitarian and disarmament affairs for over a decade".
    Advocates for the banning of cluster bombs gathered on Monday (May 19) outside the venue of the Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions as delegates arrived for the opening session of the conference in Dublin. More than 100 nations are coming together to finalize an anti-cluster munitions treaty which began three years ago under the so-called Oslo Process.
    The top producers, users and stockpilers of cluster bombs -- the United States, Israel, China, Russia, India and Pakistan -- skipped the conference but Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Michael Martin, was confident the results of the meeting would make a difference.

    "The experience of similar types of international conventions, particularly the one on personnel landmines and so forth, is that once you set an international standard through a legal international convention and an instrument like this, other powers and other nations tend to follow that standard in practice, even though they may not be signatories in the beginning, they may not ever ratify such a convention, but ultimately it does determine international practice on the ground," Martin said.
    The Oslo Process against cluster bombs began three years ago and is modelled on the campaign against anti-personnel landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 and led to the 1999 Ottawa Treaty banning them.
    Cluster munitions open in mid-air and scatter as many as several hundred "bomblets" over wide areas. They often fail to explode, creating virtual mine fields that can kill or injure anyone who comes across them.
    Two years after the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, international and local deminers continue to hunt for the tiny but deadly bomblets scattered in the plains and fields, near houses and schools in the south. The U.N.
    estimates that Israel dropped a million or so of those during the final hours of the war, triggered by Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers on July 12, 2006.
    Naema Ghazi is one of many Lebanese victims of unexploded cluster bombs. She was working in her tobacco field one day when she stepped on one.
    One leg was torn off and the other badly hurt. "I was returning back from the field, I stepped on the ground and I don't know how it exploded, I was bleeding, I felt immediately that I lost my leg, it was connected to the body with just one vein. My mother saw that and started screaming,'' she said.
    In addition to the pain and suffering caused to individuals, cluster munitions also have long term economic consequences, making farmland unusable and preventing travel and communications.
    Aid agencies working to ban cluster munitions say that without urgent international action, the human toll of cluster munitions could become far worse than for anti-personnel landmines.
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