It was a pity that the United States, along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel, boycotted the New Zealand meeting called to advance the ban on the use of cluster bombs, which ended Thursday with 82 of the 120 countries that did attend agreeing on a draft treaty ahead of final negotiations this May in Dublin.
Had the Americans been there they might have explained why, in this day of the smart bomb and the deadly unmanned drone which can launch a missile and kill a senior Al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan, the cluster bomb is so stupid. It is supposed to explode midair and scatter hundreds of bomblets that detonate when they strike the ground. However, at least 10 percent and up to 40 percent of these bomblets fail to go off at the time. The Pentagon has said that the cluster bomb has demonstrated “its military utility”. The truth is that this weapon is very good at killing innocent civilians stumbling on bomblets, long after they have been fired by artillery or dropped from warplanes.
If the deadly cargo of bomblets could be guaranteed to explode on impact or all had timers which ensured that they would explode almost immediately after they should have detonated on impact, there would be an argument that this terrible weapon ought to remain in the arsenals of the world armies that use it. However, it seems that weapon scientists are incapable of engineering such lethal efficiency. Alternatively, the effective delayed-action of these munitions is deliberate, designed to wreak wicked havoc among a civilian population that reprehensibly has been deemed to be part of the enemy. The claim that they are an important part of the military arsenal echoes the same defense made for land mines, which have nevertheless, since 1999, been forbidden. Though the United States is one of the countries that have refused to sign up to the land-mine prohibition, it reportedly no longer uses them.
Some who did attend the five-day New Zealand meeting, including the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Japan sought to water down the proposed total ban. The UK argued that while uncontrolled use of the weapon was not tenable, a blanket ban was unacceptable. However, it is the very uncontrollability of the weapon itself that makes it unacceptable. No doubt those who demur from a total ban are hoping the technology will improve and, at some point, the munitions will become “acceptable”. The answer to that is that cluster bombs should never have been deployed until it was certain that all the bomblets within them would discharge when dropped. As it is, they are a proven dreadful threat to civilians, well after the fighting has moved on or stopped, as we saw in Lebanon in the last war where Israel rained US-supplied bomblets all over the Lebanese countryside.
It is depressing how countries that busily tell the rest of the world to respect human rights, are prepared to support a weapon so absolutely indiscriminate of civilian human rights.
