The arsenals available to the modern military contain some horrifically effective weapons with which opposing armies can assault each other. But the cluster bomb has earned itself an infamous reputation. Experience of its use has demonstrated it is not in the main the belligerents who suffer from the exploding bomblets that are scattered far and wide, but civilians who are trying to get on with their lives once the fighting has finished.
The toll of killed and maimed innocents from US-supplied, Israeli-dropped cluster bombs during Israel's defeated 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon has been disgusting. Four million individual bomblets were scattered over the south of Lebanon and half a million of them failed to explode. At least 320 people have been slain or seriously injured by coming into contact with this deadly ordnance. Hardly less tragic has been the fact that there are almost a thousand zones which are still deemed by the UN Mine Action Coordination Center (UNMACC) to be too dangerous for civilians to enter. Farmers are particularly hard hit because they cannot reach their fields and olive and citrus groves. It may still be years before all the bomblets are cleared.
Yesterday in Oslo the first of an expected 107 or more countries signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), the terms of which were finalized this May in Dublin. The first name was that of Norway, which has led the drive to have, these terrible weapons banned. However, three key players, the United States, Russia and China have refused to sign. These states support the argument that the UN has a better program in the shape of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) that also includes as members India, Pakistan and Israel. The Geneva-based CCW initiative has argued that the CCM confuses and imperils final agreement that should come through the UN. This is, however, to overlook the fact that no less a person than the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the finalization of the CCM in Dublin, whose deliberations were, however, boycotted by the United States, Russia and China among others.
The reality is that the two initiatives should be seen not as rivals but as complementary to each other. Those states that have chosen to make an upfront commitment to abandon cluster bombs, their manufacture, stockpiling and use via the Norwegian initiative can still play a role in the CCW negotiations. It is less a question of moral high ground than demonstrating that their military can plan for conflict without this weapon. It will then be up to the likes of Washington, Moscow and Beijing to agree that they will in concert abandon cluster bombs, no doubt in a phased program that each state will be able to verify to its own satisfaction. The Americans and Russians with their experience of the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) already know how such mutual arms reduction works. They should now take the lead in persuading others to embark on a process that will rid the world of at least one terrible weapon.
