PARIS/GENEVA, 5 April 2003 — The co-director of Handicap International, Philippe Chabasse, yesterday slammed British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon’s defense of the use of cluster bomb units (CBUs), calling it “fallacious”. “The argument is fallacious and one cannot speak of a fixed rate of failure” for the bombs, Chabasse said in Paris.
Earlier yesterday, Hoon had defended the use of the controversial bombs by British troops near the Iraqi city of Basra, while acknowledging that around 5 percent of cluster bomblets failed to explode, posing a danger to civilians after the conflict.
In any case, Chabasse said, the 5 percent estimate represented “in absolute value hundreds or even thousands of unexploded bombs in the ground”.
In Kosovo, where cluster bombs were widely used by allied bombers, “the leftover bomblets still cause as many victims as do the remaining anti-personnel mines” more than three years after the conflict, Chabasse charged.
Chabasse also disagreed with Hoon’s assertion that the use of cluster bombs was legal, maintaining that a 1980 convention of traditional weapons banned their use. He said that there was one positive aspect of Hoon’s statement, and that was that British troops had committed themselves to removing the unexploded bomblets after the conflict ends. “Then I say to them, Hurry up and do it!” Chabasse said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the only international organization presently operating in the Iraqi war zone, expressed concern yesterday about the use of cluster bombs in the war. “There is no international ban on them”, said Antonella Notari, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, adding, “We have no own source of confirmation but we understand that British forces confirmed the use of cluster bombs.”
The ICRC has appealed for the use of CBUs only outside civilian dwellings and places of work. The problem with such bombs lie in their long-term effects, Notari said. “We have given recommendations on the construction of those devices. It should make sure that the probability of explosion is raised”, Notari said.
Large numbers of such bombs or parts of them do not explode and become mines as witnessed in the Balkans war. The inherent construction of CBUs should cause the bomb to deactivate or destroy itself. The removal of such weapons had to be ensured once a conflict had ended, the spokeswoman said.
Hoon defended the use of cluster bombs by US-British forces attacking Iraq. “Cluster bombs are a perfectly legal weapon and have an entirely legitimate military role,” Hoon said in an interview with BBC radio.
He said the bombs are not used indiscriminately but “in particular circumstances” such as when enemy forces are spread out. He said that in such situations they could be “safer” than unguided missiles.
Challenged by the BBC interviewer that a reported 30 percent of ordonnance from cluster bombs does not explode and thereby threatens civilians, especially children, Hoon said: “The failure rate for cluster bombs has been progressively reduced and is now said to be in order of some five percent.” And he said British soldiers return to battlefields to “make those bomblets safe.”
