History is replete with examples of nations that sought to promote an insidious goal cloaked in humanitarian terms and under the guise of an innocuous improvement in the status quo.
This week a group of nations led by the U.S. attempted to do exactly that, seeking to foist on to the world an unprecedentedly lax Protocol on Cluster Munitions, one of the most dangerous conventional weapons in existence.
Unfortunately for the group, which includes China, India, Israel and Russia, their efforts were thwarted by the U.N., with opposition stemming from close U.S. allies such as the U.K., and from the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. officials for human rights.
On Friday, the U.N. rejected the U.S.-backed plan at a meeting in Geneva, rebuffing Washington's thrust towards new rules regarding their manufacture and use.
Cluster bombs are usually aimed at stopping the advance of army units and are dropped from an aircraft. The bombs can cruise for approximately 15 km and release around 200 bomblets that spread out across a wide area. Every bomblet contains hundreds of potentially lethal metal shards and “When it explodes, it can cause deadly injuries up to 25m away.”
At the heart of the debate was the question of why the new Protocol is necessary, especially when it waters down the far more comprehensive agreement — the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions ratified by 111 nations.
In a statement following its defeat, a U.S. official was quoted as saying, “Cluster munitions were a military necessity needed to hit targets spread over wide areas,” though the U.S. mission in Geneva focused on the fact that the new protocol would ban the use of cluster munitions produced before 1980.
The U.S. added that it was “deeply disappointed by the failure of the Fourth Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to conclude a protocol on cluster munitions”.
However Steve Goose, Director of the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, argued that the 30-plus-year-old weapons had either “already reached or are nearing the end of their shelf-life and would have to be destroyed anyway,” adding that most munitions used in the past decade — by Libya, Thailand, the U.S., Russia, Georgia, Israel, and the United Kingdom — were produced after 1980.
“Though cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric, the draft is clearly an effort to provide political and legal cover for potential future use of the weapon. That is bad news because cluster munitions are indiscriminate when they are used, causing harm well beyond the target, and leaving unexploded sub-munitions to threaten civilians long afterward.”
