Pointing fingers on cluster munitions use in Georgia

The question on many of our minds these days is, "have cluster munitions been used in Georgia and, if so, by whom?" There have been accusations, counter-accusations and denials. Fingers are being pointed in many directions. To briefly recap:

• -- On 15 August, the NGO Human Rights Watch reported on Russian use of cluster munitions in Georgia, after it identified strikes on Gori and Ruisi on August 12 that it said killed at least 11 civilians and injured dozens more.
  

• -- On the same day, according to the Cluster Munitions Coalition of NGOs, the Defence Minister of Norway - the country that has spearheaded international efforts to ban cluster munitions and that will host, on December 3, a signing ceremony for the new Convention on Cluster Munitions - expressed grave concern at Russia’s alleged use of cluster munitions.
  

• -- Also on the same day, Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy head of the Russian General Staff, is reported as stating that, “We did not use cluster bombs, and what’s more, there was absolutely no necessity to do so.”

• -- On 19 August, the Russian Ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva accused Georgia of using cluster munitions against South Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers.

• -- On 21 August (yesterday), Human Rights Watch rejected Russia's denial that it had used cluster munition, saying that it had documented additional Russian cluster munitions attacks during the conflict in Georgia.
  

• -- Also yesterday, the Irish Foreign Minister, who hosted the diplomatic conference in Dublin in May of this year at which 107 States (although not Russia or Georgia) adopted a new treaty banning cluster munitions, expressed "deep concern" over allegations that cluster bombs were used by Russian forces.
  

Media coverage of the use of cluster munitions in Georgia has been extensive and the public outcry has been loud. The Cluster Munitions Coalition has organised protests and vigils outside of Russian embassies around the world.

The fact that there has been so much protest - both from governments and the general public - over the use of cluster munitions in Georgia, and the fact that Russia has thought it necessary to deny that it has used these weapons, is strong evidence that the stigmatisation of this particular weapons system is now well rooted in the global public conscience. As the Norwegian Defence Minister Anne Grethe Strøm-Erichsen put it:

The majority of the world’s states have, with the adoption of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, made it clear that the use of such weapons cannot be considered acceptable

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: A group of aerial bombs as depicted on the website of Miltra Engineering Ltd. The cluster munition that Russia is accused of using in Georgia - the RBK-250 - is on the far right.

Capturing the cost of cluster munitions

Last October we blogged that civil society actors seem to be waking up to the usefulness of satellite imaging technologies in trying to hold governments accountable for their actions, for instance for human rights violations or failure to protect civilians in conflict. (In contrast, the value of satellite imagery in traditional arms control was known from early in the Cold War - but cost and tight government control over access to imagery generally kept it out of the hands of non-state actors.) Amnesty International launched a website last year in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley to watch over parts of Darfur. And the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) later released similar satellite images of Myanmar.

Wired Magazine ran an interesting piece on 13 June, which presented some of the images collated by the AAAS's Geospatial Technology and Human Rights Project, which you can take a look at here. Its gallery presents a series of before and after satellite photographs spanning the globe, from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, Eritrea, Sudan and even North Korea.

Among these images were two from Southern Lebanon. Conflict there in the summer of 2006 between Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah saw both sides use cluster munitions - IDF launching them into Southern Lebanon on a massive scale, especially in the last few days of fighting.

A Human Rights Watch report, Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006 made considerable use of commercially-available satellite images matched with global positioning data to show the locations of cluster strikes and document their effects. In this way, satellite imagery played a role in raising the profile of concerns about the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, and therefore to the achievement of the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) through the Oslo Process, in which Human Rights Watch was active as a member of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

And Human Rights Watch wasn't alone. Aerial and satellite photographs were also used by other NGOs on cluster munitions. Norwegian People's Aid, working with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and an independent explosive ordnance expert, Colin King, used similar techniques in their report, M85 - An Analysis of Reliability, which was presented and discussed in two Oslo Process conferences. And a Landmine Action UK report just out, entitled Counting the Cost: The economic impact of cluster munition contamination in Lebanon, cross-referenced satellite imagery of land use with data from the Information Management System for Mine Action (or IMSMA, which despite its title sometimes covers other forms of unexploded ordnance.)

John Borrie

GoogleEarth map of Lebanon from the Google Earth Blog.

Cluster munitions: Arguments for and against

Last week's meeting of states party to the Mine Ban Treaty (8MSP) in Jordan provided an opportunity for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) to offer a lunchtime briefing to states on the Oslo Process to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. Austrian Ambassador Wolfgang Petritsch shared information about next week's Vienna Conference, and CMC Coordinator Thomas Nash talked about campaigning against cluster munitions in general.

The briefing was timely: with 8MSP about to wrap up successfully, diplomats were beginning to turn their minds to the recently released "Vienna text" and reflect upon the tactical implications of the CCW's mandate to work on cluster munitions in 2008 agreed on 13 November in Geneva. 8MSP offered a good opportunity for Oslo process outreach with a number of countries party to the Mine Ban Treaty (which has 156 members) who either aren't members of the CCW (which has 103 members) or who are but don't often attend its meetings.

One question that came up in question-and-answer time was the following:

States hostile to banning or restricting cluster munitions are likely to be briefing their delegations around the world with bullet-point style arguments as to why their cluster munitions are necessary. What are likely to be the 3 main planks of their position, and what are responses to these?

To me, actually there seem to be 4 characteristic generic arguments heard about cluster munitions. (There may be more, or maybe they could classified differently, but these rolled off the top of my head.) By request, I’ve set them out below. Sorry for the long blog post…

1. Cluster munitions are legitimate under international humanitarian law (IHL): unlike anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions aren’t inherently indiscriminate and were, besides, designed for a specific purpose - to destroy massed formations of infantry, armour and soft-skinned vehicles. If used “responsibly”, these weapons are consistent with IHL, it’s argued.

Human Rights Watch and others, however, have documented evidence that cluster munitions have almost never been used in a manner consistent with existing IHL (i.e. in Cold War-era battles in zones devoid of civilians). Instead, their use has usually been in proximity to civilian populations.

Moreover, cluster munitions do appear highly prone to indiscriminate use. This underlines the point that the effects of a weapon are context-dependent, not solely contingent on technical characteristics: self-destruct mechanisms in many explosive submunitions, for example, were shown in Southern Lebanon to have been ineffective, despite previous manufacturer and user claims about them rendering unexploded submunitions safe.

It should also be noted that – unless it’s banned – a weapon could be considered legitimate while still subject to specific legal restriction.

2. If we didn’t use cluster munitions, we’d have to use something worse: But IHL rules apply to the use of weapons generally - including any weapons of attack used as alternatives to cluster munitions. Principally, those rules are of (1) distinction between civilians and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives, (2) the rule against indiscriminate attacks, (3) the proportionality rule and (4) the obligation on belligerents to take feasible precautions to minimize incidental loss of civilian lives, injuries to them or damage to civilian objects.

An ICRC expert has observed that cluster munitions raise important and persistent legal concerns under all of these rules (this is ultimately why there are international efforts underway to deal with them explicitly!). Nevertheless, the non-use of cluster munitions isn’t a “free pass” for the use of other weapons without the application of these general IHL rules.

3. Cluster munitions are what we have in stock: while often dressed up in different forms, this point is implicit in many arguments for continued use of cluster munitions based on “military utility”. Many states possess large stocks of explosive submunitions: the US for instance, appears to have 700-800 million in inventory, predominantly of older, more problematic types. For fiscal and logistical reasons, many militaries also deploy munitions from their arsenals on a “first-in, first to deploy” basis - using older lots first, a problem that compounds the humanitarian consequences of the use of the weapon because older submunitions tend to be less reliable.

To my way of thinking, using cluster munitions is in fact a political and moral question, not a strictly military issue. It’s about how societies choose to allocate resources.

Anecdotal evidence is that soldiers are not wedded to cluster munitions, and would prefer to use alternatives with lesser humanitarian risk and which pose less hazard to their own troops advancing through areas in which unexploded submunitions are scattered, for example. But they continue to use what they’ve have been provided for in military budgets, sometimes as legacies of purchasing decisions made decades ago to suit the exigencies of Cold War fighting in Europe. Ultimately, along with commitment to addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, there needs to be recognition from governments that they must match it with financial commitment to providing alternative means for militaries to carry out their missions in ways consistent with IHL.

4. We don’t like being told what to do: this fourth argument actually has little to do with cluster munitions per se, but is really to do with concerns about “another Ottawa” emerging.

It’s self-evident that, by exploiting procedural tactics, an obstructive few are able - and sometimes do - prevent the emergence of multilateral cooperation through formal channels that could yield security benefit to all. The treatment of “mines other than anti-personnel mines” in the CCW process in recent years, in which a handful of states have obstructed general agreement on a new agreement, is a case in point.

The problem is this: if there’s evident need to negotiate a new norm (like on cluster munitions on humanitarian grounds), it’s probably emerged from the consequences of self-interested behaviour of users of the weapon. Logically, these users, who perceive that they derive benefit from that behaviour (i.e. use of cluster munitions), will then object to agreement of a robust norm restricting or banning that weapon by blocking consensus.

This underlines the conundrum for the CCW in agreeing on a new norm in the future. Its mandate for 2008 is about commencing work – not agreeing on any outcome – and both roadblocks and dilution of ambition are tactics will be encountered…

…which also highlights the importance of the Oslo process, both in its own right in addressing cluster munitions and in adjusting the perceptions of those who might otherwise resist consensus in the CCW on a final agreement there. Already, concerns about the Oslo process seem to have led states such as the US, China and Russia to change their policies in order to allow 2008 work in the CCW to proceed on cluster munitions - a new development without prospect before the Oslo Conference in February 2007. They are sure to have recognized that (unlike in the CCW) the consensus practice isn’t explicit in the Oslo process, nor is it customary in other IHL processes.

In the big picture, disagreement about the merits of "which process" just isn’t as important as achieving the goal of protecting civilians from weapons. Unfortunately, traditional multilateral structures and practices can obscure this at times. So multilateral decision-makers need to be creative and goal focused. It should be noted in this respect that the Mine Ban Treaty a decade ago actually reinvigorated the CCW for a time, and the Oslo process appears to be doing the same. So the issue here isn’t about CCW (the establishment) versus Oslo (the upstart) as some might have us believe. Meanwhile, the UN Secretary-General has been on record since February 2007 as supporting both processes, because what’s important is addressing the impact of cluster munitions on civilians.

Hear, hear.


John Borrie

References

John Borrie & Rosy Cave, “The humanitarian effects of cluster munitions: Why should we worry?”, Disarmament Forum, (Issue 4) 2006, pp. 5-13.

Human Rights Watch, Myths and Realities about Cluster Munitions.

Louis Maresca, “Cluster munitions: Moving toward specific regulation”, Disarmament Forum, (Issue 4) 2006, pp. 27-34.

30% less pupils in Helmand province

According to IRIN (the Integrated Regional Information Networks of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)), more than 30,000 pupils attending school in the Helmand province in southern Afghanistan last year were absent in 2007. This represents a reduction of more than 30% in school attendance:

“This year we have 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in Helmand province,” said Saeed Ibrar Agha, head of the provincial education department.[]
In 2002, less than a year after the Taliban were toppled, there were 224 functioning schools all over the province [].”

Insecurity explains why most schools are shuttered in the Helmand province. In the past 15 months, according to Saeed Ibrar Agha, Taliban insurgents and other armed groups targeting schools as symbols of the government have burned down more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and other staff.

The deterioration of security conditions has led to a flow of children to Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province. Today, half of all provincial pupils (i.e. 35,000 children) are to be found in Lashkar Gar. The 27 schools open in the city have been unable to keep pace with demand and some classes have to be held in the open.

To end on a positive note, the number of female students – who were denied the right to attend school under the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001 – has increased from 12,228 in 2006 (12%) to 14,500 in 2007 (21%) in the Helmand province. This is important. As a 2006 Human Rights Watch report observed, increasing females’ access to education not only benefits girls and women, but also the country’s development:

“It is now well-established that increasing girls’ and women’s access to education improves maternal and child health, improves their own children’s access to education, and promotes economic growth. For example, research has shown that an additional year of school for girls can reduce infant mortality by 5 to 10 percent, and that reducing the gender gap in education increases per capita income growth. Indeed, studies have found greater returns through higher wages on school investments for girls than for boys, particularly for secondary education.”

Aurélia Merçay


References

AFGHANISTAN: Boys' education slides in Helmand, IRIN’s report, 8 October 2007, available online at http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=74690 .

Human Rights Watch, Education in Afghanistan and its Importance for Development in Lessons in Terror: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan, July 2006, available online at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/afghanistan0706/3.htm.

Photo by Jim Birt retrieved from Flickr: brightly coloured burqas worn by Afghan girls on their way to school in Gereshk, Helmand Province (Afghanistan, May 2007).

Cluster munitions: hearing the voices of the affected

Some years ago, in 2003, I wrote a global survey of explosive remnants of war for the British non-governmental organization (NGO), Landmine Action, to feed into work in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).

The survey was a fairly preliminary piece of desk-research. It simply aimed at pulling together existing bits of information about explosive munitions (apart from landmines) that had been abandoned or failed to function as intended, in order to produce a 'snapshot' of the ERW problem around the world for the year 2001.

One of the survey's conclusions was that:

"cluster submunitions appear to pose an especially severe risk to civilians in the limited set of conflicts in which they have been used. This trend, associated with the face that cluster munitions are being procured or manufactured by an increasing number of countries, means that their post-conflict threat to civilians can be expected to further increase given the high failure rates and high lethality of this weapon type."

A great deal of research has been carried out since, and a wide range of sources only strengthen this finding. Although there's more research to be done, the reports that have been produced offer enough information to underline the problematic nature of cluster munition use, the most comprehensive recent report being Handicap International's 'Circle of Impact'. Moreover, the conflict in Southern Lebanon in 2006 underlined the humanitarian problems that cluster munitions create, whether used by professional military forces or armed non-state groups.

Unlike the anti-personnel mine ban campaign in the 1990s, the world - fortunately - doesn't yet face a cluster munition 'epidemic', although current trends being what they are this may well change. And, unlike anti-personnel mines, explosive submunitions are designed to kill rather than maim. So images of victims haven't been so prominent yet in international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions through a new treaty for at least two reasons: because there is a smaller pool of victims - for now, and so far as we know - and because more of that total pool of victims of cluster munitions are dead rather than injured. The dead simply don't tell their tales so emphatically.

A third reason is that, until now, there hasn't been an opportunity for states affected by cluster munitions to gather specifically in order to assess the human costs of cluster munitions around civilians.

Next week that will change. The government of Serbia is convening an international conference in Belgrade of states affected by cluster munitions, in which international organizations including the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross, and NGOs (many of whom are member of the Cluster Munition Coalition) will also play a part.

The topics to be discussed at the Belgrade Conference will focus on three main elements:

- survivor assistance;

- explosive ordnance clearance; and

- international assistance and cooperation.

The aim is to allow affected countries to share experiences and jointly produce some recommendations - recommendations which are likely to be incorporated into the Oslo process, if not the CCW's work.

As Serbia itself has pointed out:

"The input of countries affected by cluster munitions is crucial in establishing a treaty that addresses the needs of cluster munition survivors. A future treaty must take into account the experiences, challenges and concerns faced by people who live with the everyday consequence of cluster munition attacks."

It sounds to me like disarmament as humanitarian action in practice. I'll be attending and will report back to you about it on this blog.


John Borrie

Children’s drawings describing Darfur atrocities

Human Rights Watch (HRW): What's happening here?
13-year-old artist: These men in green are taking the women and the girls.
HRW: What are they doing?
Boy: They are forcing them to be wife. The houses are on fire.
HRW: What's happening here?
Boy: This is an Antonov. This is a helicopter. These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people.

Last week, while looking for a picture to illustrate a post on systematic rape in DRC, I came across a series of drawings from children who were refugees in camps along the Chad-Darfur border.

These pictures date from February 2005, when two Human Rights Watch researchers, Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault, visited refugee camps in Chad in order to assess issues of insecurity and sexual violence.

The two researchers gave paper and crayons to children so that they could draw while their parents and caretakers were interviewed.

Without any instructions or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region: the bombings by Sudanese government helicopters and Antonov planes, the villages burning, the attacks by mounted Janjaweed (using the UN definition, the Janjaweed – thought to mean “a man with a gun on a horse” – are comprised of nomadic Arabic-speaking African tribes, the core of whom are from Abbala (camel herder) background with significant Lambo recruitment from the Baggara (cattle herder) people), the shootings of civilians, the rape of women and girls, and the flight to Chad.

Although they date from early 2005, these drawings are highly topical. According to UN estimates, the Darfur conflict – which is still going today – has killed more than 200,000 people and at least 2.2 million people have fled their homes since 2003.

Click here to see Darfur children’s drawings.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Darfur Drawn, The conflict in Darfur through children’s eyes, Human Rights Watch, http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/index.htm.

A. Sparrow and O. Bercault, The Art of War: Children's drawings illustrate Darfur atrocities, 14 July 2005, Slate, available online at http://www.slate.com/id/2122730/.

Statistics retrieved from a press conference by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at UN Headquarters. See "Darfur: Ban Ki-moon says peace talks must be 'final phase' towards settlement", UN News Centre, 10 September 2007, available here.

Drawing from a 13-year-old boy, who fled Darfur and was living in a refugee camp in Chad in 2005 (no more recent information), see http://hrw.org/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/13.htm.

Systematic rape in Congo: a weapon of war

Last week, John Holmes, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, spent four days in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as part of the UN’s efforts to assess the humanitarian situation in the region.

Quoted in a Washington Post article published on 9 September 2007, he described the prevalence and intensity of sexual violence against women in eastern Congo as “almost unimaginable” and “worse than anywhere else in the world”. “Rape has become almost a cultural phenomenon”, Holmes noted.

In DRC, sexual violence is a component of a broader environment of insecurity. The presence in the forests of eastern Congo of Hutu militias (which fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide), along with other armed groups, has menaced the Congolese civilian population for more than 10 years. As Holmes described it:

“There needs to be a political solution to the problems there, which are connected to the past, to the genocide in Rwanda.”

Some figures? In DRC, according to the United Nations:
> About 300’000 people have been displaced in the last 10 months. Because basic resources, such as food and clean water, are missing in refugee camps, people die from hunger or disease;
> Nearly 4’500 cases of sexual violence have been reported in just one eastern province of DRC in the last 9 months. Real figures are probably much higher.

Systematic sexual violence against women and girls is a facet of warfare. It is used as a weapon of terror, aiming at terrorizing and dominating civilian populations, who often have to flee their homes in the hope of escaping sexual assaults, torture and mutilations. An article published in The Nation in 2004 noted that:

“Based on personal testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch, it is estimated that as many as 30% of rape victims are tortured and mutilated during the assaults, usually with spears, machetes, sticks or gun barrels thrust into their vaginas. [] About 40% of rape victims, usually the younger ones , aged 8 to 19, are abducted and forced to become sex slaves.”

Beside the physical and psychological damage inflicted on women and children, it is reported that systematic rape is leading to a wide contamination of the population by HIV/AIDS.

Sexual violence in DRC is of a “systematic” nature. By recognizing that sexual violence is deliberately and strategically planned – like it was the case in Rwanda and in Bosnia-Herzegovina (in 2001, for the first time ever, rape was successfully prosecuted as a crime against humanity in a trial of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) –, a case could be made that it violates international humanitarian law.

Rape in DRC could then be prosecuted as crime against humanity or as a form of genocide.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Stephanie McCrummen, “Prevalence of Rape in E. Congo Described as Worst in World”, The Washington Post, 9 September 2007, available online here.

Jan Goodwin, “Silence=Rape”, The Nation, 8 March 2004, available online here.

Photo by cyclopsr retrieved from Flickr: "the surgery of 4-year-old Vitonsi was successful and she is now recovering. But she, as well as her mother, is deeply traumatized by the rape."