Uprooting the Evil in the Fields

“Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Gandalf in J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Lord of the Rings

As mentioned in an earlier post on this blog a team of UNIDIR researchers working on the project “The Road From Oslo: Analysis of Negotiations to Address the Humanitarian Effects of Cluster Munitions” recently spent a week in Southern Lebanon, with the generous support of the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (UNMACC) there.

The 2006 conflict, during which Israel launched massive amounts of cluster munitions into Southern Lebanon, and its aftermath undeniably played an important role in pushing international efforts to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians forward. Although much has been written about how unexploded submunitions pose a humanitarian hazard and constrain development, to see the contaminated fields with one’s own eyes and hear the stories of survivors with one’s own ears conveys a different, deeper understanding of what it means to live and work on land that is contaminated by hundreds of thousands of unexploded submunitions.

Two years after the end of the conflict, people are still falling victims to dangerous unexploded submunitions lying around in their orchards and fields. 20 civilians were killed and 195 injured between August 2006 and September 2008 according to UN MACC (figures up until June ‘08 are available here) Farmers having no other source of income find themselves forced to harvest their crops and till their fields, knowing full well that these have not yet been cleared, or are only free of submunitions on the surface. Explosive submunitions can be ploughed into the earth or move underground because of rain and snow, and surface again much later. We met one farmer who suffered serious injuries to his arm when his tractor drove over a submunition in a field that he had ploughed around a dozen times since the end of the conflict.

Clearance personnel too have paid a heavy price already. 39 have been injured and 7 killed in clearance accidents, as per end of September 2008 according to UNMACC. One of the most recent victims was a Belgian UNIFIL deminer who died in the beginning of September.

Despite the urgency of preventing more cluster munitions victims and making the land save for agriculture and reconstruction, the interest of donor countries is at risk of dwindling, and clearance organizations fear running out of money for their operations in South Lebanon . When we were there, many of them told us that they would have to demobilize at least some of their clearance teams by the beginning of next year. One organization already shut down operations in the middle of this month. More recently, there are positive signs donors such as Australia and the U.S. are stepping up to the plate with further funds.

Cluster munitions clearance is a complicated affair, in many regards different from de-mining and it may be difficult for donors to understand why initial cost and time estimates continue to be revised and new funds are being asked for.

Cluster munitions clearance in South Lebanon has to take account of many factors and constraints besides the availability of financial resources and qualified personnel. Clearing residential areas, cultivated land and land required for infrastructure projects are given priority. The agricultural cycle has to be taken into account to allow harvesting of tobacco, olives and bananas in time, as well as seasonal constraints, moving clearance to coastal regions in winter when snow is falling inland. Systematic clearance of submunitions lying on the ground may be sufficient in some areas, but depending on soil conditions, others require additional sub-surface clearance, a much more time consuming and resource intensive process. All the wile, ensuring the safety of clearance personnel is paramount, though difficult.

Contrary to a systematically laid mine-field one cannot predict with certainty how many unexploded submunitions are within a cluster strike’s footprint and where the individual submunitions are located in the area to be cleared. In the days following the cease-fire, many unexploded submunitions were removed from streets and orchards by the Lebanese Army, Hezbollah and landowners (some Lebanese farmers paying Palestinians to collect the submunitions littering their plantations). This removed an immediate threat to civilians’ lives but because the locations of these submunitions were not recorded, it is all the more difficult to accurately determine the centre of a cluster munition strike today. And of course, there is the distinct possibility that more strike areas are yet to be discovered. In January this year, it was 10 new clearance sites per month.

Consequently, estimates concerning priorities, number and extent of areas to be cleared, and the resources and time required have had to be periodically revised.

The availability of Israeli cluster strike data would greatly facilitate matters. Israel "supplied maps to UNIFIL identifying areas suspected of containing unexploded ordnance, including cluster munitions", but these are inadequate for clearance purposes. With detailed, accurate and complete information about the quantity, type and location of cluster munitions dropped, UNMACC would know how many more strike areas there are and how many more square metres remain to be cleared. Clearance organizations would be in a position to better plan ahead and distribute their resources more efficiently. It should therefore be in everybody’s, not least in donors’ interest to call on Israel to release this data, as France did in September this year.


Maya Brehm

Photo: "Looking out from above Safaad al Battikh M42 clearance zone" by J. Borrie

Southern Lebanon: (Still) living with the legacy of cluster munitions

There were no updates to Disarmament Insight’s blog last week as John and Maya were in Southern Lebanon. For a week we were based at the headquarters of the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre (UN MACC SL) in Tyre, about 25km north of the ‘Blue Line’ separating Southern Lebanon from Israel, and which is monitored by UNIFIL troops.

Why were we there? In July and August 2006, ongoing incidents between the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and Hezbollah, a non-state armed group, escalated massively, and saw cluster munitions used by both sides.

Hezbollah continued to fire katyusha-style rockets from Southern Lebanon at civilian settlements in Northern Israel – inaccurate ground launched weapons at least some of which contained Chinese-manufactured MZD2 submunitions.

Following a Hezbollah ambush and kidnapping of IDF soldiers that ignited the conflagration, it seems that Israeli military forces also used the opportunity to try to destroy Hezbollah rocket sites. The IDF itself used cluster munitions, initially airdropped bombs like the CBU58, on various targets in the area. But in the last three days of the conflict (and between negotiation of a ceasefire and its entry into force) Israel used very large quantities of predominantly ground launched cluster munitions such as the M42, M46, M77 and M85. These littered villages, roads and agricultural land with massive numbers of unexploded cluster submunitions.

In future posts we’ll explore some hazards of, and responses to, unexploded ordnance contamination as seen in Southern Lebanon. Suffice to say in this post that the 2006 conflict and its aftermath served to highlight the problems the use of cluster munitions creates for civilians both at time of use and post-conflict in terms of clearance and socioeconomic recovery. The 2006 conflict’s consequences added to efforts to raise the alarm about the humanitarian problems that use of cluster munitions cause and, eventually, to the emergence of Oslo Process from February 2007. This process had the goal of achieving a treaty to ban cluster munitions that “cause unacceptable harm to civilians”, and adopted a Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in Dublin on 30 May 2008.

So it’s difficult to tell the story of the Oslo Process without understanding what happened in Southern Lebanon in 2006 – and seeing it with our own eyes. And we do intend to tell that story through a negotiating history of the Convention on Cluster Munitions to be published by the UN next summer.

Meanwhile, large-scale battle area clearance of unexploded submunitions from villages and agricultural lands continues more than two years after the August 2006 ceasefire.

It’s currently the UN MACC SL’s job to coordinate the efforts of a variety of battle area clearance and explosive ordnance disposal assets to tackle the problem of unexploded ordnance. Our week based in the MACC accompanying their staff – to which we are very grateful for their patience and generosity - gave us some insight into the practical challenges they, clearance teams and locals face on a daily basis from unexploded submunitions. More about that in future posts.

John Borrie & Maya Brehm

Photo by John Borrie.

Verdun, via Oslo?

Recent columns (dated 22 July and 22 September, 2008) by the Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson raise questions about the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). In the coming days, I’ll address three of Thompson's central arguments - arguments which track US government positions in many respects:

1. (1) taking cluster munitions out of service will result in greater humanitarian suffering due to the use of more high explosive unitary weapons as the only alternative;
2. (2) that the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) is a flawed process, while the more inclusive UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) offers a more hopeful and reasonable outcome; and
3. (3) Thompson's contention that high tech solutions like the U.S. BLU-108 Sensor Fuzed Weapon are an answer to humanitarian concerns.

So, on to the first question: will banning cluster munitions result in the unintended consequence of great humanitarian harm from unitary weapons?

Thompson argues that “a blanket ban on all cluster munitions will not end the desire of military forces to deny use of contested areas to enemies, and therefore might perversely encourage the use of more lethal ‘unitary’ munitions.” This echoes, almost verbatim, the final paragraph of the 19 June 2008 policy memorandum issued by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Among the most extreme examples of lethal uses of unitary warheads are the artillery exchanges in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, during which the French and the Germans slaughtered one another’s’ soldiers and civilians en masse with high explosive artillery shells.

According to the US policy memo, cluster munitions supposedly offer a more humanitarian answer. Their presumed genius is to distribute a large amount of explosive power in small packages over a large area using relatively few pieces of equipment, as opposed to many pieces of equipment sending high explosive warheads on lots of single targets. Some militaries like the shot-gun blasts of cluster munitions to attack moving targets, troop concentrations, tank formations and artillery formations. Take these away, so goes the argument, and you create conditions for another Verdun, or at least saturation bombing on a localized level. If we can’t use lots of little bombs to attack contested areas, so goes the argument, we’ll be forced to use lots and lots of big bombs to do the same job. Even more civilians will be injured or killed in process.

In other words, the argument is as follows: if we cannot use one means of warfare (i.e., cluster munitions) that results in indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks, we will be forced to use means or methods that are even more indiscriminate and disproportionate (e.g., saturation bombing with unitary weapons). For states that respect the rule of humanitarian law as it has developed over the past fifty years, such an argument runs into considerable trouble.

The bedrock principles of distinction, proportionality and the legal obligation to take precautionary measures are enshrined in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. These principles are considered by many to have reached customary status (see, for example, the Red Cross Customary Humanitarian Law Study) or at the very least worthy of inclusion in military law manuals (see, for instance, chapter 2 of the US Military’s Operational Law Handbook)) Taking indiscriminate cluster munitions out of a state’s arsenal does not relieve its armed forces from these obligations.

The fundamental principle of distinction requires that “Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives.” [Protocol I, Art. 52]

Furthermore, attacks have to be proportionate. Article 51(5)(b) of Protocol I spells out the proportionality rule: an “attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” is legally unacceptable.

In light of these humanitarian law principles, for a course of action to be acceptable, the military advantage of the attack must outweigh the anticipated collateral damage. Importantly, the balancing test of the proportionality principle is not between an attack that is less costly to civilians as opposed to another attack that is more costly to civilians. If neither alternative results in an anticipated military advantage that outweighs the anticipated collateral damage of either action, then neither course of action is acceptable. I have written about this elsewhere before the adoption of the CCM (see pp. 40-41, of this article).

In the 2007 Martić case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) the defence advanced the “unitaries would be worse” argument (See also a recent Landmine Action report). In that case, Milan Martić ordered rocket attacks on Zagreb in 1995 in response to the Croatian army’s offensive to retake the breakaway region of Krajina. The attacks killed seven people and injured 214, both directly and because of hazardous unexploded duds.

The weapon chosen by Martić’s commanders? The Orkan rocket system, equipped with cluster submunitions – a weapon that is very similar to the U.S. Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS). Martić argued in his defence brief that his armed forces were aiming at military targets in the city and that their only other weapon option was a powerful unitary rocket that would have caused greater damage to civilians. If we cannot use clusters, we would be forced to use unitaries, argued Martić.

How did the court respond? The court found that the Orkan rocket was an indiscriminate weapon, even assuming Martić’s forces were aiming at legitimate military targets in Zagreb:

[T]he Trial Chamber notes the characteristics of the weapon, it being a non-guided high dispersion weapon. The Trial Chamber therefore concludes that the M-87 Orkan, by virtue of its characteristics and the firing range in this specific instance, was incapable of hitting specific targets. For these reasons, the Trial Chamber also finds that the M-87 Orkan is an indiscriminate weapon, the use of which in densely populated civilian areas, such as Zagreb, will result in the infliction of severe casualties. [para. 463].

The court did not respond to the “unitary rockets would be worse” argument directly, evidently finding it without merit. In its silence, the court could have been relying on Article 35(1) of Protocol I, that the right of belligerents to choose the means and methods of warfare is not unlimited. Regardless of what other weapons were at hand, cluster munitions were not appropriate to attack the specified military targets in Zagreb. It follows logically that if the only other alternative would be something causing even worse civilian injuries, that alternative would also be prohibited.

Martić is now serving a 35 year sentence. He has renewed the “unitaries would have been worse” argument on appeal. Interestingly, the prosecutor’s office has argued in response that a single unitary rocket aimed at each target actually would have been better, not worse. The prosecutor’s office therefore did not reject entirely the use of unitary weapons, but neither did it endorse their indiscriminate use in large numbers.

History also gets in the way of “unitaries would be worse” argument. One might expect that cluster munition use might reduce the use of unitary weapons. Practice has sometimes shown the opposite – extensive use of such area weapons may well encourage or reinforce the use of large numbers of unitary weapons. The example of Laos immediately comes to mind – the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world was blanketed not only with cluster munitions, but also with rockets, mortars, shells and large general purpose bombs. The availability of vast quantities of cluster munitions did not prevent the use of large numbers of other types of ordnance. And clearance officials consider the unexploded cluster bomblets to be a much greater risk to civilians than the unexploded general purpose bombs.

Visitors to Southern Lebanon following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah can attest to a similar outcome – heavy shelling and bombardment included both cluster munitions and weapons with unitary warheads by the Israeli Defense Forces. Many credit the 2006 war with creating the tipping point for the CCM.

Virgil Wiebe


Photo Credit: “p011902.jpg” by PhotosNormandie on Flickr.

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: 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

Cluster munitions: do not adjust your set?

For the last couple of weeks, blog postings on this site have focused on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with help from our guest blogger, Patricia Lewis.

A very different meeting is to take place in Lima, Peru, next week about addressing the hazards of cluster munitions for civilians as part of the “Oslo Process”. It follows a groundbreaking conference of governments, as well as international organizations and civil society in Oslo, Norway, in February.

The Oslo Declaration that emerged commits 46 governments to completing an international treaty by the end of 2008 to “prohibit the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.” (A link to the text of the Oslo Declaration is below. See my blog posting from 24 April for more background.)

More in coming postings about the Oslo Process. In the meantime, what does explosive submunition contamination actually look like in the field?

We might imagine, for instance, that unexploded submunitions would be relatively easy to see, and thus avoid. After all, they’re not deliberately buried and concealed like landmines. So why should they be of special humanitarian concern?

At the Oslo Conference, the humanitarian organization Norwegian People’s Aid showed all those participating this brief video clip by independent photographer John Rodsted of “cluster bomb duds that shouldn’t exist” in Southern Lebanon.



The viewing had a chilling effect on all of those present in the conference room, an audience composed in large part of government representatives, as those watching realized that John was filming on Lebanese ground contaminated by submunitions that had failed to function correctly. Filming as he went, John literally walked among the hazardous M-85 duds to show how small and difficult to see they are – you can hear the nervousness in his voice.

Looking for unexploded submunitions like this is not to be generally recommended (John has a great deal of experience in these situations, and was under the supervision of explosive ordnance disposal professionals). But it underlines why the input of civil society perspectives, and especially views from the field, are so important to keeping multilateral decision making real. A short video cut through acres of the usual conference room baloney of diplomats and politicians who have in many cases never even seen an unexploded submunition with their own eyes. It helped to give those present some clarity of purpose, which other multilateral meetings closed to the real world sometimes can lack.

Reactions to the clip since it’s been posted on Youtube have been curious. A few viewers, of course, are unable to see beyond their tired prejudices, descending into infantile, aggressive and frequently misspelled ranting, and even claiming the video was faked. No mindset adjustment for them then.

Others watching it were clearly unsettled. Judging from their comments the clip has challenged them, not least about cluster munitions but also possibly to think more deeply about what are legitimate means and methods of war. That’s an important question for every thinking person in the current age.

Watch the video. What do you think?


John Borrie


References

The Norwegian Foreign Ministry has an English language web page with the Oslo Declaration, statements and other resources about addressing the humanitarian impacts of civilians (click here to access this web page).

Video clip by independent photographer John Rodsted of “cluster bomb duds that shouldn’t exist” in Southern Lebanon, available on Youtube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_jsyObTG8k.