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.

Addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions

Last week I went to the Eden Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, to attend a Meeting of Experts organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to evaluate military, technical, legal and humanitarian aspects of the use of cluster munitions.


What is a cluster munition, and what’s the problem? While there’s no universally accepted definition, it’s generally accepted that a cluster munition is a container or dispenser from which explosive submunitions (also called bomblets) are scattered. These submunitions are the dangerous parts of a cluster munition because they explode on impact or after time-delay and cause damage through blast and fragmentation – cumulatively over a wide area.

International concern about the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions has grown, especially following their use in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Kosovo and, most recently, in the Lebanon conflict in summer 2006, both in terms of how responsibly these weapons are targeted (experience has shown they're prone to indiscriminate use) and the hazards cluster submunitions pose as unexploded ordnance.

All unexploded ordnance is hazardous, but a growing body of research shows explosive submunitions are particularly nasty for civilians in the conflicts in which they’ve been used. They're usually small (often the size of a D-cell battery), unlike anti-personnel mines they're designed to kill rather than maim, and are often of an appearance that's attractive to children to pick up and play with. And they're used in very large numbers: an estimated 4 million submunitions in last summer's Lebanon conflict, for instance, of which up to 1 million may have failed to function as intended and so have posed continuing risk to people.

Unless something is done about explosive submunitions, this use - and their deadly hazard to civilians - will likely grow, especially as they continue to proliferate. But as might be expected, views among the 90 invited participants from governments (both user and affected states), international organizations and key non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participating in the 3-day meeting varied about what to do.

I don’t want to comment on these in detail here because views expressed weren’t directly attributable, and the ICRC will release a summary report of discussions in a few weeks anyway. Suffice to say, some countries would prefer to keep work in the traditional forum for this kind of thing, the rather technical UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) process, or at least to give it one more chance when it meets later this year, rather than through a free-standing humanitarian negotiation.

Nevertheless, something in every participant’s mind was that in February 2007 more than 45 countries announced the Oslo Declaration, which commits them to negotiate a new international treaty before the end of 2008 to address cluster munitions causing unacceptable harm to civilians.

One point confirmed for me at Montreux was that technical solutions of the kind to which the CCW is accustomed for weapons aren’t going to be enough in dealing with all aspects of the hazards for civilians that cluster munitions pose. It’s also likely to require restriction or prohibition of at least some kinds of explosive submunitions.

Some in the CCW, which follows consensus practice, are loath to agree to develop such measures. Certain big military powers like the United States, Russia and China currently oppose even the idea of new humanitarian law on cluster munitions, even while they admit the weapon causes humanitarian problems. It makes a robust treaty outcome in the CCW hard to envisage.

States opposed to an Oslo treaty process claim, in effect, that any work outside the CCW risks burning it to the ground. But I don’t buy it. The CCW has real value in ensuring risks for civilians in conflict are minimized through its other protocols, whether or not new rules on cluster munitions are negotiated there.

And, historically, the CCW was actually most productive in the few years after agreement of the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (negotiated outside it), when CCW members settled their differences in order to ensure it remained contemporary and credible. An outside treaty, addressing the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions in a way the CCW can’t, could actually be a very good thing in again compelling it to re-invigorate itself.

The mantra among diplomats is that the Oslo process and the CCW are complementary and mutually reinforcing. It's true, and they should remind themselves of this as the road leads toward Lima in Peru, where Oslo process countries will next meet in late May, and then on to Vienna in December.


John Borrie


References

The ICRC expects to have its summary report of the Montreux meeting available in early June. It can be downloaded from the ICRC website (www.icrc.org).

For an introduction to the issues, see John Borrie & Rosy Cave, “The humanitarian effects of cluster munitions: why should we worry?” in Disarmament Forum (four, 2006), p. 5-14 at http://www.unidir.ch/html/en/disarmament_forum.php.

Photo courtesy of R. Coupland.

Trying to account for mass participation in the Rwandan genocide

In a period of about 100 days, from 6 April to mid-July 1994, experts have estimated that civilian militias and members of the national army dominated by the Hutu ethnic group killed some 500’000 to 800’000 Tutsi (another group) and moderate Hutu in the African country of Rwanda. While these figures are striking indicators of the most rapidly occurring genocide of the 20th century, also deeply disturbing was the high level of participation in the killing, estimated at between 200’000 and 500’000 people.

While the Rwandan genocide will forever remain morally unfathomable, how can we begin to account for such a large-scale level of participation in the killing, in the hope that unambiguous danger signs might be identified to prevent it happening again?

In a book published in 2006 (see reference below), Ravi Bhavnani posed the question: did killing Tutsi become the norm in the Hutu ethnic group? Bhavnani argued that the level of participation in the Rwandan genocide can be explained by the “emergence of a violence-promoting norm among the Hutu community”.

In his chapter, Bhavnani noted that studies pointing to explanations such as structural factors or to Rwanda’s culture – described as one “of fear” or “of deep conformity” – fail to explain the emergence of such large-scale violent behaviour. Likewise, the significance of the death of Rwandan President Habyarimana in a plane crash near Kigali airport on 6 April as the major catalyst for the genocide is problematic.

Starting from the idea that norms are emergent properties of social systems, Bhavnani used complexity theory and simulation by agent-based modeling (ABM) to try to develop an explanation for the emergence of a violence-promoting norm among Hutu people.

The existence of a norm depends upon complex patterns of interactions between the individuals forming a society. At the time of the genocide, Rwanda, Bhavnani argued, was a “densely populated, heterogeneous society” with frequent connections and intermarriage between the two major ethnic groups – Hutu and Tutsi – leading to a complex pattern of interactions. Bhavnani added:

“When a population mixes randomly, extremists eventually have the opportunity to interact with moderates, and observe and punish their behaviour.”

In other words, in Rwanda it was about killing or being killed.

By focusing on microlevel dynamics, Bhavnani hoped this ABM could show how local interactions could bring about massive Hutu participation in the killing. Of course, however intriguing, Bhavani’s work on its own is unlikely to settle the debate over what really caused the genocide. But it serves to underline the worth of studying collective violence by using bottom-up approaches and of appreciating the complex nature of many human social interactions or, as Bhavnani put it, that:

“The causes of conflict constitute partial explanations at best, and are inextricably linked to the process by which conflict unfolds.”

Aurélia Merçay


Reference

See chapter 6: Agent-Based Models in the Study of Ethnic Norms and violence, by R. Bhavnani in Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm, N.E. Harrison & J.N. Rosenau, 2006, SUNY series in Global Politic, State University of New York Press.