Unacceptable Harm: Geneva launch

On Friday UNIDIR launched a new book I wrote entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won at the Palais des Nations, the home of the United Nations in Geneva.

Chaired by the Norwegian Permanent Mission in Geneva, the lunchtime event featured four speakers: Dr. Gro Nystuen (Chair of the Council on Ethics for the Norwegian Government Pension Fund – Global), Richard Moyes (policy and research director at Landmine Action and co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC)), the CMC’s Coordinator Thomas Nash, and myself. Turn-out was very good, with a full room and some interesting discussion following the presentations.

The chair of the meeting, Norwegian diplomat Hilde Skorpen, recalled the origins of the project. It grew out of a proposal I made in 2007 to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For several years, we at UNIDIR had carried out research analysing a range of negotiating processes as part of a project on Disarmament as Humanitarian Action : Making Multilateral Negotiations Work, and in the course of that work we found a lacuna in the policy and academic literature on the landmine negotiations : while some good stuff had been written about the Ottawa process, no narrative historical framework existed to tell the story of the achievement of the Mine Ban Treaty as a coherent whole – from its origins to its agreement – for a wide audience.

Memories fade quickly, and hindsight can obscure what we can learn from success and failure in multilateral negotiations. Myths can arise and take hold. This isn’t necessarily helpful when it comes to try to distill lessons learned with a view to improving the performance of multilateral negotiators. So my proposal on UNIDIR’s behalf was a simple one : shouldn’t someone try to capture what would happen on cluster munitions ; that is, if we really are to learn and so improve our performance as negotiators?

This idea must have seemed a little risky. At that stage nobody knew how the emerging Oslo process or in the CCW would turn out! To their credit the Norwegians decided to fund the project. (And then, like a good funder of such research should, they stood back to let us get on with it.)

The rest, as they say, is history. A history though that would be a larger and more complicated task than we originally envisaged in researching and writing ‘Unacceptable Harm’…

But now the book is 'out there'. Thanks to all of the speakers and those who came out for the launch on a cold, bright Geneva day. With Unacceptable Harm no longer under embargo, those readers who are on UNIDIR’s publication circulation list or those (like a considerable number of CMC campaigners) who have placed orders for the book should receive their copies through the mail before too long. In due course the book should also become available in the UN's bookshops in Geneva and New York, and eventually on Amazon.

There will be further events associated with the launch of the book in the New Year. We’re anticipating something in Oslo on 12 January and perhaps elsewhere. Read this blog for further updates.

John Borrie

Photo courtesy of Tamar Gabelnick, International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

More Unacceptable Harm

The second review conference of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention commenced yesterday in Cartagena, Colombia, which is obviously this week’s big news on the multilateral conventional weapons front. Good luck to all of the folks over there and congratulations to a regime that despite its ongoing implementation challenges has retained its vitality after a decade and made a positive difference to people’s lives on the ground in many mine-affected countries. Even the United States – which, to date has resisted joining the regime – recognizes this: it’s attending the summit as an observer. (It would be even better if the US would choose to come in from the cold and join the treaty, which already has 156 state parties.)

We have a bit of a news of our own: the history I’ve been working on for the last two years of international efforts to deal with the humanitarian impacts of another problematic weapon, cluster munitions, is now printed.

The book is entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won. The cover image (see above) is of a French F.1 ‘Ogre’ submunition, with the gracious permission of the French artist and photographer Raphael Dallaporta. There are also colour plates in the middle of the book, with some great images by the Norwegian photographer Werner Anderson and others. The book also has a foreword written by Dr. Eric Prokosch, one of the pioneer researchers on cluster munitions, and author of the classic book The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Anti-Personnel Weapons (1995).

Unacceptable Harm explains how the Convention on Cluster Munitions was achieved through the ‘Oslo process’, a partnership of governments, international organizations and civil society not unlike the one that resulted in the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in 1997. The book examines why it took the world so long to act on cluster munitions, why it eventually did, and what lessons banning cluster munitions might hold for future efforts on a pressing challenge of our time: protecting civilians from the effects of explosive weapons. (For further info on explosive weapons, see also Landmine Action's recent report).

The book will initially be launched in Geneva on 11 December, to be followed by events in Oslo and elsewhere in early 2010. Stay tuned to the blog for further updates.

John Borrie

Disarmament Insight: Just popped out ...

In March 2007, along with Patrick Mc Carthy from the Geneva Forum, I started the Disarmament Insight blog to help communicate the findings of UNIDIR's project on Disarmament as Humanitarian Action: Making Multilateral Negotiations work (DHA). At that time, I think none of us involved envisaged that more than two-and-a-half years later the blog would still be running, or that it would have covered the myriad of subjects it has - from the Conference on Disarmament to the cognitive constraints on negotiators, from export controls to explosive violence, nuclear disarmament to negotiation theory - in hundreds of posts from dozens of contributors. During that time we've witnessed an almost-complete turn-over of core contributors, with Patrick having shifted to UNDP and Maya Brehm on board at UNIDIR.

Along the way, the blog became one respected source of news and analysis on international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions, in particular. This emphasis on cluster munitions was only fitting: the UN's Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons talks and the eventual Oslo process that emerged in parallel underlined many of the points we were trying to make in the DHA project's work. The achievement of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in May 2008 was hugely gratifying, and obviously we believe lends weight to some DHA findings.

Another reason was that as a follow-on from the DHA project's work we undertook a new project to tell the story of these efforts on cluster munitions. This project officially commenced in March 2008. A detailed analytical history, entitled Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won, which I wrote, was intended to be the main product. This book is now completed, and earlier this week it went to the UN print shop for production. We hope that the book will be available for launch and distribution in December. (During the pretty intense editing and production period in September and October, regular readers may have noticed we weren't posting on the blog, for which I offer our apologies.)

Apart from launch events associated with Unacceptable Harm in December and January, the cluster munition project is now finished. Both Maya and I are taking a break while we wait for word on future funding for an exciting new project. It means that this will be the last Disarmament Insight post for a while.

But keep checking the blog come December, and retain it on your list of RSS feeds as we anticipate news to come of various kinds including more information about Unacceptable Harm when it's out in print.

John Borrie

Protecting civilians from explosive violence: time for states to raise their voices

Last week the United Nations Secretary-General submitted his annual report to the Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. The language of the report represents something of a break-though of a sort that's pleasing to see from the editorial perspective of this blog. Hopefully now states will also begin to make their voices heard in supporting the Protection of Civilians report's content both in the Security Council chamber and in elsewhere.

The Secretary-General's report observed that the "choice of weapons is critical in minimizing and reducing the impacts of hostilities on civilians". While this might sound obvious, it's worth noting that heavy weapons such as artillery and rockets were nevertheless used in populated areas in conflicts in recent months such as Gaza and in Sri Lanka, something the report also commented on in its paragraph 36:

"As demonstrated by this year’s hostilities in Sri Lanka and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the use in densely populated environments of explosive weapons that have so-called “area effect” inevitably has an indiscriminate and severe humanitarian impact. First, in terms of the risk to civilians caught in the blast radius or killed or injured by damaged and collapsed buildings. Secondly, in terms of damage to infrastructure vital to the wellbeing of the civilian population, such as water and sanitation systems."

These are certainly issues that individually some Security Council members are taking very seriously. Only today, for instance, the New York Times reported that the new American military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes there in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths he had concluded were undermining the American-led mission. In today's warfare, in which the lines between military objectives and civilian concentrations are usually blurred, those on the cutting edge of military thought are increasingly aware that the use of explosive violence in such areas can be counter-productive, as well as morally and legally unacceptable.

The Secretary-General further noted in last week's report that the Security Council "has a critical role in promoting systematic compliance with the law" including condemning violations "without exceptions", threatening and if necessary applying targeted measures against the leadership of parties violating their obligations to "respect" civilians and keeping track of violations and mandating commissions of inquiry "where concerns exist regarding serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law".

The British NGO Landmine Action issued a media release responding to the Secretary General's report, which

"welcomes the clear expression of concern from the UN Secretary-General regarding the humanitarian problems caused by explosive weapons. Landmine Action urges States, international organisations and civil society to further document the civilian harm caused by explosive weapons, work to prevent the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and support all efforts to minimise the post-conflict harm that explosive weapons cause."

One of the key points underlined by multilateral processes representing 'disarmament as humanitarian action' such as the Ottawa process to prohibit anti-personnel mines and the Oslo process resulting in the Convention on Cluster Munitions is that the collection and analysis of empirical evidence is crucial in changing policy makers' minds and re-framing issues in ways that make them more tractable. Nevertheless, weapons-specific processes like these require a huge amount of effort that is difficult to sustain throughout treaty implementation, let alone repeat for other weapons.

And, a risk of weapon-specific multilateral processes in general is that governments opposed to stigmatising the use of explosive violence in populated areas will succeed in breaking up and subdividing issues around use of explosive weapons (as Richard Moyes at Landmine Action has pointed out) that muddy the waters, or denude relevant multilateral processes of real value.

There is a need for the international community to begin looking beyond just the weapon specific to highlight explosive weapons as a broad category of concern at time of use and post-conflict. This is something a few of us have already begun trying to do (Landmine Action's media release mentioned, for instance, Disarmament Insight's work at facilitating such discussion).

In light of the Protection of Civilians report, the Security Council could be one place for states and international organisations to take the new discourse forward. But it also needs to be a broader debate. The international community should do more to ensure civilians are protected, and that will necessarily entail some fresh thinking.

John Borrie

Image downloaded from Wikipedia: "A Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon is prepared for testing at the Eglin Air Force Armament Center on March 11, 2003. The MOAB is a precision-guided munition weighing 21,500 pounds and will be dropped from a C-130 Hercules aircraft for the test. It will be the largest non-nuclear conventional weapon in existence."

When is it acceptable to harm civilians?

My colleague John Borrie is in Belgrade this week participating in a meeting of States against whom cluster munitions have been used (he previewed the meeting in his last posting and will report back to this blog at the end of the week on how things went). The Belgrade meeting forms part of the so-called Olso Process on cluster munitions, which aims, by the end of 2008, to produce a new treaty banning cluster munitions that cause "unacceptable harm" to civilians.

As I suggested in a previous posting entitled, "Facing the facts on cluster munitions," the crux of the Oslo Process negotiations will be defining what "unacceptable harm to civilians" actually means. The fault-lines of this debate are already being drawn.

NGOs in the Cluster Munition Coalition claim that all cluster munitions cause unacceptable harm to civilians due to a combination of their wide-area affects at the time of use and to the fact that they leave behind unexploded duds that continue to kill civilians - a high proportion of them children - for years afterwards. The burden of proving that some cluster munitions do not cause unacceptable harm, argue the NGOs, falls on the governments who wish to continue using such weapons.

As the guardian of International Humanitarian Law - otherwise known as the Law of War - the International Committee of the Red Cross argues that what leads some cluster munitions to cause unacceptable harm to civilians is their inaccuracy and their unreliability. The ICRC suggests that technical solutions could be found to these problems, such as sensor fuzing, for example, or reducing the failure rates of sub-munitions. Harm to civilians could also be reduced by not using cluster munitions in, or even close to, civilian areas. At the core of these arguments is the international humanitarian law rule of proportionality, which balances military advantage against civilian casualties.

As for the States participating in the Oslo Process - now over 80 of them - most have still to declare their hand on this question and are most likely planning not to do so until the hard negotiating begins next year.

That is why the Belgrade meeting is so important. In Belgrade, over 20 States that have had cluster munitions used against them will share their experiences of living with the legacy of the attacks and of the explosive remnants left behind. This will be an important reality check for the Oslo Process; one that should persuade participating States to make up their minds sooner rather than later on the "acceptability" of the civilian harm caused by cluster munitions.

In the words of Branislav Kapetanovic, a Serbian clearance expert who lost both legs and arms in an accident while at work in 2000, "We know what it means to live through cluster bomb attacks and the consequences of unexploded submunitions, we know the painstaking and dangerous work it takes to clear them, and we know the challenges of assisting those who survive an accident caused by cluster bombs."

One may hope that, by the end of this week, this knowledge will be more widespread than it was before.


Patrick Mc Carthy


References

Cluster Munition Coalition press release on the Belgrade Conference of States Affected by Cluster Munitions, "Contaminated Countries Embrace Ban on Cluster Munitions" (2 October 2007).

Photo Credit: truelovecj on flickr