CCM: Positive developments

Earlier this week, the Lao People's Democratic Republic ratified the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) at a special event in New York at United Nations Headquarters.

Lao PDR’s accession to the CCM is significant not least because this South East Asian nation is the most heavily affected country in the world from unexploded submunitions due to a secret American bombing campaign in the 1960s and 1970s that pulverised entire areas of the country such as the Plain of Jars. A generation on, and Lao PDR’s people – the majority of them not even born during the bombing period – are saddled with a deadly legacy of unexploded ‘bombies’ (submunitions) in their fields, rivers and woods that threaten livelihoods and their very lives.

The figures are staggering. Lao PDR’s National Unexploded Ordnance Programme believes that, even under ideal firing conditions, at least 30 percent of the more than 260 million submunitions dropped on the country during the Indochina War would have failed to function as intended, leaving an estimated 78 million bombies to pose hazard to people going about their daily lives. Fifteen of Lao’s seventeen provinces were left affected by cluster munitions and other unexploded ordnance, and today ten provinces are still severely infested – with an estimated 300 people injured or killed per year.

As such, Lao PDR is always going to be a special case for the new treaty. It is generally (if tacitly) recognised by others involved in the Oslo process that – even with the international assistance promised by other members of the CCM – Lao PDR is unlikely to achieve the treaty’s ten-year deadline for clearance and will eventually require an extension (as has just occurred in the Mine Ban Treaty context, for example, for certain countries that have not completed anti-personnel mine clearance activities for various reasons). But, hopefully, membership of the CCM will be a means to continually draw attention to and resources for post-conflict activities to reduce the hazards of unexploded submunitions and other ordnance on Laotian civilians.

At the same ceremony, the Democratic Republic of the Congo – another cluster munition-affected country – signed the CCM, which makes it the 96th to do so. And Iraq made a statement indicating its intent to join the CCM once domestic steps have been completed. Also, a week earlier, on 11 March, the Mexican Senate approved that country’s ratification of the CCM.

Although a country can provisionally apply the CCM at any time, to enter into force internationally the CCM needs to be ratified by 30 states. Less than five months after the CCM’s signing ceremony in Oslo last December, the treaty can already count on 6, and more will surely follow as 35 other states have publicly committed to ratify as soon as possible. As Iraq’s statement indicated, the number of signatories, which presently stands at 96, is also certain to increase soon.

So far many of the world’s largest producers and users of cluster munitions remain outside of the treaty. But there were encouraging developments last week in the US. On 11 March, President Obama signed the Omnibus Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2009, already passed by Congress. It enacts a ban on American exports of most cluster munitions, and has been described as a “qualified ban”.

Meanwhile, many members of both chambers of Congress have apparently cosponsored legislation to enact a ban on most cluster bombs – galvanised by Senators Patrick Leahy and Dianne Feinstein. And President Obama’s transition team are apparently studying the issue of whether the US should go the whole hog and join the CCM.

We’ll seek to provide more analysis in coming weeks.

John Borrie

Photo credit: Mary Wareham. Ambassador Kanika Phommachanh, Permanent Representative of the Lao PDR to the UN in New York, depositing her government's ratification of the Convention on Cluster Munitions with the UN's Office of Legal Affairs represented by Treaty Section Chief Annebeth Rosenboom. Laos became the fifth state to ratify - a total of 30 are required for the treaty to enter into force.

Lao reference: Lao PDR National Regulatory Authority, Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme and UNDP, Hazardous Ground: Cluster Munitions and UXO in the Lao PDR (2008).

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."