All eyes on Dublin to put cluster munitions beyond the Pale

I found it a bit hard to concentrate in the office today, knowing that a two-week diplomatic conference with the aim of banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians was kicking off in Dublin.

The conference is the culmination of the Oslo Process on cluster munitions that began relatively small with a conference in Oslo in February 2007 and has since grown in size and momentum through further global meetings in Lima, Vienna and Wellington to reach where it is today. More than 100 governments have sent plenipotentiaries to Dublin and the scene is now set for tough negotiations on what has the potential to be the most significant disarmament treaty in a decade.

For those of us who can't be in Dublin, there are fortunately many good ways of keeping up to date with what is going on there. One, of course, is this blog. My colleague John Borrie is participating in the conference in Dublin and will be posting updates and analysis here during this week. I will be joining him next week when we hope to be able to post more or less every day. This blog also contains a wealth of background on the issue of cluster munitions (we have been posting on this topic for more than a year now). Do a keyword search for "cluster munition" or "cluster bomb" to find out more.

There are also a number of other excellent sources of up-to-date information, such as:

-- The Ban Advocates blog: The NGO Handicap International has been working with survivors of cluster bomblet explosions from all over the world and helping them to become effective advocates for a comprehensive ban on these weapons. One of these advocates, Mr. Branislav Kapetanovic, who lost both legs and both hands to a cluster bomblet, spoke at today's conference opening ceremony. The Ban Advocates blog follows these remarkable people as they lobby governments for the strongest possible ban in Dublin.

-- The Aotearoa New Zealand Cluster Munition Coalition blog: Mary Wareham of Oxfam New Zealand, who is at the conference, is posting regularly on goings on in Dublin, particularly on civil society activities. New Zealand's capital, Wellington, was the venue for the most recent conference of the Oslo Process in February.

-- RTE News: The Irish broadcast agency, RTE, is one of the few to offer free streaming video news on the web. It should be covering the conference during the course of the next two weeks and has already posted almost 8 minutes of video footage of the opening day on its Six One news programme. Also check out the Nine News programme for shorter video updates.

-- The Cluster Munition Coalition of NGOs has a brand new website which contains regularly-updated "cluster ban news," as well as the CMC video press-release for the Dublin conference. A nice touch is the countdown, in seconds, to the deadline for a new Cluster Munitions Convention - noon on Friday, May 30.

This, it seems, is as strict as deadlines come since all delegates will have to vacate the conference centre at that time to make way for hoards of fans of Celine Dion, who plays a concert that night at the same venue, Croke Park, a sports stadium that also doubles as Ireland's largest conference centre.

916,385 seconds to go; and it won't be over 'til the thin lady sings.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: Photo by Mary Wareham retreived from Flickr.

What do survivors think of cluster munitions?

Did you ever wonder what a cluster munition survivor thinks of cluster munitions? We found out a few weeks ago during training in Belgrade, Serbia, for individuals from communities affected by cluster munitions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Serbia and Tajikistan. Their answers were stunning, and touched on devastation, the death of parents and relatives, babies torn apart, terror, trauma, blindness, horror and poverty. There was also guilt and uncertainty - why am I the only survivor of the family? Why did ‘they’ kill my little brother, my mother, even our sheep? What should I do now? And, what do I have to live for, since cluster munitions have killed my family and neighbours?

Over two days, my colleagues Patrizia, Jelena, Firoz, Loren and I heard these moving stories from a small group of rather amazing people. We expected something strong to come out of the meeting but were not prepared for something as strong as that.

The main goal of this pilot project is to enable individuals from affected communities to take part and influence the Oslo process to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions in a way that responds to affected communities’ needs. The project is born out of research on the human impact of cluster munitions that my organization, Handicap International, and our research partners conducted over the past two years (see Fatal Footprint and Circle of Impact, our two reports on the global human impact of cluster munitions). Beyond research into the impacts on the ground, we felt that there was a need to involve in the diplomatic process those people for which the Oslo process has been developed, in partnership with other NGO’s active in survivor and cluster munitions issues. In fact, you could see this project as a global community liaison project, establishing a two-way communication between affected communities and the diplomatic community.

After a few days of training the participants - Snezana, Sladjan and his wife Dusica, Umarbek, Dejan, Danijel, Milosav, Rasha, Ali and Jonuz - had become Ban Advocates, meaning that we’ll work together over the course of the coming year to explain to diplomats, military and the media why the Oslo process on cluster munitions is so necessary and how it should address affected communities’ needs. More than us, they know what a cluster munition is and why it should be banned. They know what the ‘victims’ needs are. And beyond the theoretical discussions that often take place in multilateral talks, they know what is needed in their communities and can inject a much-needed sense of reality. And they have already begun to do this, for instance at an international conference of cluster munition-affected states in Serbia earlier this month.

If you come to Vienna, Wellington or Dublin for the next international meetings of the Oslo process, you’re likely to meet these Ban Advocates. Please, listen to them. If you do, what they shall tell you is likely to radically modify your understanding of what a cluster munition is and what its effects are.

The Ban Advocates initiative will be launched officially just before the Vienna Conference on Cluster Munitions in December this year.


Stan Brabant

This is a guest blog by Stan Brabant. Stan is Head of Policy at Handicap International, Belgium, and coordinates the ‘Ban Advocates initiative’.


Reference

Photo of the Ban Advocates in Belgrade courtesy of Stan Brabant (front row left).

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

Drawing a circle around cluster munitions

Last Friday, in our last Disarmament Insight post, Patrick Mc Carthy noted the launch of a report by the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Handicap International (HI) entitled “Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities”. It follows Handicap International’s preliminary report about the socio-economic effects of cluster munitions, “Fatal Footprint: The Global Human Impact of Cluster Munitions,” released in early November 2006.

To briefly recap, “Fatal Footprint” identified 11,044 casualties (3,830 killed, 5,581 injured) directly related to cluster munition use in 23 countries and territories. 98% of these casualties were reportedly civilians. With 91% of such casualties occurring in countries with incomplete or zero data collection, it’s also highly likely that many casualties go unrecorded, HI noted.

Authorities in only three of the 23 countries and territories in HI’s report collected data on casualties while in conflict. Moreover, many victims in high-use areas like Afghanistan and Cambodia go unreported altogether, and many others caused by unexploded submunitions aren’t differentiated from those caused by other explosive remnants of war. A lack of information about specific casualties caused by cluster munitions during or after strikes – like who was involved and what they were doing – is an issue for any comprehensive effort at casualty data collection. HI estimated that only about 10% of casualty information was available in its November 2006 report.

In its more comprehensive “Circle of Impact” report released last week, HI “calls for a ban on cluster munitions and for assistance to civilians”. The total number of casualties it quoted as caused by cluster munitions rose to 13,306 (5,475 killed, 7,246 injured) in 25 countries and territories. The overall focus of the new report is on the civilian victims and the broader socio-economic challenges presented by cluster munition use during, and long after, conflict. Some country-specific recommendations of ways forward were offered, along with extensive data analysis.

HI’s reports are cautious steps toward building a clear picture of what the effects of cluster munitions really are. It builds on useful work already done by other actors like the International Committee of the Red Cross, Landmine Action UK, Human Rights Watch and, indeed, UNIDIR. But as HI would be the first to admit, this picture is still very incomplete.

HI’s press-pack distributed to journalists in Geneva last week to accompany its “Circle of Impact” report noted its launch “just one week before states gather in Lima, Peru (23-25 May), to discuss a draft text of a treaty to ban cluster munitions and create a framework for cooperation and assistance to survivors and communities affected by this weapon by 2008”.

In public, HI and other NGOs are highly optimistic about the progress the Lima meeting will make in negotiating a treaty text to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions. This needs to be taken with a grain of salt: while Peru, as chair of that meeting, has distributed a discussion paper containing a sample text of what a future instrument might look like, it seems unlikely that governments will have time to briefly discuss more than the broad themes of an agreement in just three days. More likely, negotiators won’t get down to textual brass tacks until later this year, either in Oslo in early December as the next chapter in the unfolding story of the “Oslo Process”, or (much less likely) in the context of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Whatever the caveats necessary on “Circle of Impact” because of the limits of data gathering, the report’s real significance is in its timing. Emerging only days before the Lima meeting, HI’s work reinforces the message about the seriousness of the hazard created by cluster munitions – something that humanitarian practitioners have been trying to get through to the international community for a while.

The “Circle of Impact” press release also notes that already such concerns have “resulted in at least 55 countries… taking initiatives towards a prohibition on cluster munitions.” This strikes me as premature. A lot is going to hinge on negotiators eventually defining what a cluster munition that causes “unacceptable harm” to civilians is in the terminology of the February 2006 Oslo Declaration (see previous posts). That’s ultimately a political question, despite legal and technical dimensions, and will need considerable skill to settle. Meanwhile, as the Lima meeting begins, some states participating recognise humanitarian concerns about cluster munitions and are willing to respond, but nevertheless view them as useful elements of their military arsenals. They don’t seem willing to give up cluster munitions with explosive submunitions entirely, at least not yet.

Watch this space for updates about work in Lima.


Ashley Thornton


References

The final report, Circle of Impact: The Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities, and the HI Press Release are available here.

Photo of a B-1B Lancer unleashing cluster munitions (retrieved from Wikipedia).