Banning cluster munitions: John Borrie outlines New Zealand's role in efforts to prevent the use of a weapon that presents extreme and long-lasting hazards to civilians.

• Author: Borrie, John

This November, representatives of governments from around the globe will meet in Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, in South-east Asia, for a milestone event in international work against inhumane weapons. International organisations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, will also participate, along with hundreds of civil society campaigners. The Vientiane conference is the first meeting of states parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), (1) a new treaty negotiated in May 2008. The CCM not only defines and bans these weapons but also contains obligations for member governments to clear unexploded cluster munition remnants on their territories, destroy their stockpiles of the weapon, help victims and cooperate in order to do so. In Vientiane, implementing these obligations begins in earnest.

It is fitting that the first meeting of the CCM should be held in Laos. During the war it fought in South-east Asia, the United States secretly bombed the country between 1964 and 1973 to try to weaken the Pathet Laos forces fighting its royalist government, and to interdict communist troops and supplies traversing the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North to South Vietnam via south-eastern Laos. As a result, Laos is the most heavily bombed nation in the world per capita: according to one estimate, more than 500,000 US bombing missions dropped in excess of two million tons of explosive ordnance between 1964 and 1973. Among these were more than 260 million cluster sub-munitions, which Laotians call 'bombies'. (2)

These are staggering quantities of lethal ordnance, and the American bombing campaign had terrible effects on civilians in Laos at the time. Today, the civilian population of Laos is still living with the consequences of that bombing. The United Nations and the Laotian government believe at least 78 million of those bombies failed to function as intended, and remain unexploded in at least ten of the country's seventeen provinces. (3) Earlier this decade, they estimated that more than 22,000 Laotian people have been casualties of bombies and other unexploded ordnance since the war--11,500 injured and the remainder killed. (4) Yet, with a median age of less than 20, the great majority of Laos citizenry were not even alive to remember the South-east Asian conflict. A poor, largely rural nation in which medical care is limited, and surgical and rehabilitation resources are scarce, is saddled with the humanitarian and developmental costs of carpet bombing by cluster munitions more than a generation ago.

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International campaign

Although the most severely affected, Laos would be by no means the last conflict in which cluster munitions would constitute a serious and persistent threat to civilians. (5) Eventually, an international campaign would emerge to outlaw cluster munitions. In some ways, this 'Oslo process' was akin to the partnership between governments and civil society in the 1990s sometimes called the 'Ottawa process', which achieved the landmark 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. New Zealand's government and individual New Zealanders working in various roles overseas would play significant parts in the 'Oslo process' and achievement of the cluster munition ban treaty.

I was one participant in the Oslo process and earlier work on cluster munitions this decade, and recently wrote a negotiating history of the CCM entitled Unacceptable Harm. (6) Below, I draw on that study to explain what cluster munitions are and why they are of humanitarian concern, and offer a brief sketch of the cluster munition campaign itself. Finally, I suggest what the Oslo process may mean.

What are cluster munitions, and why are they of concern? A cluster munition can be described as a container or dispenser from which explosive sub-munitions (sometimes called bomblets or bombies) are scattered. These sub-munitions are generally the dangerous parts of a cluster munition because they are designed to explode on impact. They are delivered in cluster munitions dropped from aircraft or dispersed from fixed dispensers. Increasingly in recent decades cluster munitions have been surface-launched: besides artillery shells containing sub-munitions, systems are also used that deploy sub-munitions from rockets or mortar shells. Sub-munitions are small. American and Israeli examples I saw in southern Lebanon, for instance, have bodies not much larger than a D-cell battery, from which a small detonator and a stabilising streamer or ribbon extend. These devices look as innocuous as miniature aerosol spraycans, yet have a lethal radius of up to dozens of metres against unprotected people, and can even puncture the armoured hull of a tank.

Three concerns

Broadly speaking, there are three concerns about cluster munitions. First, there are problems at time of use as cluster munitions are intended to saturate an area with explosive submunitions, which cannot be individually targeted at military objectives. This raises issues under the rule of distinction between combatants and civilians, which is fundamental in international humanitarian law. (Under these 'laws of war', civilians should be protected.) Second, because of cluster munitions' area effect, it follows that failed sub-munitions may disperse over a significant area, remaining in streets, ditches, bombed buildings, vegetation and on (or in the soil of) agricultural lands. And, sometimes, cluster munitions can fail to dispense their cargo of sub-munitions, which poses a different kind of hazard.

Because massive numbers of these inaccurate and unreliable sub-munitions can be dispersed from cluster munition containers in a very short time, it is easy to see why...