Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won.

• Author: Harding, Bruce
• Position: Book review

Unacceptable Harm: A History of How the Treaty to Ban Cluster Munitions Was Won

Author: John Borrie

Published by: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, New York and Geneva, 2009, 488pp, US$65.

This is an extraordinary book: a kind of diplomatic expose and thriller as well as a vitally important and richly detailed reference work which lifts the veil on the extremely delicate and intricate multilateral negotiations between governments and a plethora of non-governmental organisations on this humanitarian calamity. It shows just how important this country's role was in securing the 2008 Dublin treaty banning cluster munitions, especially due to the support of MFAT, the then New Zealand Disarmament Minister, Phil Goff, and our disarmament ambassador to Switzerland, the dextrous Don MacKay, who chaired the Wellington Conference that set the parameters for the Dublin end-game.

The author of this volume, John Borrie, is an emigre New Zealander who worked at MFAT from 1999 to 2002 before joining the Mines-Arms Unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). He subsequently joined the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) at the Palais de Nations (the United Nations' European HQ) in Geneva, to lead projects on 'The Road from Oslo' and 'Disarmament as Humanitarian Action'. In 2006 he co-founded the Disarmament Insight Initiative (www.disarmamentinsight.blogspot.com). The key reason why this book is so valuable is that Borrie was fortunate to have observed and participated in the process at close range from his position at the UNIDIR.

Cluster munitions saturate areas with explosive force and are considered more 'mission critical' than landmines by the United States. In the 1970s several conferences were held to strengthen the Geneva Conventions, and out of these emerged, in 1980, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW; also known as the 'Inhuman Weapons Convention'), which had weak rules. Years later, the Ottawa Process spawned the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, and the South Lebanon conflict of mid-2006 drew attention to the appalling nature of cluster munitions. These weapons pose such horrific danger to civilians because they are prone to indiscriminate effects at the time of use and because they create a long-term hazardous residue of lethal, unexploded sub-munitions (which are released in a cluster but may not actually explode until well after their original impact while being...