I don’t know if any of you follow the recent deaths roundup over at Iraq body count, but I noticed that this last Saturday two children were killed in Iraq, in Karbala, by an unexploded cluster bomblet left over from the illegal 2003 invasion.
It didn’t, of course, make any ripple at all in any U.S. news sources. Here’s the story from Voices in Iraq
So for the uninformed, cluster weapons are bombs which are delivered by airplanes or artillery which have from several to thousands of smaller bomblets inside. The larger bomb opens at a certain height dispersing the smaller bomblets over a wide area. When the bomblets hit the ground, they are supposed to explode. Each bomblet contains dozens to hundreds of smaller bits–shrapnel, inside, and when the bombet explodes, these tiny projectiles speed outward as fast as bullets. You can imagine the devastation this causes to living flesh.
The problem with these weapons is that as many as 30-40% of the bomblets don’t explode when the fall. So they sit around for years, even for decades, until something eventually causes them to explode. And often that something is a person–a farmer cultivating his land, or a construction worker preparing a site for construction, or a child exploring who finds a new “toy”.
An international conference working toward reducing or abolishing the use of these weapons just finished on December 7th. The U.S., one of the world’s leading producers, users, and sellers of these indiscriminate weapons, chose not to send a delegation.
My question is about responsibility.
In light of the fact that unexploded bomblets continue to kill hundreds of civilians every year in Laos and Vietnam some 4 decades after the hot war there ended, and also that knowing this we choose to continue to produce and deploy these weapons, my question is this:
I’d love to hear your general reactions/any actions you have taken or plan to take
12-19-2007 |
6 Comments »Cluster munitions are larger shells or casings which contain dozens to hundreds of submunitions. They are designed to be dropped from aircraft or launched from artillery, and then the larger casing opens in the air and the submunitions disperse over a wide area, and then explode on impact. The problem is that the submuntions have a relatively huge failure rate (10 to 40+%), so that one ends up with submunitions which have not yet exploded littering the landscape, basically acting as antipersonnel land mines. These can sit dormant for years and years, and for instance in Laos, where the U.S. bombed heavily with cluster munitions in the 60’s and 70’s, every year farmers find and accidentally set them off while tilling the soil to grow food, or children find them while exploring and think they are toys and then get maimed or killed. This is still happening 40 years after they were originally dropped, and the Red Cross estimates that 11,000 civilians have been killed in Laos alone since the end of the war.
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04-04-2007 |
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