Ban on cluster bombs agreed

Ban on cluster bombs agreed

By Stephen Fidler in London and Daniel Dombey in Washington

Published: May 29 2008 01:07 | Last updated: May 29 2008 01:07

More than 100 governments agreed a draft treaty to ban the use of cluster munitions on Wednesday in the face of strong warnings from the US to its allies not to do so.

The agreement came after a late decision by Britain, which helped to break deadlock at the talks by agreeing to take its stocks of cluster weapons out of service.

Cluster bombs break up in the air and launch up to several hundred bomblets over wide areas.

They are blamed for heavy civilian casualties because the nature of the weapon makes it hard to discriminate between combatants and civilians and because many bomblets fail to explode on impact and kill or wound people after hostilities are over.

The US had warned the Washington embassies of its Nato partners against agreeing a ban, diplomats said. Officials claimed the treaty would bar joint peacekeeping and other operations with signatories because the US military kept cluster weapons in its stockpiles.

The deal came at an international conference in Dublin at which 116 nations were represented. They agreed to an immediate ban on the use of cluster munitions and a destruction of stockpiles over an eight-year period.

Officials from some governments represented, including Japan, Finland and Poland, were referring back to their capitals to secure agreement for the text.

Campaigners heralded the deal. “We are very pleased with the outcome. More than 100 states have agreed to ban every type of cluster munition that has ever been used,” said Simon Conway, a former British army officer and co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition.

He said campaigners had some misgivings about aspects of the agreement. The US is not a signatory to the treaty and its military almost certainly keeps cluster bombs in its bases on UK soil. The draft does not explicitly forbid this, but Mr Conway said Britain was likely to ask Washington to move the weapons before the eight-year deadline was up.

The clause that has raised US concerns forbids signatories from assisting others in the use of cluster bombs, forbidding joint operations – such as those in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 – where such bombs are used.

Last week, Stephen Mull, US acting assistant secretary for political military affairs, said: “If the convention passes in its current form, any US military ship would be technically not able to get involved in a peacekeeping operation, in providing disaster relief or humanitarian assistance. That’s because most US military units have in their inventory these kinds of weapons.”

The US is among a number of governments, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Israel, that did not part in the Dublin talks.

Mr Conway said he hoped that the treaty would have a demonstration effect – as the 1997 convention banning landmines had deterred militaries of governments that were not signatories, including the US, from using anti-personnel mines. “The only government using landmines now is Burma, a pariah state,” he said.