Celebrate the United Kingdom's Ratification of the Cluster Bomb Ban

The United Kingdom ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions at the UN on May 4th. That means that despite much work yet to be done, even UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband, while remaining engaged on UK global security, efforts to prevent terrorism, the Afghan War, and more, believe it is vital to stop using cluster bombs, and stop companies from making and selling them.

There are a number of advocacy groups to cheer for this milestone, follow the Cluster Munition Coalition's links to partners. So why is this such an enormous achievement for governments and bomb-victim advocates, as well as an incredible positive for all of us?

Let's say you live in a neighborhood, living your life. You have a spouse, kids, and parents next door. Perhaps you're in South Beirut, Kandahar, or somewhere that didn't expect violence so close to home, like Belgrade. Maybe you don't follow politics or don't want to get involved in the higher-level arguments. Nevertheless, your government and some foreign government or rebel group begin fighting somewhere over the hills.

Then, because one of the groups has set up an operations cell in your neighborhood, planes fly over one night and drop bombs. All night long, your family is unable to sleep just listening to the soul-crushing thunder, explosions, the ground being ripped open, each thud perhaps echoes with the sound of someone's soul being sucked into the ground.

At last, it's dawn, you survived. Somehow you got through it. The fight was horrific, but the war is over. Whoever was fighting has finally brokered an agreement you don't quite understand.

The neighborhood celebrates. It's over. Peace has returned. You finally let your kids return to school to play. Your elderly parents go for a walk. Your spouse goes to work. Then, the peace is broken by yet another, surprise earth-shaking detonation. People scurry to see what happened. An ambulance siren wails. Was anyone hurt or killed? Was it someone from your family? And this keeps happening, once a week, twice a week. Why?

When fighting forces use landmines, they tend to plant them mostly in predictable patterns along fighting lines. But many civilians after conflicts continued to trigger them and get killed or injured because they either didn't know that it was a former fighting area or because rain, erosion, or something else literally shifted the mines into pathways otherwise thought to be clear. And yet, the global community unified for the most part to ban the manufacture and use of landmines through an international convention in 1997.

But cluster bombs are different, some would say even more dangerous. Rather than foot soldiers planting the bombs in front of their fighting positions, cluster bombs are dropped from planes when the air commander wants to make sure to hit a wide set of targets with a spray pattern, rather than wasting a lot of pinpoint bombs that could more easily miss.

The effect is similar to that of landmines. Most explode, but some remain in the ground. However, since cluster bombs are dropped from the air, their likely locations are even harder for local civilians to predict.

The UK is now the 32nd country to ratify the cluster munitions ban, after, for example, Norway (#1, Go norse!), Ireland (#2, Smiling eyes!), Sierra Leone (#4, Greatest post-war comeback!), Laos (#5, Revived!), and Croatia (#16, Nearly finished de-mining the last of its mountain hiking trails!).

The United States still has neither signed, nor ratified the cluster ban. Why? Because defense leaders are convinced that new technology can be plugged into landmines and cluster bombs, which could allow them to be remotely de-activated. Of course, they haven't ensured that all the pellets will explode upon landing, so would they really be able to be sure all the de-activations would work?

Fortunately, I haven't been around cluster bombs, that I know of. But I have had to work very close to active minefields in Bosnia and Azerbaijan. I'm telling you that people who live and raise kids beside those areas live with neck-breaking stress every day. They never know when a normal day on the farm or in the village will suddenly turn upside down. Let's help these people escape the nightmares.

Photo: Trevor MacInnis