Wounded landscapes

As we were racing towards a stunning victory for Labor, cluster bomb duds were going off by the dozen in Southern Lebanon.

Usually, they only go off one at a time as the weeks go by. It is estimated that about 30 Lebanese have been killed, and another 100 wounded by some half a million of the duds left at the end of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel, in August of 2006.

But last week, there was widespread hail in Southern Lebanon. Hailstones the size of walnuts fell in the valleys and fields and orchards, and set off some of the many thousands which didn’t explode according to plan.

The Lebanon Star called the event “A Blessing in Disguise”. To villagers who lived through that conflict, the sharp, crackling blasts were a grim reminder of last year’s chaos and grief and of this year’s lost crops.

Many of the 500,000 duds have been removed, but how do you clean up all half a million live cluster bombs?

In traditionally farmed areas, it usually falls to carefully trained villagers who locate and destroy them, one at a time, for years afterward.

Rae McGrath founded the Mines Advisory Group (MAG). He is currently with Handicap International Network, where he is the International Spokesperson on Cluster Munitions. He is passionate about cluster munitions. The MAG, and he personally, spent some years in the 1990’s teaching Laotian villagers to remove UXO, mainly clusters, from their fields and villages.

He knows what happens on the ground, and he has no patience with the arguments currently being made by the Australian diplomatic delegations, at conferences aiming to fast-track a ban on cluster munitions.

McGrath said:

The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (the CCW), part of the Geneva Convention, was expected to find a solution to the humanitarian problems caused by cluster munitions. But, because it relies on consensus, it has failed even to mandate itself to negotiate any meaningful change. Last month, it, could not even agree a timeframe to resolve this humanitarian emergency. The Oslo Process began officially in February this year, because official talks have dragged on and accomplished virtually nothing since the successful Land Mine Ban campaign won the world an international treaty, ten years ago.

The “Oslo Process” meeting, being held in Vienna from December 4-6 will engage 130 countries, at the latest count.

Australia’s policy towards cluster munitions is not progressive. At the very time that 85 countries are seeking a treaty to ban them, Australia has decided to buy them. The ALP, in a policy statement published on the Peace Tasmania website, states:

Labor [agrees] with the Department of Defence’s position that the blanket prohibition of broadly defined “cluster munitions” could place Australian forces at a disadvantage against potential adversaries. Furthermore, such a ban would mean that Defence could not acquire any sub-munition based weapon system, whether or not it was generally considered to be a cluster munition, including those intended to minimise humanitarian impact.

And:

It is noted that Landmine Action UK, the Cluster Munitions Coalition, and Handicap International, have conceded that precision-guided munitions that discriminate between targets, such as those in the process of being procured by Defence, do not pose a greater risk to civilians and constitute legitimate alternatives to general cluster munitions.

When Rae McGrath read this, he responded with “An Open Letter” to the ALP. Addressed to Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and other ministers of note, it accused Labor of “… a quite cynical misrepresentation of Handicap International’s position”.

“They have also misrepresented the whole Cluster Munitions Coalition” Rae said. “We call for a total ban on all cluster munitions based on the experiences of our field teams over many years …”

Rae makes no bones about cluster munitions. He writes: “There is another reason we campaign for a total ban on cluster munitions - their use is already illegal under existing international law, most specifically under the terms of Additional Protocol I, Article 51 to the Geneva Conventions.”

In a telephone interview today McGrath added:

Australia may think it makes no difference for them just to have a small stock of cluster munitions which it is unlikely to use. They must realise that their actions weaken the resolve of countries prepared to make a sacrifice for reasons of humanity and common decency. Instead, they are encouraging the few governments intent on undermining the new treaty. It is behaviour unworthy of Australians and for no real military gain. It’s an idiotic policy which I hope the new government will quickly abandon in favour of a complete ban. Hopefully this government will forswear cluster munitions. Hopefully, they will respond with urgency and humanity to such grim reminders as the cluster duds in Lebanon.

Australian anti-mine activists are hoping that Mr Rudd and his new ministry and backbenchers use Labor’s mandate to build an Australia that will leave a legacy of humane diplomacy rather than more wounded landscapes, littered with unexploded ordnance.