Cluster bombs and Australia’s national interest

In addition, the Defence Department claimed the Allison Bill would have “put Australia at a serious military disadvantage in future conflicts, which would be detrimental to our national interest”.

The international response to this growing threat to civilian life has been somewhat disappointing. Although many individuals and agencies including the Red Cross and the United Nations oppose the use of cluster bombs, no international legal instrument specifically covers them. Belgium alone has issued a comprehensive ban on the use of cluster munitions. Several other countries, including Australia, have engaged in parliamentary discussions with a view to a moratorium or ban.

An international conference in Oslo in February 2007 led to 46 of the 68 participating nations backing a Norwegian push for a new international treaty by 2008 that would ban “cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians”. What constitutes “unacceptable harm” is ambiguous and disputed.

Australia was not represented at the Oslo talks, but did send officials to a second round of talks involving 70 countries in Lima, Peru, from May 23 to 25, 2007, aimed at a global treaty banning cluster munitions. Australia’s contribution to the latest round of talks was to call for an exclusion of weapons with a self-destruct mechanism in an apparent attempt to protect the interests of the ADF.

Dr Mark Zirnsak, National Coordinator of the Australian Network to Ban Landmines, described this as “a deadly and disastrous decision by the Australian Government as the self-destruct mechanism has repeatedly been proven not to protect civilians from the indiscriminate explosions.”

Handicap International asked whether the Government had actually studied the humanitarian risks of the cluster bombs it wanted to acquire:

As with landmines, cluster munitions pose a serious threat to civilians during and after the conflicts. Australia should also be setting an example based on its commitment to humanitarian law that weapons that are indiscriminate should not be used.

Perhaps the mantra of “the national interest” has itself become a handicap to the advocacy of reasonable notions of justice and compassion in Australia. Indeed, it is debatable whether there is any contested area of Australian public life in which the national interest could not be invoked by political pragmatists, or economic fundamentalists, to justify what a majority of the population regards as injustice.