Cluster's last stand

Now is the time to ban these bombs

When cluster bombs fall, we know what happens. Civilians die. They die in the initial attack, if the bombs are used against military personnel who are intermingled with civilians. But worse still is what happens for years afterwards when civilians, often children, stumble upon unexploded "bomblets". Such remnants from US cluster bombs dropped in the Gulf war in 1991 are still being found - 2,400 of them last year alone. Some 1,600 civilians have been killed and 2,500 injured in the intervening 12 years from unexploded bomblets. They are particularly dangerous in desert landscapes because sand can camouflage their position. But the same story is being repeated in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

Used against tanks or concentrations of forces, cluster bombs are currently a legal weapon. But civilians are already being injured by them in the current Iraq war, just as in earlier conflicts. Last week cluster bombs fell on Hilla, a town six miles south of Baghdad. According to the chief doctor at the local teaching hospital in Hilla, 33 civilians were killed and 100 injured. Further south, British artillery has fired cluster munitions against military targets near Basra. But Basra is a town with a million people. So sensitive is the British military about the use of such bombs that their use was immediately denied by army headquarters in Kuwait. The denial was later reversed by the defence secretary in London.

Should cluster bombs be banned? The military establishment says no. It points to the fact that the 1997 Ottawa treaty outlawing the use of anti-personnel mines does not cover unexploded bombs. Landmine Action, the pressure group which campaigned to get mines banned, believes that a ban should apply - and for some good reasons. The military know that between 2-20% of the bomblets in current cluster bombs will not explode. After the Gulf war, more people were killed by such bomblets than by mines, even though the land had been very heavily mined. To ban cluster bombs would not necessarily stop their use; neither the US nor Iraq is among the 130 signatories of the Ottawa treaty. But it would make commanders more circumspect in signatory and non-signatory nations alike. The current use of cluster bombs in areas close to civilians could not be more counter-productive for a campaign that is trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. Aid agencies are right to call for stronger curbs.