Dec
Vienna Conference to Ban Cluster Muitions
Posted under Features, |
Vienna Conference to Ban Cluster Muitions
Over 130 countries met in Vienna this week to continue the effort to ban cluster munitions. The three-day meeting is taking place as the world is celebrating the tenth Anniversary of the Ottawa Convention to Ban Landmines signed in Canada in December 1997.
The Cluster Munitions Coalition, the organizer of this conference, is pursuing the initiative launched in Norway to conclude a new international treaty in 2008. The agenda at the conference includes a program to destroy stockpiles of these weapons as well as to provide aid to civilian survivors of accidents caused by there use. However, many countries including France and Germany are insisting on exemptions in the treaty.
Eighty three nations have come forward to support the ban of these weapons, but without the three most powerful nations in the world, China, Russia and the United States, who have stated that they do not support the move for a complete ban. It is widely held that these countries are major manufacturers of Cluster bombs.
Cluster bombs are air or artillery delivered bombs containing smaller bomblets that are dispersed over a wide area. It has be suggested that the high number of cluster bomblets that fail to explode on impact is a design feature built into these weapons, to provide a type of de-facto landmine that will deny the enemy the use of the area where these bomblets are targeted. This feature is what makes these bombs so devastating to the civilian population who suffer casualties as they re-inhabit these areas, as was the case in Southern Lebanon as well as in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan and in the Balkans.
Statistics concerning the numbers of people who have been maimed or killed by cluster munitions are difficult to gather, but it has been estimated by Handicap International that as high as 98 percent of victims are civilians, and often children.
Further conferences are scheduled in New Zealand for February and Dublin in May in order to finalize the treaty by the end of the year.
