Check for web archive captures
Landmines and Cluster Bombs: "Terrorism in Slow
Motion"
By mickielynn on 2009-02-05 15:49:31
Although this blog discussion of the use of Landmines and Cluster Bombs began as a conversation about the effects of
Landmines in Afghanistan--during the last 10 years, the United States has deployed or dropped large numbers of these
weapons in civilian-populated areas of the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Why are these weapons considered so horrific that widely signed and ratified international treaties have been created to ban
their use? Here are a couple of descriptions of their effects on civilian populations and on troops on both sides of a given
conflict.
This is what Dr. Gino Strada, the founder of the Milan based humanitarian aid group, Emergency, which has been working
in Iraq since 1995 had to say about Landmines: "I think these weapons are a form of terrorism in slow motion. They have no
target. They just hit civilians."
By 2004 Dr. Strada had personally treated 3,000 mine victims all of whom were civilians. Both sides used and stored land
mines but the U.S. deployed them in huge numbers.
A report in the UN Chronicle in the fall of 2004 stated that "According to E-Mine, Iraq might be the country in the world
most affected by landmines as well as unexploded ordinance." The survey found that minefields blocked grazing and
agricultural land, access to water and community facilities including hospitals and added more obstacles to repairing
infrastructure.
Then there is a concise description of the effects of unexploded Cluster Bombs well expressed by the Friends Committee on
National Legislation {FCNL}:
"Cluster munitions pose a danger to civilians during and after conflict, as malfunctioning {brightly colored and attractive to
children} bomblets scattered over a wide swath of land become de facto landmines. During the 1991 war against Iraq, U.S.-
dropped cluster submunitions were the single most deadly weapon facing U.S. troops." {Parentheses are mine}.
Here's one example described in a letter written to the Los Angeles Times by Lynn Bradach on December 2, 2008:
Ban the cluster bomb. The U.S. should join a global treaty to curb the deadly devices says the mother of one victim.
More than half the world's nations are meeting in Oslo on Wednesday to sign a global treaty banning cluster
bombs. Although my government won't be there, I will.
I have a personal stake in this treaty. My son, Travis, a corporal in the Marines, was killed by one of our own
cluster bomblets in July 2003. He was clearing an Iraqi farmer's field near Karbala of unexploded ordnance
when one of the men from his unit mishandled a cluster submunition. It exploded, killing Travis and taking an
eye and an arm from the Marine who touched it.
On January 30, 2009 Lynn Bradach, whose Marine son, Travis, lost his life in Iraq to a U.S. cluster bomb, helped the Friends
Committee on National Legislation to deliver 9,000 petitions to the Pentagon, calling on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
to renounce the use of cluster bombs.
In an article written in 1999, (two years after the International Committee to Ban Landmines and its director, Jody Williams
were awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for their amazing international work in bringing about the Ottawa Treaty to Ban
Landmines) Ms. Williams ended with this hopeful paragraph:
".,.The ICBL, and its partnership with governments, has resulted in a truly remarkable process. Landmines have been used
since the U.S. Civil War and the Crimean War, yet through concerted political action, they will be taken out of the arsenals
of the world. This process has clearly demonstrated that civil society and governments do not have to see each other as
adversaries. It has shown that in a partnership of civil society and governments, each brings particular assets to the process,
which is made stronger by the participation of both. It demonstrates that small and middle powers can work together with
civil society and address humanitarian concerns with breathtaking speed. It shows that such a partnership can be a new kind
of "superpower" in the post-Cold War world."
You can read the entire article at the following web address:
FCNL reports that "on December 3, 2008 as half of the world's governments signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions in
Oslo, Norway, a spokeswoman for the Obama Transition Team said that the next president would ‘carefully review the new
treaty.’"
Please urge President Obama to sign onto, and ask Congress to ratify, the global treaty to prevent the manufacture and use of
Cluster Bombs and the Oslo Treaty to ban Landmines.
