Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about the problem of cluster bombs. These are munitions that disperse small bombs known as bomblets or submunitions over a very wide area, up to one kilometre away from the initial bomb site. They leave unexploded bombs that act rather like landmines, insofar as they kill and injure civilians. In fact, 98 per cent of deaths and injuries associated with cluster bombs and their submunitions involve civilians, very often children. The problem is that the unexploded bombs act like landmines. They render useless vast tracts of land for decades after the conflict. Ten to 50 per cent of those bombs that are dropped do not actually explode on impact but again, like landmines, they can be triggered by someone standing on them, brushing against them, picking them up or in any way disturbing them.

The big problem is that they are proliferating rapidly around the world. So far, they have been used against 78 countries by the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, the former USSR, Herzegovina, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Montenegro, Sudan and Turkey—to name just some.

Lebanon was the latest country to have cluster bombs used against it. In Laos, 25 bomblets were dropped for every man, woman and child. In Cambodia, the United States used 540,000 bomblets and in Vietnam an incredible 83 million were dropped. They were also used in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and the Falkland Islands. The United Nations estimates that Israel dropped between one million and 1.25 million submunitions in Lebanon, most of them in the last 72 hours of the conflict when ceasefire discussions were already under way. Hezbollah is also said to have used a small number, although it denies that was the case.

The big problem is that cluster bombs not only kill and injure people for decades after they are dropped in these places but also make agriculture and mobility almost impossible. Imagine a bomb dropping and bombs dispersing from that bomb up to one kilometre away. We are talking about a vast area of land that is rendered useless.

The sick part about cluster bombs is that they are so attractive to children. They are small enough to be picked up by a child and they look deceptively like toys. But of course there is nothing toylike in their application. One cluster bomb is milled in a way that produces very small pieces of shrapnel. Some look like butterflies, some look like balls, some look like oranges and some look like segmented toys. There is a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some are designed to spin. It is easy to see how they would get caught up in vegetation, long grass, trees and the like, making them very dangerous for people walking through such an area. In Lebanon, since the end of the war, several dozen people have been killed and several hundred injured.

Fortunately, there is some action under way. As with landmines, there is a movement around the world that is saying ‘Enough’ and that we should move to ban these munitions because of their effect on civilians and that we should stop this trade in human misery. An organisation called Handicap International put out a report not long ago entitled Fatal footprint: the global human impact of cluster munitions. It reported that 98 per cent of cluster bomb casualties were civilians who were injured or killed while carrying out their normal day-to-day activities in an environment contaminated by unexploded munitions.

On 17 November, state parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons ended their third review conference with significant developments on the issue of cluster munitions. In the course of the two-week meeting, an ever-increasing number of state parties called for a new protocol to the Certain Conventional Weapons arrangement to address the humanitarian problems associated with cluster munitions.

In the first 15 weeks, 15 state parties joined an Austrian proposal calling for the negotiation of a new international agreement. But the conference was eventually able only to agree to convene a meeting of governments or experts within governments in June next year with a particular focus on cluster bombs. The meeting has no mandate to develop recommendations or negotiate new rules, but it will report back to the Certain Conventional Weapons state parties on its proceedings late next year.

So far, 25 countries—Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, the Holy See, Hungary, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Switzerland—have joined in a political declaration committing themselves to a new international agreement to regulate cluster munitions. They called for a new international instrument that would prohibit the use of cluster munitions in concentrations of civilians; prohibit use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions that pose serious humanitarian hazards; and assure the destruction of stockpiles of these weapons. Norway announced that it would invite states committed to such an international instrument to a meeting in Oslo early in 2007, with a view to deciding how to pursue that goal.

The International Committee of the Red Cross will also sponsor an informal international expert meeting in March or April 2007. The Red Cross has reiterated its belief that both national policy changes and specific new international humanitarian law rules are urgently needed to address the specific problems of cluster munitions. The Red Cross welcomes all efforts aimed at developing adequate national policies and specific new rules for international humanitarian law for cluster munitions.

I did put some questions to our government a month or so ago and I asked about whether Australia possessed any stockpiles of cluster munitions, and I am pleased to advise the Senate that it does not; it no longer has them. It did have them, during the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, and they were tested in Woomera and Karinga. But, according to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, we no longer have them. I was disappointed, however, in the response of the government, who admitted:

Cluster munitions have the potential to cause great harm to civilians, and the Government supports discussions in international fora aimed at placing restrictions on their use.

The government points out:

Cluster munitions are not illegal under any arms control or IHL instrument, and they have—

and this is the disappointing part—

... legitimate military utility where properly targeted, are reliable and discriminating, and deployed in compliance with IHL. Defence made a substantial contribution to the funding of a discussion paper for the CCW on the IHL concept of proportionality and its application to the creation of Explosive Remnants of War, including cluster munitions.

Finally, in answer to my question ‘Does the Government condone the use of cluster bombs by Israel in the recent conflict with Lebanon’ the answer was:

The Government is aware of reports of the use of cluster munitions by the Israel Defence Force (IDF) in southern Lebanon in the recent conflict with Hezbollah, and understands an internal inquiry has been announced into the IDF’s use of cluster munitions. Beyond this, the Government is not in a position to comment on the IDF’s use of cluster munitions.

This arises out of a visit that I made to Lebanon a few weeks ago in October, and everyone that I and Laurie Ferguson, who also came on this visit, met raised this matter of cluster bombs. (Time expired)