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Cluster Munitions
House of Lords
May 17th 2007
The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Elton, for bringing his account of the Oslo conference to our attention, and for bringing to our attention the uncomfortable, troubling and disturbing facts behind it. I speak today as a lay person on this subject. I speak as one who has been confronted by stories of human lives brought to an end; of children and adults indiscriminately maimed; of land contaminated and unavailable for agriculture or development; and of unimaginable and interminable risks to innocent non-combatants being visited upon sizeable populations of people in Kosovo, in Serbia and Montenegro, in Lebanon, in Iraq and elsewhere. I speak as one deeply troubled that the United Kingdom military is using these M85 weapons in my name. I speak as one who cannot accept the Secretary of State’s claim that:
“The types of cluster munitions we intend to retain are legitimate weapons with significant military value which, as a result of mitigating features, is not outweighed by humanitarian factors”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/3/07; col. 37WS.]
I cannot accept that statement because I cannot understand what, in the mind of the Secretary of State, legitimates the use of these weapons. Are they legitimated by international law or convention, and does that offer comfort or consolation to the victims—many of them children—who have not been consulted about the legitimacy of dropping these weapons on their communities?
I cannot understand either the significant military value of these weapons in the kind of conflicts in which our Armed Forces are likely to be engaged in the foreseeable future. I cannot accept that the so-called “mitigating features”—presumably referring to the self destruct mechanism so eloquently described by the noble Lord, Lord Elton—help to legitimise the use of these weapons. The evidence appears to be robust—even overwhelming—that the self-destruct mechanisms are unreliable; that the tests used to evaluate the performance of the weapons are undertaken only in ideal conditions, which do not replicate actual combat conditions; and that the United Kingdom has made no effort to assess the performance of these munitions in combat.
Furthermore, I cannot accept that this argument outweighs what the Secretary of State refers to as the “humanitarian factors”. Can he be referring to the old man in Kosovo who desperately tried to escape as the sky rained down bomblets and blew him and his neighbours to pieces? Can he be referring to the victims who had holes twice the size of a man’s fist blown in their torsos? Can he be referring to children playing innocently in Kosovo who were punished with multiple amputations for their temerity? Can he be referring to the population of Basra who had 98,000 of these weapons rained on them during the invasion of Iraq? Are these “humanitarian factors” another way of speaking of our brothers and sisters who pay the price for these weapons in their mutilated bodies? They receive no medals; they are not treated as war heroes; they do not have the benefit of military hospitals, but languish for a lifetime of regret that the “mitigating features” failed to work in their case.
The document, Fatal Footprint, seeks to clarify the impact of these munitions on the lives of people in 23 countries and areas not internationally recognised, which are confirmed to be affected by cluster munitions. This is the first comprehensive study systematically analysing the impact of these weapons on civilian populations through casualty data. As noble Lords may be aware, it concludes that 98 per cent of casualties are civilian; that these munitions are more fatal and involve more injuries than mines or other explosive remnants of war. Not only are civilians most at risk, but the vast majority of civilian casualties occur when people are carrying on their normal daily livelihood activities in their usual and accustomed places.
Further, it is clear from experiences in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq and Vietnam that extensive cluster munitions use generally poses a volatile and generational threat to civilians where clearance efforts are delayed.
It is commonplace these days for all of us to complain that we live in a culture dominated by the requirements of health and safety. Indeed, we live in something of a schizoid culture, in which on the one hand we want to avoid every possible risk to life and limb for ourselves, however small, even often at great personal inconvenience. On the other hand, we are ready to pretend to each other that the risks visited on entirely innocent populations by our own military are somehow acceptable. I speak as a lay person, as I said. I defer to noble and gallant Lords in their greatly superior military, technical and diplomatic expertise in these matters. But I cannot find it possible to come to terms with the argument that these weapons are legitimated militarily, morally or on any other grounds.
In the Christian calendar, today is the feast day of the Ascension of Christ. For those of us in the Christian tradition, it is a day in which our Lord’s kingship over all human affairs, relations and conflicts is celebrated. It is a day on which we are reminded that human beings are to behave towards each other as children of the same heavenly father. It is a day to repent of these weapons, and a day to press on the Government’s representatives as they prepare to go to Lima that we wish them to be in no doubt whatever that, in the view of this House, these weapons are wholly unacceptable.
