British use of cluster bombs condemned
Weapons make battlefield safer, Hoon says
Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott
Friday April 4, 2003
The Guardian
British and American forces were accused yesterday of breaking international rules of war after admitting that they were using cluster bombs against targets in Iraq.
Presented with a storm of criticism, the Ministry of Defense admitted that Israeli-manufactured cluster shells had been fired by the Royal Artillerys long-range howitzers around Basra.
It also said that RAF Harrier jets had dropped RBL755 cluster bombs on targets in Iraq. The weapons, which scatter 147 bomblets over a wide area, have an estimated 10% failure rate, leaving unexploded munitions which humanitarian groups say are as dangerous as landmines. Yellow in color and the size of soft-drink cans, they are attractive to children in particular.
British howitzers with a range of 30 km have fired Israeli-made L20 cluster shells on targets described by the MoD as in the open. Though they are designed to self-destruct if they fail to detonate, they contain 49 bomblets which are lethal over a large area and have a failure rate of up to 5%.
US forces, meanwhile, have been showering batteries of cluster weapons on Iraqi targets with multi-launch rocket systems.
Iraqs information minister accused US-led forces of dropping cluster bombs on Baghdad on Thursday, killing 14 people and wounding 66.
This morning, these criminals dropped cluster bombs on the Douri residential area of Baghdad, and 14 people - men, women and children - were martyred and 66 were wounded, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf told a news conference.
US and British commanders insist they would not drop cluster bombs in places where there are civilians present.
The chief doctor at the general teaching hospital in Hula, six miles south of Baghdad, said this week that 33 civilians had been killed, and 100 injured, after a cluster bomb attack. The US central command in Qatar is investigating the report.
American military officials said yesterday that US B-52 bombers had for the first time dropped six new CBU-105 bombs - guided 500 kg cluster bombs - on Iraqi tanks defending Baghdad.
Cohn King, author of Janes explosive ordnance disposal guide and a British army bomb disposal expert in the 1991 Gulf war, said yesterday: Cluster bombs have a very bad reputation, which they deserve.
Richard Lloyd, director of the campaigning group Landmine Action said yesterday: Dropping cluster bombs on Iraq contradicts any government claim to minimize civilian casualties. Cluster weapons are prone to missing their targets and killing civilians.
Alex Renton, overseeing Oxfams aid work from Jordan, said the cluster shells could cause unnecessary harm. The UN childrens fund, Unicef, expressed concern that Iraqi children might confuse the yellow food packets being handed out by American forces with the bomblets, which had identical coloring.
In the Commons, the defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, accepted there were risks with cluster bombs.
He said that though the failure rate was very small they did leave a continuing problem. Mr Hoon added: Balanced against that you really have got to face up to the issue of whether you are going to allow coalition forces to be put at risk because we do not use this particular capability.
It would be necessary to use far larger weapons to deal with the same problem if cluster bombs were ruled out, he said.
Cluster weapons were used when it was absolutely justified ... because it is making the battlefield safer for our armed forces, said Mr Hoon.
Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, has said in a written parliamentary reply that British Challenger 2 tanks in southern Iraq have fired depleted uranium shells. The post-conflict administrators of Iraq will be responsible for monitoring DU levels in the environment and cordoning off and decontaminating sites of penetrator impacts, he told the Labor MP Llewellyn Smith.
Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Iraqi forces stored more than 150 landmines in a mosque containing the tombs of Kurdish martyrs in violation of humanitarian law. The stockpile of abandoned anti-personnel devices was discovered several days ago in northern Iraq by a team from the Mines Advisory Group, a British mine removal charity.
Although Iraq is not party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, said Steve Goose, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, any use of anti-personnel mines by any armed force is prohibited by customary international humanitarian law, since they are inherently indiscriminate weapons.
