TV news footage transmitted worldwide, 14 May 2008, on APTN Global Video Wire at 12:15 GMT, repeated at 22:00 GMT
and on Eurovision EVN at 11:45 GMT

Date, location: May 2008, Geneva, Ireland. Archives: Lebanon 2006, Serbia 1999, Laos 2006-7
Production: Jan Powell, Didier Revol, Geneva
Sound: English, Lao
Access: All
Length: 10 mins


Preview Extract : Video on cluster munitions

For broadcast tapes and information on footage: Jan Powell, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva,

Representatives from over a hundred governments are meeting in Dublin, Ireland, 19-30 May, to finalize a new treaty to ban the use, manufacture and stocking of cluster munitions. The conference is the culmination of a negotiation process that began in Oslo in February 2007. Its supporters believe that the treaty will be as effective as the 1997 Ottawa Treaty has been in dealing with anti-personnel landmines - now banned by three-quarters of the world’s states.

Cluster munitions are usually bombs, rocket or artillery shells which open to release up to 650 smaller ‘bomblets’. These bomblets, known as submunitions, disperse and explode over a wide area. Experience over the last four decades shows that between 10 and 40% of them fail to detonate. As a result, vast areas of land are polluted with live ammunition, primed to explode at the touch of a spade or a child’s hand. The ICRC has called for a ban on unreliable and inaccurate sub-munitions to spare future generations from their lethal consequences: ‘Its bad enough that civilians are caught up in the fighting and suffer incredible pain and disruption…but to us it is repugnant that this killing and injuring of civilians will go on for years or decades,’ says the ICRC’s Peter Herby.

There is a rising groundswell of support for the new treaty which would prohibit the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions; and require the elimination of current stocks, help for victims and clearance of existing contamination. Military officers also recognize the importance of the new Treaty. According to Lt Colonel Jim Burke of the Irish Defence Forces, military commanders "don’t want unreliable or inaccurate munitions, they also don’t want to be in a position of being forced to use a weapon which is stigmatized internationally and they don’t want to be accused of disobeying international humanitarian law."

It took the 2006 war in southern Lebanon to make the world finally sit up and take notice of the dreadful consequences of cluster munitions. In just one month an estimated 37 million square metres of land were contaminated with up to a million unexploded cluster submunitions. More than 250 civilians and clearance operators have been killed and injured by them since the fighting ended.

Unexploded submunitions have turned vast tracts of land into deadly no-go areas in some 20 countries of the world - including Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, Kosovo, Lebanon, Tajikistan and Vietnam. The world’s worst affected county is Laos. An estimated 270 million submunitions were dropped there in US bombing raids during the Vietnam war of the 1960s and 1970s. Tens of millions failed to explode and remain today in farmland, forests and villages. As a result, thousands of civilians have been killed and injured, many of them children who are attracted to the small bomblets that often look like playthings.

While the pain and suffering caused to individuals is horrific, cluster munitions also have long term economic consequences, making farmland unusable and preventing travel and communications. According to Peter Herby: " If cluster munitions are littering an agricultural landscape … it can be devastating for the livelihoods of individuals who depend on those fields or orchards."

Without urgent international action, the human toll of cluster munitions could become far worse than for anti-personnel landmines. Billions of cluster submunitions have been stockpiled by the world’s states. Many models are aged, inaccurate and unreliable. But while landmines were in the hands of virtually all armed forces, only about 75 states currently possess cluster munitions. It is therefore not too late to prevent human suffering on a potentially massive scale.

LOGLIST
00 00 Cluster bomb sequence showing air launch, bomb casings opening, cluster munitions released and exploding on the ground.

00 34 Second sequence of cluster bomb explosion (archive footage, ICRC film, "Cluster Munitions: Time o Act".)

00 57 Closeup of unexploded cluster munitions - various types and designs

01 23 ITW Peter Herby, Head of Arms Unit, ICRC
"A cluster munition is a container which contains small individual sub-munitions. Some of these containers may include a few, 5, 10, but it may include as many as 650 individual sub-munitions. These can be distributed by artillery, fired from the ground, from missiles, from aircraft. And when in flight, the container will open and distribute hundreds and hundreds of small sub-munitions, which are intended to create a devastating force over a very large area, up to tens of thousands square metres. The problem is the volume. These can be delivered in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands in a few hours, in millions in a few days and these numbers, combined with the fact that from 10 to 40 percent simply do not explode, create a huge problem of contamination and a huge threat to the civilian populations."

02 25 Child victims of cluster bomb explosions showing injuries- various (Lebanon)

02 54 man and child – injured, walking (Afghanistan)

03 00 ITW Lt Colonel Jim Burke, Military Advisor, Irish Defence Forces

"You cannot expect the civilian population to be an expert in the nature of all types of munitions, and the more munitions of this nature which are left lying around the greater the dangers are. Very quickly after the Kosovo conflict, the major killer of civilians were not antipersonnel mines or anti-vehicle mines or conventional munitions but these munitions."

03 25 ITW Peter Herby, Head of Arms Unit, ICRC
"It’s bad enough that civilians are caught up in the fighting and suffer incredible pain, disruption, displacement during the conflict. But to us it is absolutely repugnant that this killing and injuring of civilians will go on for years or decades simply because of the choice of the wrong weapon in an armed conflict."

03 46 Town during a cluster strike, (Serbia) showing wounded civilians in suburban area, dead dog, man lying on ground, close-up yellow unexploded cluster sub-munition.

04 16 ITW Lt Colonel Jim Burke, Military Advisor, Irish Defence Forces
"Another problem is the wide footprint of many of these weapons at time of impact. So it is more likely that civilians will get caught up in a strike at time of use."

04 29 "From a technical point of view, It’s difficult to see how one could guarantee a very high reliability rate during active service conditions and all the factors that would impinge on these weapons during use."

04 43 Damaged buildings by cluster strikes - various (Lebanon)

04 58 Olive grove with cluster bomb contamination (Lebanon)

05 10 Clearing farmland of cluster bombs by FSD (Swiss Foundation for Mine Action) showing deminers at work, wheat field and farmer discussing clearance process looking at land which he cannot use (Lebanon).

05 47 ITW Peter Herby, Head of Arms Unit, ICRC
"If cluster munitions are littering a landscape, an agricultural landscape for example, it can be devastating for the livelihoods of individuals who depend on those fields or orchards for their livelihoods."

06 09 LAOS Women working in rice fields

06 27 Map Laos - red dots show individual cluster bomb strikes

06 40 Explosion - disposing of cluster munitions

06 47 Bouy, victim of cluster munition explosion while working in his fields, shows scar on stomach, children watching (Laos)

07 02 ITW Bouy, cluster munitions victim, Laos
"I was going to work in my field. I suddenly struck something solid with my pick. At the same time I heard an explosion and I felt a sharp pain in my stomach and thigh. I was taken to hospital. I had to sell a buffalo to cover the cost.”

07 35 ITW Lt Colonel Jim Burke, Military Advisor, Irish Defence Forces
"Military people are generally pretty practical. They don’t want unreliable or inaccurate munitions, they also don’t want to be in a position of being forced to use a weapon which is stigmatized internationally and they don’t want to be accused of disobeying international humanitarian law."

07 59 cutaway - closeups of unexploded cluster bombs on ground in tree

08 03 ITW Jim Burke continues

"But I think most of my colleagues would agree that existing…or the set of weapons and systems whichcause the problems in Lebanon in 2006, in Iraq in 2003, in Yugoslavia in 1999, in Iraq in 1991, that these weapon systems are undesirable, that the negative effects outweigh the military advantage from their point of view.”

08 29 Exterior UN, with national country flags (Geneva)

08 35 Meeting of states parties to Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons discussions on newTreaty (Geneva)

08 42 Close-up ICRC representative at meeting

08 49 Close-up Peter Herby at meeting

08 57 ITW Jacob Kellenberger, ICRC President

"What the ICRC really wants is a legally binding instrument which does prohibit inaccurate, unreliable cluster munitions."

09 12 "It does imply that inaccurate and unreliable cluster munitions would be prohibited. Not only their use would be prohibited but also the stocks would have to be destroyed. And the proposal does also imply that you have also to think of those people who have become victims of cluster munitions and that these people have to be assisted."

09 40 ITW Peter Herby, Head of Arms Unit, ICRC
"You cannot any longer wait for the problem to solve itself. It will only be solved when there is a new international norm that says you may not use inaccurate and unreliable cluster munitions and you have to eliminate them completely, destroy them, you don’t give them to anyone, you don’t sell them to anyone, they are simply a prohibited weapon."

09 58 ENDS