2023-07-12 04:00:00
Canada and several other countries have announced that they will not send cluster munitions to Ukraine even if the United States decides to do so.
Joe Biden defended himself by saying his decision was difficult but necessary, pointing out that Ukraine assured him that the cluster bombs would not be used once morest targets in Russia.
Ah good! They will therefore only be dangerous for Ukrainian civilians, especially in the areas occupied by the Russians. As the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC) points out, the US decision “will contribute to terrible Ukrainian civilian casualties both immediately and for years to come.”
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Ukraine and Russia are already using cluster bombs with devastating effects. When HRW investigators traveled to the eastern Ukrainian town of Izium last year, they found that a cluster bomb used by Kyiv had killed at least eight civilians and injured 15 others. . On February 24, 2022, a cluster munition – Russian this time – exploded outside a hospital in Vuhledar in Ukraine, killing four civilians and injuring ten.
Delayed deadly pollution
Cluster munitions can maim and kill civilians years following the end of hostilities, spreading over a wide area and lying dormant until people come into contact with them.
Canada, like more than 120 countries, has signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions to prohibit their production, stockpiling, transfer, use and to ensure their disposal. The United States, Russia and Ukraine have not signed the agreement.
These weapons have been used in virtually all armed conflicts since the Second World War with terrible consequences for populations.
The first use of these bombs was in 1943 when Soviet forces dropped cluster munitions on German forces at the Battle of Kursk in Russia. Germany for its part launched 1000 “butterfly bombs” on the port city of Grimsby, in the northeast of England.
During their intervention in Indochina between 1965 and 1973 the Americans used them in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, dropping 413,130 tons of cluster munitions over this country. Unexploded munitions of war have caused more than 100,000 civilian casualties there since the end of hostilities.
The International Red Cross estimates that 80 million submunitions have been spread over Laos, causing 300 victims a year there.
HRW estimates that during the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and its allies used 61,000 cluster bombs containing 20 million submunitions, or “regarding a quarter of the bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait”.
Still according to HRW, the United States dropped 1,228 cluster bombs containing 248,056 explosive projectiles in Afghanistan for the single period between October 2001 and March 2002 at the start of their intervention in this country.
Victims: mostly civilians and children
And there are also anti-personnel mines. Canada sponsored the 1997 treaty – called the Ottawa Convention – on their prohibition and destruction signed by 164 states. Again, the most belligerent countries on the planet, including the United States, Russia and China, have not signed the convention.
Every year, mines also cause thousands of deaths and injuries. Most are civilians, half of them children. As with cluster bombs, there are hundreds of thousands of mines that have been left behind at the end of conflicts for decades.
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