NO ONE knows exactly where Hala Hassan and her brother, Ali, were playing when they found the squat brown cylinder lying on the ground.

The children, aged five and two, are too stunned to talk about it, and their father and mother were inside at the time.

In a poor city, they live in the poorest quarter of all, where the closest things to toys are bits of plastic scavenged from the rubbish that covers the muddy ground.

“They thought it was a kind of ball,” said Hala’s aunt, weeping. “They only wanted to play.”

Two-year-old Ali, wounded by shrapnel from a cluster bomb, is comforted by his father in al-Nasiriyah general hospital. The leftover weapons are a huge menace to towns and cities
But the object picked up by the two children was a bomblet from an unexploded cluster bomb. It went off in the front yard, leaving a neat six-inch hole in the concrete floor.

Tiny fragments of shrapnel flew upwards into Hala’s legs and into Ali’s face. At least one of them is still lodged deep in his cheek. Their father clutches the screaming boy, weeping silently.

Callous though it sounds, they are lucky to be alive. Just the day before, three boys, aged between 7 and 14, were killed, and two injured in a similar tragedy just 500 yards away.

After a quarter of a century of dictatorship, 12 years of sanctions and one of the bloodiest battles of the three-week war, the people of liberated al-Nasiriyah face a new source of misery: unexploded American cluster bombs.

Al-Tadhiya slum is in the center of al-Nasiriyah, but for the past month it has literally been a minefield.

Yesterday morning, within half a mile of the funeral tent where people were paying their respects to the families of the dead boys, at least eight cluster bombs, along with two unexploded mortar rounds, were visible.

Three were half-buried in the mud, three lay in rubbish next to a house and two were on a nearby roof. Each one is capable of killing, blinding and severing legs and arms. And these are only the ones which have been spotted.

Geoff Hoon, the Defense Secretary, said in the House of Commons during the war that in certain situations cluster bombs are of great military use. Against moving targets, such as armored columns, their scatter-gun effect is far more useful than conventional artillery. But in urban settings like this one the suffering they cause is incalculable.

A high proportion of the bomblets — some say one in ten, some a quarter — do not go off and lie where they fall, capable of exploding at any moment. At least one US Marine has been injured after tripping over an unexploded cluster bomb. Iraqis hate them. The US troops do not like them. They kill and maim children. So why have they been used?

The local people say that there were indeed Iraqi army units and Fedayin militia in this area, firing on the Americans. But why were cluster bombs, the least precise of all munitions, used against them, rather than aimed mortars and missiles? A nearby group of Marines on patrol suggest an answer.

Lance Corporal Matthew Gamel and Sergeant Jason Daniels have fought their way from Umm Qasr, past Basra and into al-Nasiriyah, and they do not welcome the continuing peacetime danger that the cluster bombs present. They explained the principle behind the weapons — the canister fired from a howitzer, that opens in the air releasing the bomblets; the “shaped charge” that punches a hole through armour; and the shrapnel that sprays anyone within range.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0419-05.htm

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Landmine Action director Richard Lloyd displays a cluster bomb

As British forces drop cluster bombs on Iraq, BBC News Online looks at where they have been used in the past and why.

Eighteen months ago, in western Afghanistan, a 15-year-old boy picked up what he thought was a packet of food - it blew his head off.

Sayyid Ahmad Sanef believed the bright yellow object lying on the ground near his home was one of the 37,000 plastic humanitarian aid packages of the same colour dropped on Afghanistan by US military aircraft - but it had come from a cluster bomb.

Cluster bombs contain as many as 200 smaller bomblets and up to 30% of these fail to explode on impact but, like landmines, remain deadly for many years.

This is particularly the case when the weapons are dropped from medium or high altitude.

This can cause the bomblets, which contain shrapnel and flammable material, to drift in the wind and land a long way from the intended target.

And they are more likely to kill children, who pick them up without knowing what they are, according to British charity Landmine Action.

The bomblets were mistaken for aid packages in Afghanistan

Director Richard Lloyd told BBC News Online: "As many are brightly-coloured and the size of a drinks can or toy, they are particularly attractive to children."

Landmine Action has joined with the British charity set up to commemorate the late Princess Diana in condemning the "appalling" use of cluster bombs by coalition forces in Iraq.

The chief executive of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, Andrew Purkis, urged people to "put pressure on governments to take responsibility for the clear-up of these indiscriminate weapons of war".

Nato governments and their military commanders generally argue cluster bombs are an effective and useful weapon in certain circumstances.

The UK military says its L20 bomblets have a "secondary arming device" to ensure any that do not explode immediately on impact do so within 15 seconds.

A Ministry of Defence spokesman told BBC News Online: "Cluster bombs are a lawful weapon and we are using them against legitimate military targets.

Fact file: Cluster bombs

"Their main benefit is the ability to attack a large-scale moving target, like a mechanised column in transit."

And using any other type of bomb to attack as wide a range of targets over as large an area would require "far greater tonnage of explosives, leading to far greater damage", he said.

But Mr Lloyd said: "As we know from Afghanistan, Kosovo and the last Gulf war, these weapons cannot be used in a way that discriminates between civilian and military targets and that is illegal under military and humanitarian international law."

Cluster bombs have killed nearly 2,000 Kuwaitis since the end of the 1991 Gulf war, according to Labour MP Joan Ruddock.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2912617.stm

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Unexploded “bomblets” from the cluster bombs NATO is dropping in Yugoslavia function a lot like land mines. Children are often the victims, because they pick up the brightly colored objects and end up dead or dismembered. Human rights advocates want them banned.

by Jeffrey Benner
May 28, 1999

However, criticism of cluster bombs has focused on what happens when these weapons fail to work properly. A 1,000 pound CBU 87 cluster bomb, which is the type U.S. planes have been dropping on targets and troops in Yugoslavia, breaks up into 202 small “bomblets.” These soda-can sized munitions float out over an area of several football fields and explode a short distance from the ground, covering the entire area in a shower of deadly shrapnel.

There are two ways these bombs can kill people other than the poor souls for whom they are intended. One is dropping the bombs over the wrong target. That happened on May 7, when NATO dropped cluster bombs on the central marketplace in Nis, killing at least 15 civilians. The other is when an unsuspecting person picks up an unexploded bomblet, a “dud.” For every cluster bomb dropped, a small percentage of the 202 bomblets released are duds. Bright yellow with red stripes and a little plastic parachute hood, these soda-can-sized death sticks have proven particularly attractive to curious children. Many are blown to bits and killed in the encounter, while others survive despite the loss of limbs.

There have already been reports of several such tragedies in Yugoslavia, though doubtless we hear of only a fraction of them. One story which did make the news, thanks to Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, was a case of five ethnic Albanian cousins who were killed in Kosovo when they picked up an unexploded cluster bomblet. A surgeon in Pristina claims he has treated hundreds of innocent victims, mostly for loss of limbs, since the beginning of the NATO campaign.

Such incidents of indiscriminate killing have led groups like Human Rights Watch to argue that “dud” cluster bomblets are, in effect, land mines, and should therefore be banned under the 1997 Anti-Personnel Landmines Treaty. The US has been widely criticized for being one of the few countries (and one of only two NATO countries) yet to sign the treaty. While the U.S. government claims it intends to sign, its reticence is largely due to that fact that, as it is presently worded, the convention could be interpreted to include cluster bombs.

The current draft of proposed U.S. legislation, which would ban the use of land mines by the year 2000, defines anti-personnel devices as “designed, constructed, or adapted to be detonated or exploded by the presence, proximity or contact of a person and that will incapacitate, injure or kill one or more persons.”

At a 1997 Pentagon briefing regarding the land mine ban, the Pentagon said that while it supports the land-mine ban, it would like to see the word “primarily” inserted at the beginning of the definition. They believe this would insure that cluster bombs would be exempted from the ban, since they are not “primarily designed” to function as land mines.

If “primarily” were not included, one Pentagon briefer explained, “that could knock out a number of systems that we really do need -- some of our runway and island munitions and that sort of thing, and that's what we're concerned about. We want to be sure that if we're talking about a land mine ban we're talking about land mines.”

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