Does the U.S. Want to Stop Cluster Bombs from Killing Civilians or Not?
Administration Opposes Efforts to Control Use of Cluster Munitions
For immediate release: February 15, 2008
Washington, DC…The Pentagon this week went on the offensive against international negotiations intended to prevent the use of cluster bombs that cause great harm to civilians and reasserted the U.S. right to use these weapons in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, a 64-year-old Quaker peace lobby said today.
As representatives of 100 countries gather in Wellington, New Zealand (February 18-22) to continue negotiations leading to a binding treaty to ban the stockpiling, use, transfer and manufacturing of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Security Affairs Joseph Benkert told journalists that the international process initiated in Oslo, Norway “could become sort of ‘feel good’ arms control.”
What is feel good arms control? The United States has used cluster munitions in civilian populated areas of three countries in the last ten years. “Report after report has demonstrated that the use of these weapons kills and maims more civilians than soldiers,” said Lora Lumpe, a lobbyist working for the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “Our Quaker peace lobby is deeply concerned that a top Pentagon official would characterize the efforts of more than half the countries of the world to stop these weapons from killing civilians as ‘feel good arms control.’ The United States should be joining these negotiations, not working to undermine them.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Christian relief group World Vision are supporting effort to restrict the use of these weapons, which do so much harm to civilians. “In arguing against the Oslo process, Assistant Secretary Joseph Benkert said the problem is not the cluster munitions, the problem is how these weapons are targeted,” said Lumpe. However, she pointed out that the Bush administration is not only opposing the Oslo process, it is also actively opposing efforts by Congress to pass the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act, which states “Cluster munitions will not be used where civilians are known to be present or in areas normally inhabited by civilians” (S.594/H.R. 1755).
“The U.S. government says it is working to prevent civilian casualties, yet Washington has long resisted every effort to control the use of these weapons,” said Lumpe. “It was only after the international community came together in the Oslo process that the U.S. started arguing for a treaty to control cluster munitions through the Convention on Conventional Weapons”—a Geneva-based arms control treaty.
“Rather than blocking efforts in Congress and internationally to control these weapons, the United States government should be embracing efforts to control the use of these weapons and, particularly, to ban their use in areas normally occupied by civilians,” said Lora Lumpe.
Congress passed part of S.594/H.R. 1755 into law in December 2007. Included in the Omnibus Appropriation was a one-year moratorium on exports of cluster munitions with a ‘dud’ rate of one percent or more. The failure rate refers to the number of landmine-like cluster submunitions left behind to threaten civilian populations after combat ends.
For more information on cluster bombs go to http://www.banclusterbombs.org
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The Friends Committee on National Legislation, the oldest registered religious lobby in Washington, is a non-partisan Quaker lobby in the public interest. FCNL works with a nationwide network of tens of thousands of people from every state in the U.S. to advocate for social and economic justice, peace, and good government.
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