Saturday, September 02, 2006
Cluster Bombs - The United States' Shameful Role
The use of cluster bombs by the Israelis has received some attention but not enough. Numerous cluster bombs were used in air strikes in Lebanon. What was worse, most of them were dropped in the last few days of the conflict when cease fire was imminent. It is incomprehensible that the same people whose ancestors (some still alive) were victims of the holocaust during Hitler's Third Reich planned and carried out such fiendishly inhumane operations intended to kill and maim innocent people. No doubt some Hezbollah fighters would be among the dead. Does that justify it? Large supplies of cluster bombs were provided by America under the presidency of G.W. Bush.
Washington Post (filed by Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters) A Decade to Clear Cluster Bombs GENEVA (Reuters) - Clearing unexploded cluster bombs used by Israel in Lebanon during the month-long war, many of them U.S.-manufactured, could take 10 years, a British-based demining group said on Friday. "We will be clearing unexploded cluster munitions from the rubble of the villages of southern Lebanon for another decade," said Simon Conway, director of Land mine Action. "That is the grim reality," he told reporters in Geneva. Before the recent war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas in the south, demining teams were still clearing unexploded cluster munitions from Israel's 1978 and 1982 incursions into Lebanon, according to the advocacy group which is campaigning for an international ban on their use. Such weapons continue to kill and maim civilians, especially children, for years after a conflict, it said. More Three types of artillery-delivered cluster bombs were used by Israel in Lebanon -- two U.S.-made (M42 and M77) and one Israeli (M85), each with roughly the same failure rate of 40 percent, he said. So far, the United Nations has found 400 strike sites where cluster bombs -- "a lot of them U.S.-manufactured" -- were used, said David Shearer, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Lebanon. |
The Guardian Israel faced a stinging rebuke from the UN yesterday when the world body's humanitarian chief expressed shock at the "completely immoral" use of cluster bombs in Lebanon and Kofi Annan called for a rapid end to the conflict in Gaza. Jan Egeland said civilians were facing "massive problems" returning home because of as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bombs, most of which were dropped in the last days of the war. "What's shocking - and I would say to me completely immoral - is that 90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," Mr Egeland said. "Every day people are maimed, wounded and are killed by these ordnance." |
