The delivery of US cluster bombs to Ukraine was announced this Friday, July 7 by Washington. A decision announced shortly before the NATO summit in Vilnius next week, in a clear desire to increase aid to the forces of Kiev, mobilized in a counter-offensive which is struggling to produce major effects against the army. Russian.
The announcement drew critical reactions from the NGO Handicap International – Humanity and Inclusion, which said the colossal impact these weapons could have on civilians. “There are people who have not yet been born who will be the victims,” ??she told AFP.
The use of these cluster bombs (BASM) aroused, already before the formalization of the announcement, a wave of condemnations from those who, around the world, measure the effects. Thus, in August 2022, the Cluster Munition Monitor, which brings together several specialized NGOs, noted that Ukraine was then the only theater where they were used, in this case by the Russian army. These bombs scatter, indiscriminately and over an area larger than several football fields, a multitude of small explosives, a significant part of which does not explode and is buried in the ground. They then fall, de facto, into the category of anti-personnel mines.
Militarily, they make it possible to hit a large number of enemy soldiers, to render an airport runway unusable or to mine a vast territory to hinder enemy progress. But, in violation of international humanitarian law, they strike civilians and soldiers alike. Experts claim that between 5% and 40% of submunitions do not explode on impact and thus can remain in the ground for decades.
“It’s a death sentence for civilians in the long run. There are people who have not yet been born who will be the victims”, denounces Baptiste Chapuis, of the organization Handicap International – Humanity and Inclusion (HI). Ultimately, he adds to AFP, “there is also an issue of physical access to the areas affected by humanitarian organizations (…) therefore preventing a lifeline for the affected populations”.
A total of 123 countries – with the notable exceptions of Syria, the United States, Russia, China and Israel – have signed the 2008 Oslo Treaty, which entered into force in 2010, and which prohibits the production, storage, sale and use of cluster bombs. These weapons appeared massively during the Second World War. The United States used them in Iraq and Afghanistan, as did Israel in Lebanon, particularly against Hezbollah in 2006. “We are still clearing American submunitions in Laos”, almost fifty years after the end of the war of Vietnam, emphasizes Baptiste Chapuis.
The 2008 convention notes that cluster munitions “kill or maim civilians, including women and children, impede development (…), impede post-conflict rehabilitation and reconstruction, delay or prevent the return of refugees and displaced persons (…) for many years”.
Sending cluster bombs to Ukraine would be “escalatory, counterproductive and would only increase the danger to civilian populations caught in combat zones”, denounced Daryl Kimball, director of the American organization Arms Control Association in a communicated. They “will not tell the difference between a Ukrainian soldier and a Russian soldier. The effectiveness of cluster bombs is vastly oversold and the impact on non-combatants is acknowledged but too often overlooked,” he added.
He also recalled that the disastrous effects of this weapon had justified its abandonment by the American Department of Defense in Afghanistan in 2002 and in Iraq in 2003. The American decision “is a step backwards which undermines the considerable progress made by the international community in its attempt to protect civilians from such dangers during and after armed conflict,” Amnesty International said, calling on Washington to reverse its decision.
Civilians represent 97% of the victims (killed or injured), 66% of them are children, in areas where age is taken into account by the statistics, according to the Cluster Munition Monitor. And 29 countries or areas in the world are known or suspected of being contaminated by untriggered explosives linked to cluster bombs, including ten States parties to the Oslo convention, bound by demining obligations, specified its document in 2022.
