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Chapter 5: Conclusion
Clusters of Death
A family in Nong Oh Village, Xieng Khuong province, Laos watched their one son die and their one daughter be injured by a cluster bomb. They were working in the fields when they accidently hit a bomblet with a digger. The explosion killed the young boy (age 8), and sent shrapnel into the brain of the daughter (age 12). The daughter survived but remains mentally handicapped. The location of the shrapnel makes it impossible to operate.(1) With numbing regularity, stories like the one above are becoming more and more common. Whether it be Chechnya, Sudan, Kosovo, Laos, Vietnam, Lebanon, Ethiopia, or Afghanistan, the accounts tell the same story: the verdict is out on cluster bombs. They should simply no longer be in the arsenals of the world's army. Whether dropped from the air, blasted from cannons, or "delivered" by cruise missiles, the characteristics of cluster munitions are so abhorrent, so inherently indiscriminate, and so likely to cause unnecessary suffering, that they should be banned. Cluster bombs kill indiscriminately in two ways: (1) "geographically," because they are wide area munitions which are difficult to target, they are likely to kill and injure civilian and soldier alike, especially in civilian areas, and (2) "temporally," because their high dud rates guarantee the creation of de facto landmine fields, they go on killing for decades after the battle is over. Vladimir Jovanovic, a 72-year old resident of Nis, Serbia, had the misfortune of proving both those points. In May 1999, he was injured when a US cluster bomb went astray. In April 2000, he died when his shovel hit an unexploded cluster bomb buried in his yard. The lethality of cluster bombs is so high, that even when used "properly" against combatants, they arguably violate the international prohibition against weapons that cause "superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering." War is hell, we are told. But there are limits, even in war. As Mennonites committed to peace and opposed to the execution of war in any form, we have been loathe to walk into these discussions of the law of war, with its gruesome calculus between "military necessity" and "collateral damage." We enter those discussions not because we have abandoned our commitment to peace, but because we have seen and heard too many stories like the one of the family from Nong Oh. Farmers around the world must every day walk into dangerous fields, risking injury from unexploded cluster bombs to feed their families. We owe it to them to walk into the dangerous fields of international diplomacy and "war talk" to call on the nations of the world to halt their use of these weapons. Notes for Chapter 51. Titus Peachey, Field notes from trip to Laos, April 2000. |
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