No, this is not an article about Congress. It’s about countries who seem able to agree on little else standing together to fight the treaty ban on cluster munitions. During the cold war, they made sense on mass battlefields, but those conditions no longer exist. Now they are good only for indiscriminate killing, even months and years after deployment.
The United States, Russia and China are working against a pact signed by 108 countries to ban cluster munitions that kill civilians long after conflicts, a leading international campaign group said on Monday.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the 3 powers — as well as others like India, Pakistan, Israel and South Korea — were still pushing for a weaker United Nations treaty on the weapons although the pact was already in force.
"More than two years after adoption of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the United States and other major military powers continue actively to resist the convention," a 224-page report by the group said.
The report — Meeting the Challenge: Protecting Civilians through the Convention on Cluster Munitions — was presented by HRW at the United Nations’ European headquarters, seat of the world body-sponsored Conference on Disarmament.
The convention, negotiated outside the U.N. disarmament framework by countries frustrated at blockages in talks there, bans production, stockpiling and transfer of the weapons, which are dropped by air or fired by artillery.
Campaigners say they have killed thousands of civilians, with many deaths unrecorded in rural areas of poor countries where they have been deployed, since their first major use by the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Common Dreams>
The killing of innocent civilians, long after a conflict ends, cannot be sanitized using terms like collateral damage. Continuing to support the use of cluster munitions is inhuman.
2 Responses to “Cluster What?”
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Do you really think that “New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW)” is clear and honest? What is the treaty signatory value if lot of the signatories’ countries already used cluster bombs to fight rebels, terrorists and armies? Did the HRW encounters terrorists’ crimes of PKK, Turkey, Yemen government and rebels,
Hezbollah, Hamas, Taliban and such of the kind groups?
You also should know that killing of innocent civilians, long after a conflict ends has nothing to do with cluster bombs but with the state/organization’s behave and moral. People are killed with regular bombs, suicide bombers and shooting.
You should start watching Glenn Beck!
Abe, I’m actually trying to make some sense of what you wrote. What is ‘signatory value’? By ‘encounters’ did you mean report on their human rights violations? The answer is yes. Sorry, but I can’t decipher the sentence about killing innocent civilians.
On occasion, I do watch Glen Beck. When I’m very constipated, I’ll watch clips of him on my cell phone in the bathroom. If the thought that some people actually believe him doesn’t scare me empty, my uncontrollable laughter at his stupidity does the trick.