Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-19-Speech-3-251"
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"en.20081119.20.3-251"2
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"−
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, cluster munitions are, to all intents and purposes, weapons of mass destruction, inhumane devices, if it is possible for a humane device to exist in a war.
A US army publication
states: ‘Unexploded bomblets are a problem for innocent civilians and our light forces, our dismounted infantry, who come after the bombardment of an urban area’, and nonetheless they continue to be produced and used and land polluted with unexploded devices continues to sow death year after year, as we have also seen in Georgia.
In Oslo, at the conference to combat the use, production and stockpiling of cluster munitions, a young Lebanese man aged 24, Ibrahim, whose body had been devastated by wounds, and who had an amputated leg, introduced himself, saying: ‘Pleased to meet you, I am a survivor’. I would have wanted to die, and instead I just embraced him. I went to meet him in his village, in the south of Lebanon, and I saw in the yards of the houses, the schools, in the grass, under the trees, unexploded bombs, launched from Israeli planes. They launched over 1 400 000 of them, and they launched them in recent days, when the truce and ceasefire had already been declared. This was pure cruelty, and I met many children, men and women in Afghanistan in the emergency hospitals, with mutilated bodies; there are thousands of children in the world mutilated because they played with fragments of cluster bombs, attracted by the coloured objects.
In Dublin, 109 countries undertook, after 10 days of debate, to sign the prohibition on the deadly weapons, to provide assistance to victims and to provide financial help to the areas involved, but the agreement also stipulates that all the arsenals must be destroyed within eight years. They will certainly not do this unless there is strong pressure from all the signatory countries of the United Nations and the countries which are responsible for crimes against civilian populations countries such as Israel, the United States, Russia, China, India and Pakistan, which did not go to Dublin and which have refused to ban cluster munitions.
Robert Gates, Defence secretary, has attempted to explain US resistance: cluster munitions are an effective weapon against many different objectives. The dead in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia have certainly tested this. Once again, Europe is showing its sensibilities, with the 22 countries that have signed and acceded to the Dublin Convention, but concrete action is needed.
On 2 and 3 December, the treaty will be officially signed in Oslo, but it will have to be ratified. We must do so quickly and block any attempt to get round the treaty, and I believe that the Council will really have to lay down effective political and financial instruments to ensure that the treaty is implemented and that there are no more deaths of this kind, namely deaths caused by weapons of destruction."@en1
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"Field Artillery"1
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