NZ's bomb-ban role lauded

ROSS GIBLIN

MAKING A DIFFERENCE: After a light aircraft dropped leaflets over Wellington yesterday to promote the banning of cluster bombs, Solway College students Sophie Maxwell, 14,left, Tahi Hikitapua-Martin, 13, and Guiliana Piercy, 14, retrieved copies from the Frank Kitts Park lagoon.

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New Zealand's leading role in promoting a ban on cluster bombs could see a new international treaty in place by May.

Eighty nations are expected to attend a treaty conference in Wellington in February to accelerate efforts to ban the munitions, which have killed and maimed civilians around the world.

New Zealand is a co-sponsor of the Norwegian treaty initiative, which aims to replicate the success of the anti-landmine treaty drawn up a decade ago.

This country's efforts have been commended by an Australian campaigner who is in Wellington to give public talks about the horrors of cluster bombs. John Rodsted, a photojournalist whose abhorrence of landmines and cluster munitions goes back to his work in Cambodia in the 1980s, said the weapons left a deadly legacy once the war moved on.

Whereas the landmine treaty had effectively halted the use of anti-personnel mines over the past 10 years, cluster munitions were still causing huge problems.

"By default they have the same effect. It is not so much what happens when you bomb the hell out of a target, it's what happens to people who come back after the war to find these unexploded munitions all around them."

Mr Rodsted was appalled by what he saw after the war in Lebanon last year. "It was the same as what I'd seen in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Sudan.

"In the last three days of the conflict last year, Israel put about four million cluster munitions into Lebanon. This was a salted-earth policy ... to saturate southern Lebanon and make it a de facto minefield so people can't go back."

As many as 45 per cent of the bomblets failed to explode, littering towns, orchards and farmland, he said. One bomb could contain up to 600 bomblets and one multiple-launch rocket system could saturate a target with 7000 bomblets.

"With 25 to 45 per cent dud rates, it actually makes a minefield look like a good option. We were finding them in houses and hospitals ... and some were smaller than D-size batteries."

Since June last year, 200 people had been killed or maimed in Lebanon by cluster munitions. Another 38 demining personnel had been killed or maimed while trying to clear them, a toll which included a British friend, Mr Rodsted said.

He described the weapons as a means of bombing countries back into the Stone Age, referring to Laos, where hundreds of kilometres of land were covered with munitions dropped more than 30 years ago.

"You put those people in a cycle of danger and poverty that never goes away. The war finished in Laos in 1975 and it is still hamstrung courtesy of the unexploded-bomb problem."

He commended New Zealand's record in peace and disarmament issues and its sponsorship of the new treaty along with Norway, Mexico, Peru, Austria and Ireland.

Sadly, he said, Australia was not following suit. Its Government was in the process of buying new artillery shells containing heat-seeking cluster munitions.

Mr Rodsted is in Wellington at the invitation of the New Zealand Cluster Munitions Coalition. He will speak to diplomats and politicians and give public talks, including one in Wellington today at 6pm at Capital E's Mackenzie Theatre in Civic Square.

- © Fairfax NZ News