More than 70 countries push for cluster bomb ban

Lima, May 26: Nearly 70 countries pledged support for an international ban on cluster bombs, but the world's biggest producers of the munitions, the United States, Russia and China, were not among them.

Delegates from 68 countries met in the Peruvian capital, Lima yesterday, to broaden support for a declaration agreed to in Norway in February calling for a ban on cluster bombs by 2008. More than a third joined the process for the first time, having missed the Oslo meeting.

Among them was Laos, littered with more unexploded bomblets from cluster munitions than any other country.

More than 30 years after US airplanes bombed it during the Vietnam War, there are still tens of millions of cluster bomb duds scattered across the Southeast Asian country, each with the potential to kill.

When cluster bombs explode, they scatter numerous bomblets that often lie dormant, exploding only when they are picked up by unsuspecting civilians, sometimes years after they were dropped.

Campaigners say the vast majority of victims are civilians and about a quarter are children.

''We are confident we can agree to a treaty banning cluster munitions within a year,'' said Steve Goose, director of the Arms division at Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization pushing for the ban.

''Twenty-eight new countries joined the process in Lima, showing that the support for a ban on clusters is rapidly gaining momentum,'' he added.

The next scheduled meeting is in Vienna in December where organizers hope to gain support from more countries for a ban.

Some nations, mostly European countries that produce cluster bombs, pushed for a compromise that would exempt some munitions from a ban -- for example if they contained self-destruct mechanisms or had a proven reliability rate.

Campaigners said only a blanket ban would do.

''I don't think many countries are rowing back from their position in Oslo,'' said Thomas Nash, coordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition, an umbrella group pushing for a ban.

''The problem is that certain countries like the United Kingdom, Japan, Finland, France, Germany and Australia want a weaker treaty,'' he told Reuters.

The United States, Russia and China did not attend either the Lima or Oslo conference.

Israel, which was heavily criticized for dropping millions of bomblets in southern Lebanon during its war last year with Hezbollah guerrillas, also stayed away.

Reuters>