No Child (Or Farmer) Left Behind

by poputonian

What do you call a “large canister … as long as 13 feet and weighing up to 2,000 pounds … packed with … hundreds of … bomblets or submunitions packed with shrapnel and an explosive charge … launched from the air by fighter planes, bombers, or helicopters, or shot out of artillery, rockets or missile systems?”

It would be tempting to call it a cluster bomb.

Suppose that between 20 and 40 percent of the bomblets do not detonate upon impact and thus “their effects stretch beyond the duration of the hostilities” and when they do explode they “cannot distinguish between civilian and combatant.” What do you call it then?

How about a big canister full of land mines?

Probably not. Cluster bombs are legal and land mines are not. So we’d better go with cluster bomb.

The State Department is investigating Israel’s use of American made cluster bombs during the war in Lebanon–in particular whether Israel broke a secret agreement made in 1967 not to use cluster bombs against civilians.
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During the last three days of the war–as the final touches on the peace agreement were being made–Israel dropped an estimated 1.2 million bomblets throughout Lebanon, a country smaller than the state of Connecticut. Jan Egeland, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, was decidedly undiplomatic in his assessment: “What is shocking and, I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution.”

With their failure rate of up to 40%, more than one of every three bombs may not detonate immediately–lying in wait for children, trucks, and livestock.
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An unnamed Israeli commander of a rocket unit in Lebanon told Haaretz on September 12 that the saturation bombing with cluster weapons was “insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs.”
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The saturation bombing has effectively crippled agriculture. Farmers’ fields and orchards are now minefields and their crops are rotting on the stalk. The summer tobacco, wheat, and fruit, as well as late-yielding crops like olives, cannot be harvested, and winter crops, like lentils and chickpeas, have not been planted because farmers cannot plow their fields.

Many of the two to three daily casualties are poor farmers desperate to feed their families from fields that are now de facto minefields.

Rida Noureddine, an olive and wheat farmer whose land is littered with cluster bombs, feels the frustration of many southern Lebanese who are dependent on the land. He told the New York Times, “I feel as though someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by the neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul.”
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An Israeli Defense Force spokesman insists that “all of the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal according to international law and their use conforms to international standards.” That is cold comfort for the family of 11-year-old Ramy Shibleh, one of the post-war victims. He was gathering pinecones outside Halta, a small southern town where the Lebanese army had already cleared mines twice. But more bombs remained, including the one that Ramy and his brother hit with their cart of pinecones. Reuters reported that Ramy tried to toss the rock-like object out of the way, but it exploded, tearing off his right arm and the back of his head and killing him instantly. His mother keeps the shreds of the yellow shirt Ramy was wearing when he died. “He was only picking up the pine nuts to buy the toys he loved,” she told reporters.

From “What We Leave Behind: From Kosovo to Lebanon, cluster bomb casualties continue to mount” in the December print edition of In These Times. The article will be available on-line soon.