Wars lethal leftovers
By CLAIRE
SCHAEFFER-DUFFY Kabul, Afghanistan
Last October, shortly after a U.S. plane dropped a cluster bomb on
Shakar Qala, a village adjacent to the western city of Herat, Afghanistan, Dan
Kelly got a phone call. The hit at Shakar Qala killed nine people, injured 14,
destroyed 24 of the hamlets 50 houses and left Kelly, the U.N.
coordinator for mine removal in Afghanistan, dealing with a new threat on the
ground.
The caller was a local Herat de-miner who didnt know how to
defuse the bright yellow bomblets, the size of soda cans, still lying around
Shakar Qala. One had already killed a curious villager. Women and children were
too terrified to leave their houses.
Last autumns air war on Afghanistan, with its use of cluster
bombs, wreaked havoc on the countrys de-mining program.
The significant use of cluster bombs caused us to change our
whole operation, said Kelly, who is program manager for the U.N. Mine
Action Program in Afghanistan. The program oversees an extensive mine clearance
program run by eight regional offices and 15 nongovernmental organizations.
Kelly reports that 234 air strikes used cluster weapons, dropping
between two and 16 bombs per foray. Each bomb scattered submunitions, also
called bomblets, many of which failed to detonate, leaving a lethal litter of
more than 15,000 duds on a land already saturated with mines and
unexploded ordnance.
Despite a decade of well-coordinated mine clearance, Afghanistan
in September 2001 was still one of the most mine- and unexploded
ordnance-affected countries in the world, according to Landmine Monitor,
a publication of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Mines were first laid by Soviet troops during the 1980s and then
scattered haphazardly by retreating mujahideen during the civil war of the
1990s. Along with unexploded ordnance -- the war trash of battles long past --
the mines have impeded the resettlement of the country, curtailing farming and
killing or maiming, on average, 150 to 300 people a month.
Calculating the number of injuries and fatalities caused by mines
or unexploded ordnance in Afghanistan is difficult. Often people are hurt in
remote areas far from any medical facility. The country has only one doctor for
50,000 people. Some victims die en route to a hospital.
According to U.N. Mine Action Program, the estimated number of
mine and ordnance victims in 1999 was between five and 10 people a day. In
1993, the toll was 20 to 24 casualties per day. A large proportion of mine
victims are men of working age who are often the only family breadwinner.
The severity of Afghanistans mine problem required the Mine
Action Program to prioritize its plans for clearance. Areas where people were
getting blown up were dealt with first, then homes, fields and irrigation
systems, and finally farmlands and pastures.
But the U.S.-led air war, which started in early October,
completely changed the U.N. de-mining program. Kelly said air strikes forced
the withdrawal of most of the 68 de-mining sites dispersed throughout the
country because, from the air, de-mining camps look like military
operations.
We kept an emergency team in major centers, but we had to
close most of our tented sites, Kelly said.
At least three de-mining operations were bombed. The first hit,
which occurred within 48 hours of the start of the war, killed four and
left 11 shell-shocked people, he said. In addition, $14 million worth of
de-mining equipment was destroyed, primarily by war looting.
By late October, U.S.-led forces were using cluster bombs --
weapons that break open in midair, dispersing bomblets over a wide area of
land. Dispersal of the bomblets depends on several factors, such as release
altitude, spin rate of the munition and wind speed. But the weapons are
designed to scatter submunitions as far and wide as possible. A drop of several
canisters can create kill zones of a square kilometer or greater in size.
Many bomblets fail to explode on contact, becoming in effect the
equivalent of a land mine. Estimates of failure rates range from 5 percent to
30 percent, depending on the weapons system and conditions of use. Kelly
estimates that the failure rate for the CBU-87, a cluster munition used in
Afghanistan, is 10 percent.
In addition, the unexploded yellow bomblets were confused with
similarly colored food packages dropped from U.S. planes in Afghanistan.
Pentagon officials have said they plan to change the color of the food
packages. Cluster bombs in general are attractive to children, who often
mistake them for toys.
Manufactured by Alliant Technology in Hopkins, Minn., the CBU-87,
and its variant, the CBU-103, are described by Afghan de-miners as the
newest and most dangerous bomb.
Each CBU-87 scatters 202 canister-shaped bomblets, creating a
footprint 200 meters wide and 400 meters long.
These are not precision weapons, said Kelly. Strikes
that dropped multiple cluster bombs complicated the identification of
unexploded bomblets. When you superimpose 16 footprints in one area,
its difficult to get an accurate reading, he said.
Most cluster munitions are anti-tank or anti-personnel, designed
to destroy a tank and its crew or spray hundreds of shards of steel at
ballistic speeds over a wide area. The CBU-87 has multiple capabilities. The
highly volatile, canister-shaped bomblet, set off by human touch, is equipped
with a three kill mechanism. It can burn, shatter into 300
flesh-piercing pieces and penetrate up to five inches of tank armor.
Within each canister is an armor-piercing shape charge or
slug capable of traveling a kilometer. Kelly said the flying slug
makes detonation extremely treacherous, able to kill the de-miner as well as
onlookers standing a good distance away. Sometimes the nylon parachute attached
to each bomblet snares in trees. When that happens, the weapon becomes
hellishly difficult to defuse.
The U.N. Mine Action Program spent most of last November and
December providing capacity training for its 4,400 de-miners and has since
increased its personnel to 7,000, primarily to deal with the legacy of last
falls air war.
Our survey teams had to be taught what a footprint is and
then how to destroy these things, which are much more dangerous than an
anti-personnel mine. These things kill. We had to come up with a way to destroy
them, Kelly said. U.N. military sanctions, imposed on Afghanistan in
1998, prevented the de-mining program from buying detonators. So Kelly
purchased supplies from Pakistan and designed a defuser to implode the
bomblets.
By mid-October of last year, the United Nations had a liaison
officer at Central Command in Tampa, Fla., to identify the location of
de-mining operations in order to prevent further bombing of these sites. The
Tampa connection, Kelly said, enabled the de-mining program to get fairly
accurate information from the U.S. military about the location and number of
air strikes using cluster bombs.
Last winter, Human Rights Watch reported that U.S. airplanes
dropped 1,150 cluster bombs on 188 locations in Afghanistan. Kellys data
of cluster bomb use in 234 U.S. air strikes puts the number of drops between
468 and 3,744 bombs -- 94,536 to 756,288 bomblets. Five thousand of the duds
have been defused, which is about 35 percent of the necessary cleanup, Kelly
said.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan said, Cluster
munitions were used early on in last falls air campaign. Their use was
limited to certain targets -- large groups of enemy forces, vehicles and
equipments, tanks.
About 60 percent of the weapons [used in last
falls air campaign] were precision-guided, 40 percent were
not.
But a chart provided by the Arms Trade Resource Center of the
World Policy Institute identifies five different types of cluster bombs used
against Afghanistan, including the GATOR described as a scatterable
mine. The 1,000-pound bomb holds 72 anti-armor and 22 anti-personnel
mines.
Landmine Action, a British-based organization working for the
elimination of mines and unexploded ordnance, reports that more than 13 million
cluster submunitions were dumped on Iraq during the six weeks of bombing in the
Gulf War. The Pentagon estimates that 1,392 cluster bombs were dropped during
the U.S.-led NATO bombing in Kosovo.
First used by the United States in the Vietnam War, the prevalence
of cluster munitions in modern warfare, with their capacity to kill
indiscriminately long after a conflict is over, have led many humanitarian
organizations to call for an immediate ban on their use. Cluster weapons are
not covered under the Mine Ban Treaty because technically they are not
victim-activated and are designed to explode on impact.
The Call for a Moratorium on Cluster Bomb Use, sponsored by the
Mennonite Central Committee, proposes restricting the weapons under the
Convention on Conventional Weapons. The moratorium also would require cluster
bomb users to be accountable for ordnance clearance and assistance to
victims.
The U.S. military is not assisting with mine clearance in
Afghanistan. But the Department of States Office of Humanitarian Demining
Programs has allocated $7.03 million for fiscal year 2002 to support various
mine action activities in Afghanistan. The State Department said $3.1 million
of the years total will finance a commercial U.S. de-mining organization
that will, among other things, train Afghan de-miners in the removal of
unexploded bomblets. Of the $500 million provided by the United States for
humanitarian mine action worldwide since 1993, nearly $28 million has been
given to Afghanistan.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a freelance writer living in Worcester,
Mass., traveled with a 19-member interfaith delegation to Kabul in June. The
trip was organized by the San Francisco-based human rights group Global
Exchange.
Related Web sites
Afghan Victims Fund
campaign www.globalexchange.org/september11/victimsFund.html
Arms
Trade Resource Center www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms
Call
for a Moratorium on Cluster Bomb
Use www.mcc.org/clusterbomb
International Campaign to Ban
Landmines www.icbl.org
Landmine
Action www.landmineaction.org
Peaceful
Tomorrows www.peacefultomorrows.org
U.N. Mine Action Program
for
Afghanistan www.un.org/Depts/dpko/mine/program/afghanis.htm
U.S.
Department of State Office of Humanitarian Demining
Programs www.state.gov/t/pm/hdp
National Catholic Reporter, August 2, 2002
[corrected 08/16/2002]
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