Keeping Nice Company

"The fact that they made an amendment was significant. We were surprised to get any amendment and surprised that was the amendment we got. If they were only going to delete one word, 'using' was the most important one."
"It clarifies the fact that Canadian forces themselves can never use clusters. But it also means it will be more difficult for other countries to use them in joint ops when Canadians are involved."
Paul Hannon, executive director, Mines Action Canada

  Bomb demolition experts detonate a cluster bomb after finding it near a village in southern Lebanon.   Photograph by: THOMAS COEX , AFP/Getty Images

Canada has found itself in an awkward situation. While Canadian activists aided by Canadian Members of Parliament supporting them, became headstarters in bringing the deadly issue of banning cluster bombs to the United Nations, and encouraging nations to outlaw their use on the battlefield, Canada has never officially signed on to the agreement. The time has long since passed for Canada to sign that document, passing the legislation required to fulfill that obligation.

Cluster bombs represent a dreadful scourge as a nasty and unnecessary weapon in the arsenal of destruction employed by armies of the world. They were designed to maim and to kill, for maximum effect to distribute their malign explosive potential in as large an arc as possible. They are represented by a bomb containing many far smaller bomblets. Each of these small bombs are packed full of shrapnel, designed to extract as much harm to life and limb as possible.

Their intention transcends sinister, for they are designed to appear innocent in their construction and their purpose. Their shapes and their colours make them appear as they could possibly be toys, attractive to inquisitive and playful children. The consequences are dreadful, for they represent a military armament whose victims are mostly not military, but civilians. Farmers and peasants working in fields, children picking up attractive objects die, or lose their limbs, their eyesight.

There is no conceivable reason born of efficiency on the battlefield or a threat to one's military enemies to excuse the use of these malignant bombs. But Canada, in honouring its commitment to NATO, and in recognition of its close ties with the United States where often both countries' militaries operate in joint missions, has a problem. Canada does not maintain an arsenal of cluster bombs, but its neighbour does.

Operating in the battlefield on a joint assignment could be extremely difficult should Canada sign that legislation ratifying the international treaty banning cluster bombs, with the knowledge that the United States uses them, maintains them in their arsenal, and has no intention of signing the treaty. The bombs are designed to break apart in mid-air spreading their hundreds of small, explosive bomblets across a targeted area.

Which does represent a hypocrical stance on the part of the U.S. at least, making an (quite deserved) international incident out of the use of chemical weapons representing a weapon of mass destruction, marginally more refined and broader in destruction only at time of use than the cluster bomb.

All party support in the Commons Foreign Affairs committee supported the Conservative government's removal of the word 'using' to make it clear that Canadian troops themselves cannot use the weapons. While leaving their role in joint military operations with countries such as the United States fairly nebulous.

Neither China, Russia nor the U.S. have signed, nor appear prepared to sign the treaty; all three of whom stockpile the weapons.