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If cluster munitions do not explode, they become small landmines. They are the size of my fist roughly. Because of the very high failure rate, latterly a secondary system has been introduced into many of them, which is designed to self-destruct within five seconds after impact if the bomb has not already gone off. I shall go into failure rates later. However, it is important to remember that they also have a failure rate. All ammunition has a failure rate, from a 303 round to a howitzer round. If the secondary mechanism fails, and experience proves that it does so on a considerable scale, the bomb left on the ground is just as dangerous and far more difficult to defuse. That is one of the reasons why so many landmine clearing experts are losing their lives around the world at present. Munitions designed to self-destruct and those which have other mechanisms to make them more accurate are excluded from a general definition known as “dumb/smart munitions”. Her Majesty’s Government refuse to accept the term and I rather congratulate them on that. Referring to cluster munitions as “smart” would be an oxymoron, but we do not have a general term for them yet; we need one.

It would be possible to quote many sources on failure rates and come to different conclusions, but fortunately the Quadripartite Committee of another place states the following at paragraph 367 of its report:

Going to the scale on which this happens, Handicap International, another charity of very great value, has said that in Lebanon it is estimated that at least 1,159,000 sub-munitions have been delivered by rocket and 2,800,000 by artillery, and those figures exclude all air-delivered weapons completely. I leave it to noble Lords to work out even 5 per cent of those numbers in relation to the size of that country. At the time of writing, the number of casualties reported as definitely due to these things was 587, but that is going to mount. Eleven of those casualties are de-miners. The de-miners are incredibly brave people. I had the privilege of meeting in Lima, at an earlier stage of the Oslo process, a de-miner of possibly Albanian origin who had simply stirred the grass at the end of a runway which had been under attack, having been told that some of these munitions were there. He never saw the thing that blew up, but it removed all his limbs. He now has no hands and no feet, indeed nothing below the knee. I can almost hear some of your Lordships say, “Spare us the bleeding

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stumps”, but it is bleeding stumps that we are actually talking about, thousands if not millions of them.

The scale to dwarf all is that of Vietnam. By 1975, 294 cluster munitions—the containers, not the bomblets—had been delivered to the equivalent of every square kilometre of Vietnam, which works out at roughly two sub-munitions per head of the population of that country. It is also tragic to note that the ratio of those killed shows that more than twice as many civilians died as did military personnel. Is it not surprising that the Americans lost the war, and is there not a lesson for us there? Therefore almost in parenthesis, I ask the Minister whether our use of these weapons on the fringes of Basra affected our reception by the local civilian population.

All this is certainly horrific, but is it militarily useful? I have already referred to Landmine Action, which states on page 9 of its report that:

Incidentally, in that campaign there was a total of 234,123 sub-munitions confirmed minimum, of which a considerable number were dropped by us and the rest by our allies.

This makes the blood run a little cold. On the military issues there are others—notably the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, who is to address your Lordships later—who know more about this than I do, but already after the first Gulf War certain American senior soldiers, particularly those connected with 3 Infantry Division, were calling these campaign losers, not because of their effect on the civilian population, which would be disastrous for their eventual aim, but on their own troops because they could not go on foot through ground on which they had deployed their weapons. Every time they came to where they had deployed any weapons they had to get into their helicopters. Consequently they arrived late on objective.

I ask your Lordships to consider their impact, not only on people in the battlefield at the time of the battle but on a large number of civilians afterwards. We cannot hear the groans of the wounded, for whom the loss of a limb is the loss of a livelihood; we cannot hear the tears of the widows and orphans who have lost the means of subsistence; we cannot hear the frustration of those who want to carry on their commercial activities but cannot because the roads are not safe; we cannot hear the farmers who dread to till their fields because they do not know what has been sown in them. People in Vietnam fear them still; they are losing up to 100 civilians a year as a result of these things.

I do not need to say much more to convince your Lordships about the horror of these weapons. That is no doubt why the UN Secretary-General received an invitation and a welcome to the convention meeting last week in Geneva. He urged states to,



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I pause on the word “developmental” to reflect how extraordinarily well qualified the Minister is to respond to this debate. From the moment he founded the Economist development report, through his work at the World Bank on the United Nations millennium development goals, to his work as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, as the chef de cabinet to the Secretary-General and eventually as a deputy secretary, he has been committed to development for the whole of his career. I hope he will be able to answer with that in mind, untrammelled by words of caution from the officials’ box or from his Secretary of State.

The Minister will be familiar with the extraordinary circumstances in which I found myself last week in the United Nations building, the Palais de Nations, a vast amphitheatre full of people who, for hour upon hour, were straining to change two words in an unimportant preliminary document. Anything important was happening in the cafeteria or in small rooms, and I had the privilege of seeing the French and Russians grouped like a rugby scrum around a small round table. It was impossible to hear anything they were saying, which was most frustrating.

That brings me to the Russians and the fact that, until they became active, there seemed to be a general agreement available on a fairly positive result to all this. However, the chill wind from Siberia flowed into the corridors and it wilted. I shall tell your Lordships in a moment what we got as a result. I would like to know from the Minister whether I am right that our own diplomatic efforts are constrained within the terms of the European leadership. Apparently, we have to toe its line in certain respects. If the presidency adopts a line, we have to follow it. Does that extend to our role in the Security Council? I hope that it does not.

The United Nations proceeds by consensus. Members of this House proceed often enough by consensus to hold it up as a virtue, but I see it as a terrible threat, because it enables anybody to stop something in its tracks, which is just about what happened. The text, as agreed by consensus on 13 November, stated:

the fight to include the word “negotiate”, showing that something positive was being done, is immediately neutralised by “a proposal”—

My noble friend on the Front Bench will undoubtedly do that, although I think that he will get the balance marginally wrong. The text continues:

that is, the group of government experts—

I skip to the programme for the experts. They will meet from 14 to 18 January. It is urgent business, this: their next meeting is on 7 July. That is where I would like them to see the bleeding stumps and to hear the cries of the wounded and the bereaved.



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Even that, several states—Brazil, Pakistan, India, South Korea and the United States—indicated that they would not support, nor would they negotiate a mandate if it was explicitly aimed at establishing a prohibition or if it had a deadline. The Russians asked to be read into the record a long declamation of what they would not stand, including anything that had any commercial or economic effect. At that point, I thought that we were in Alice in Wonderland territory. It was therefore encouraging to hear the Prime Minister say at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet:

on which I and my colleagues offer warm congratulations—

If noble Lords read that alongside the Oslo declaration, they will see that the Oslo process includes exactly what the Prime Minister stated, with added to it humanitarian treatment for those affected and destruction of the stockpiles. What better commendation could there be to the next meeting of the Oslo process in Vienna, to which I am delighted to say that the noble Lord—I am tempted to call him a noble friend, but that is dangerous ground in this Chamber—will go from our country?

I have possibly said enough to persuade your Lordships that these are obscene weapons, whose effects are unacceptable and unavoidable, as one sees from the deaths among mine clearers as well as others, and that we should in all humanity stop using them at once. Our country is leading the way—I am proud of that—but what I would like to hear from the Minister today is an unequivocal undertaking that the Government will pursue this to the end in the Oslo process, and will find as few weasel words as possible for the final declaration so that everything that does not work is scrubbed out. We are talking about future generations. How true was it said that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children and the children’s children unto the third and fourth generation. It is on their behalf that I draw your Lordships’ attention to the Motion. I beg to move for Papers.

11.59 am

Lord Jay of Ewelme: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on bringing this subject to your Lordships' House for a second time. It deserves a second hearing. I congratulate, too, the Government on a slightly crabwise but none the less forward movement on cluster munitions over the past year or so. I hope to show that with only a little further movement the Government could put themselves in a position in which they felt genuinely comfortable and could play a leadership role on an issue of great public and humanitarian concern.

We have alas to accept that there will continue to be conflicts in the years ahead—often unjustified, often preventable, always nasty. That is a depressing

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but realistic conclusion. But even recognising that, we can and must take action to mitigate the worst consequences of conflict, and that means in particular the effect of conflict on innocent civilians and especially on women and children. That is why action has been taken against landmines—I join the noble Lord, Lord Elton, in congratulating Landmine Action on the work that it has done and continues to do—and that is why action is needed now to ban cluster munitions, weapons which, as the noble Lord explained, are lethal, horrible and do untold damage to innocent people in the months and years after conflicts have gone and sometimes after the original purpose of that conflict has been forgotten.

As I say, I welcome the Government’s move recently towards a ban on cluster munitions. I welcome the decision to work for a ban on so-called dumb munitions and to withdraw the United Kingdom's stocks with immediate effect. I welcome the Government's commitment to the Oslo process and I understand their desire to work in parallel through the convention on conventional weapons to engage those countries whose position is less forward than our own. But despite the stance taken by the Government, and despite, as I understand it—perhaps the Minister can confirm this—the strong position taken by the European Union at the meeting in Geneva, the outcome was weak and disappointing. It is clear that working through the CCW is going to be, at the very best, a long process.

The Oslo process therefore remains the key. What the whole issue now requires is firm and moral leadership, and the prospect of such leadership from the United Kingdom seems tantalisingly close. The Prime Minister said in his Mansion House speech, as the noble Lord, Lord Elton, said, that he would work towards,

echoing the words of the UN Secretary-General. But the inescapable truth is that all cluster bombs cause unacceptable harm to civilians regardless of whether they are dumb, not dumb, smart or not very smart. Surely these are semantic and ignoble distinctions to make.

All cluster bombs or bomblets that do not explode may kill or maim innocent people, and very many of them do. I found the figures which the noble Lord mentioned horrific. Even if only 2 per cent—and that is way below the estimates—of the bomblets used in Lebanon in 2006 did not explode, that means that there are tens of thousands of bomblets waiting to trap innocent people. The only possible justification for accepting that those should continue is if we believe that the military use of these weapons is so overwhelmingly important that it outweighs the unquestioned humanitarian cost. I very much look forward to hearing the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, speak on that point. I find that case very hard to believe and I hope that the Minister will not seek to advance that argument when he responds to the debate.

As I said, there is a need for moral leadership here. The Foreign Secretary, when Secretary of State at Defra, showed such leadership in putting forward the

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draft Climate Change Bill, which I strongly support and which I look forward to debating in the House later this month. Will the Minister use his undoubted expertise and influence to persuade the Foreign Secretary that a decision now to work for a legally binding instrument to ban all cluster munitions and to withdraw our stockpiles of all cluster munitions with immediate effect would be a similar act of statesmanship, which would be strongly welcomed by very many people in this country and abroad and would have a real chance of saving many innocent lives in the years ahead?

12.05 pm

Lord Ramsbotham: My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Jay in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Elton, on obtaining this debate. It is marvellous that the debate is taking place so soon after the Geneva conference in which he played a distinguished part. I also express my pleasure that once again the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is taking part in this debate because, between them, the two noble Lords have done so much to keep this issue alive.

When I last spoke on this in the debate in May, I mentioned my experience both as a military commander and as somebody involved in demining, which had conditioned my view about these weapons. At the risk of boring the House, I would like to return to that because I was very interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Elton, mention the after-action comments of the United States Third Infantry Division in Iraq, who pointed out that it was not just a case of the damage caused to civilians by unexploded weapons but of the difficulties imposed on the movement of its own troops which made these inappropriate weapons for that type of conflict.

When I commanded the British Third Armoured Division for two years, which was the first division to be given a counterattack responsibility within the NATO forces in Germany, my task was to go quickly to places where I could deliver a counterattack, following an advance by the Russians. We were then concerned particularly about problems of movement. We were able to take action around our own marked minefields because we knew where they were. But when you looked at the state of the battlefield, you realised that they were not the principal inhibitors; the principal inhibitors were the unmarked, random minefields, many of which had been delivered by cluster munitions. They had been put down for what was then a military purpose.

The development of these weapons began in Korea when people were concerned with taking on massed Chinese infantry. They required a weapon to take action against mass—fine. The next development took place again in the context of mass, but against mass armour. The idea developed of cluster munitions which could deliver top attack—as it was called—many of which could take on the more vulnerable top parts of a tank and could help break up massed Russian armour. At the time, as military people, we welcomed those because of what they did when we had a purely defensive posture. But once movement began and the inhibitors, particularly of

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the failed weapons, began to cause problems for our own movement, we realised that these were not appropriate weapons where movement was concerned.

That was during the Cold War when we were talking about war between what are called industrial nations by armed bodies of uniformed troops on ground which was dedicated to the battle between them. That, of course, is not the nature of warfare, particularly since the end of the Cold War. We are not talking about war between the armed forces of industrial nations; we are talking about, in the words of General Sir Rupert Smith, “wars amongst the people”. It is the people who we have to consider.

I was also involved in demining in places such as Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia. I am sure that the Minister will remember the welcome that the demining fraternity gave to the pronouncement by the new president of the World Bank, of which he was then a member, in July 1995, when for the first time he said that the World Bank recognised that demining was not a purely military activity and it therefore qualified for World Bank funding for post-conflict reconstruction. That was one of the most important statements made in this area, because until then demining activities were severely frustrated by the lack of funding.

When we went to carry out the demining, it was easy to clear mines that were marked, but it was not easy to clear those that were unmarked. One was particularly concerned about the random delivery by cluster munitions all over the place, which were not marked; nor did anyone know the failure rate. I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Elton, mentioned the figures that have been produced following the completely unjustified use of those weapons, particularly the M85 in Lebanon, because they drive a coach and horses through the previous figures given to justify their use.

There has been one other development since our last debate in May; the publication in America of the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. It is the result of work done by General David Petraeus, who is the senior commander of the American forces in Iraq. The manual is one of the most remarkable documents that I have ever come across, because it completely reverses the previous United States approach to warfare of this kind. It used to be based on what was called the “doctrine of overwhelming force”. Overwhelming force was just that; the application of everything that you had every time that you took part in any form of conflict, because they felt that that guaranteed quick success and would save lives. They have analysed the results of using these sorts of weapons, particularly in Iraq, and the report of the third division, which the noble Lord, Lord Elton, mentioned, played a large part in that.

At the beginning of the manual, there are two very interesting essays. One is by Colonel Nagl, who is one of the American army authors, who was in Iraq, in which he says that the American army was completely unprepared for this type of conflict. The other essay is by Sarah Sewall, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Inter alia, she says:



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She also postulates that the manual may also reveal America’s moral anxiety:

In particular, commenting on the new doctrine, she says:

When I mentioned this in the previous debate, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said to me that although he completely accepted what I was saying, he suspected that I would be,

I am the first to listen to such advice, and when I was commanding forces I hoped that people might listen to mine. But bearing in mind the type of warfare and the sort of appreciation that the Americans have now carried out as a result of their experiences of what using these weapons has done to their ability to fight war among the people, I suggest that there cannot be a British military commander who could justify the use of these weapons in the sort of warfare now taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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