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Cluster Munitions

My Lords, I am deeply indebted to everyone who has spoken in the debate. I rather deplore our tradition that everyone must start by congratulating the person who has been lucky enough to win the ballot. It uses valuable time, and there is nothing very clever about winning the ballot. I was very lucky to get it on this day, and it could well have been the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. I acknowledge, as I should have done at the start, that he would certainly have conducted this debate at least as well and probably better than I did. He has a better track record on fighting cluster munitions than I as yet have, but I regard myself as a rival in that regard, and I will try not to start addressing him as my noble friend. I, too, acknowledge the pioneering, courageous and skilled work of Landmine Action, a non-government voluntary body. I should have declared an interest, and I will have to put it in the office, that it paid the expenses of my visit to Oslo and will do so for my visit to Peru. I leave it to your Lordships to judge whether that has coloured my judgment; I assure noble Lords that it has not. My noble friend on the Front Bench pointed out that of the 49 who went to Oslo, Poland, Romania and Japan have not signed up. I therefore, against Poland and Romania, take from a long list France, Germany, Italy and Spain, all in Europe, who did so. My noble friend mentioned Japan; I mention Canada and Austria. We can play these cards out as if it is a party game. The list is long, distinguished and growing. It is perhaps worth saying that of the34 nations which make these beastly things, sell them to others and approve of their use, 15 have now signed up to the Oslo accord. So it was a very significant development and is one to take note of and to be exploited in a way in which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, is more skilled than anyone in doing. It has been suggested that we should approach a total ban by stages. Certainly, there should be effective regulation of how these things are used. The use in Lebanon was utterly disgraceful and inhumane. In discussions outside this Chamber, I am constantly told that commanders are not allowed to use them in built-up areas, and yet I have seen film of these things in use in Nis, a considerable city in the Balkans, as well as a commander who saturated a village in the Lebanon. So those rules do not actually work. In the haste, fear, anger and fog of war, rules get bent or ignored. The only thing that works is not providing weapons that are not fit for purpose. It must cause the Government to waver, whatever their current commanders are saying, that we have written testimony from one field marshal that this type of weapon is counterproductive and causes you to lose the war even if you have won the battle, and we have an air marshal and a general saying that they serve no useful military purpose either. Having talked to pretty senior military people and commanders in the British forces, I do not get a sense of the depth of tenacity to this weapon that the Minister’s reply suggested exists. I suspect that the postcode of the advice is somewhere near Whitehall rather than somewhere near NATO headquarters. We come to the basic issue of why these things are unacceptable; apart from the military matters, which we can go on arguing about for some time, it is because they kill unacceptable numbers of civilians, of whom an unacceptably high proportion are children. We have had a notional figure of 30,000 casualties so far, and rising. That arises from two things. First, I concentrated in my opening remarks on the failure of the failsafe system, and I have heard no answer yet to the evidence that the United Nations produced from Lebanon on the failure rate, or to the video that I saw. There is the other aspect. These are area weapons; they do not attack targets. They attack areas in which the target either is or is supposed to be. The noble Baroness is looking anxious; we have until eight minutes past two, but I have nearly concluded. What is wrong with these weapons is that they do not pinpoint a target. The noble Lord, Lord Garden, asked what is coming next along the production line. It is called Bonus, and it has two or three accurate, individually targeted weapons that can recognise the difference between a tank and a tractor. I ask the noble Lord to do two things. First, I ask him to expedite and assist in every way that he can the Oslo process, as well as the United Nations process. Secondly, I ask him to get the boffins on with developing something that does the job that these things fail to do, knocks out the enemy and does not turn whole nations again us. With some reluctance, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers. Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.