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Cluster Munitions (Prohibitions) Bill [Lords]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Robert Key) for that remarkable speech. I am sure no one will forget what he said about Friday 13 May 1955. I welcome the international moves against land mines and cluster bombs. The first time I came across a cluster bomb was in the early 1980s in Afghanistan. There were a number of little green things with a wing on the side and a bit of metal protruding from them. Back in Pakistan, I saw the effect of those at a children's hospital run, I think, but the International Committee of the Red Cross. I shall not forget, in Bosnia in about 1992, when someone had been blown up by a mine in a little town called Stari Vitez, my team and I going back to where we lived and prising out of the soles of our Timberland shoes little flecks of different bits of people. In 2003 I remember standing in a built-up area in northern Iraq and being extremely surprised to see shiny little unexploded bomblets, almost certainly from an American plane. I wondered why they had been used there in those circumstances. Poorly targeted, they do not discriminate between civilian and military targets. When the submunitions fail to explode, they become de facto land mines, every bit as lethal as that experienced by my hon. Friend, causing civilian casualties much later. A number of countries have refused to sign the convention, most notably Russia and China, which export cluster munitions to third-world countries. We know that the end-user arrangements can be extremely tenuous. Russia's arms exports are about $10 billion. Chinese defence exports are somewhat lower. Most of those go to Pakistan, another country that has not signed, as is the case for Israel. By signing the convention, the Government will not be able to stop nasty wars in various parts of the world that are still being fought with the use of cluster munitions. The two latest and most well-known examples are the war between Russia and Georgia and the extensive use of presumably American-made cluster bombs in Lebanon by Israel. I have no idea what is going on in the nastier, darker corners of the world in all those little wars in places such as Africa.