I have heard that cluster bombs can be confused with food packages dropped from the air - which might land in minefields anyway - and that armed soldiers commandeer food packages intended for civilians. So perhaps a few cluster bombs reach their intended targets. But at what cost?

Should Canada be participating in this sort of war? Are we any better than the amputators in Sierra Leone?

Here is an article that was published in the Nelson Daily News on 20 March, 2000.  - First published in The
Spectator (UK)

* * * *

The ABCs of killing and maiming children

By Brian Cloughley For Southam Newspapers

In front of me as I write is a dud butterfly bomb. It is just over 10 centimetres wide and five deep, made of plastic and shaped like a wing-nut or a butterfly - and its purpose was to blow the hands off Afghan children.

I was given this horrible object in Herat, in the northwest of Afghanistan. It is losing its colour now, having been bright green when new. They were produced in green, blue, red and yellow because they would be more attractive for children to pick up and thus have their hands blown off. This was usually only up to the wrist, but sometimes further, especially if the child was delicate or small. One wing of the bomb is just over a centimetre thick and was filled with explosive. The other side is flat, and in the middle is a cylinder that contained the detonator. When dropped from aircraft in their thousands, they twirled on their axes down to earth and landed upright, whereupon the detonator was made active. It has what is called a trembler fuse that would cause it to explode half a second or so after it was picked up. Note the delay. There had to be time for the bomb to be fully grasped, otherwise there was no point in dropping it in the fields and watercourses close to villages. If it could explode at a touch, a child might lose only a few fingers. (Sometimes they lost feet.)

No: it had to be seized in a tiny hand for the explosive to act in the way that was intended.

Horrible, you will agree. There must be a word to describe the warped minds that thought up this particular little wheeze, and for those who produced them, and for the evil men who cast them about the countryside, but I can’t think of one bad enough. The designer (he? she?) has moved on now, and is probably inventing clockwork pop-up toasters or something equally useful, while those who produced them and dropped them are no doubt equally gainfully occupied. I trust they do not sleep at night, but likely they do, well enough. In the meantime, some of the children they mutilated continue to exist, after a fashion, for so long as their families support them. But most of the crippled female children are allowed or encouraged to die.

There would be a bang, you see, in a field, and a screaming child would hold up a bright-red, streaming, pumping stump. The women would rush to the infant and shout for the men to try to stop the blood, and in natural womanly fashion they would offer comfort. The mother and grandmothers, sisters and aunts would be beside themselves with grief because they knew that although a maimed male child would be useless to the family, a one-handed female child was worse than that: she would be a burden, for in later life she could not carry water or firewood or be a useful slave before marriage - and who would marry such as she?

And so, if possible, the men would allow the child to die at once. Many girls did - those who were not saved by the shrieks of the womenfolk, shaming the men into stanching the spouting blood. Later, after the men worked their malevolent machismo, the mother might agree that a helpless, unproductive female child would be better dead, and she was usually made so, by smothering as she lay asleep between man and woman on the floor, or in the bed of the mother, still held by her. And the man padded across the hard-packed earth in the room in which the other children caught their breath in the still of early morning, closing eyes and ears as he held his scarf over mouth and nose and took the corpse of his child from the house for silent burial among some far-off rocks. Or the sleeping child might be placed outside in the snow, where her one-handed life would come to a merciful end in a swirl of flakes on an icy night. I was told that, according to season, this was the best means of ridding the family of a cripple, for it could take place early in the evening and the father could then have uninterrupted rest. It sometimes happens, anyway, if there are more female babies born than are desired of a winter - and not just in Afghanistan.

There are few in the West who think about Afghan children. They are yesterday’s news. It is, as usual, the unsung, hard-working dedicated people of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, the Halo Trust, Medecins sans Frontieres, the UN Comprehensive Disabled Afghans Program and other organizations which care about things like this. (The effort should be put in perspective by the fact that the UN program, for example, is limited to $2.2 million this year: the cost of two cruise missiles.) But we are brought a little more up to date by NATO’s war against Serbia, when little bombs coloured orange and yellow were spread around.

NATO dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on Serbia. Each of them contained some 200 cricket-ball- or soft-drink-can-sized objects coyly called ‘submunitions’ - small bombs, in other words. These are brightly coloured and designed to kill lots of people for little money, and were effective, save for the fact that many of them were past their ‘use-by’ date and did not explode on hitting the ground. They remain armed and may explode when moved. Some have done so already. The ‘normal’ failure rate is officially acknowledged as five per cent, but we are told so many lies by our masters that this figure is suspect. NATO admits that there may be 14,000 unexploded yellow bomblets and, if this is what they admit to, the true figure is likely to be more chilling. These bomblets will maim children, but you can be sure that NATO’s excellent machine will cope with that problem. (Not the maiming, the publicity - please don’t be obtuse.)

The same applies in Iraq, which US and British aircraft have been illegally bombing for over a year. Their aircraft sweep across the skies amd ‘deliver ordnance’ throughout the country and nobody cares, except the Iraqis, of course. The United States and the U.K. have achieved nothing by their onslaught, other than some remarkably good training (another U.S.Air National Guard unit headed east in February), but how many cluster bombs have been dropped? How many little yellow toys are there in the sands of Iraq, waiting to be picked up by children who will not appear in the statistics of the maimed?

And how many of these or similar explosives were used in Russia’s attacks on Grozny?

It wasn’t the Third World that invented and made butterfly and cluster bombs: they are products of so-called civilized countries, and this should be remembered when the ‘developed’ nations lecture others about their conduct. The posturing of Russia and the West is dismal, coming as it does from a self-satisfied bunch of humbugs who demand standards which they are not themselves prepared to meet. They scatter their evil bombs on civilians (a few more killed in Iraq last month; who cares?) in the name of ‘justice’ and cannot see that their bombs are as bad as anyone else’s. Worse, really, because they imagine they are ‘ethical’ bombs.

(Brian Cloughley served in the British and Australian armies in Germany and Asia, and saw active service in Borneo and Vietnam.)

Thanks to Norman Thyer

6115 Sproule Creek Road, Nelson, B.C., Canada V1L 6Y1

for this post