MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Dalla fine della guerra israelo-libanese in agosto sono state
gravemente ferite (119) o uccise (18) persone, 3 al giorno, dalle bombe a grappolo
sganciate da Israele negli ultimi giorni della guerra; ci vorranno almeno 15 mesi
per liberarne l’area, se ci sarà il denaro sufficiente.
Il tasso ufficiale di fallimento delle bombe a grappolo è
del 15%, ma quello calcolato per questa guerra è del 40%.
Sono legali e, molto efficaci, se mirate ad obbiettivi militari,
ma è difficile centrarle solo su obiettivi militari.
Gli USA hanno venduto ad Israele questo tipo di bombe, con
un accordo segreto che ne restringeva l’utilizzo; gli USA stanno indagando se
Israele ha violato gli accordi.
Sono ora impegnati nell’opera di “sminamento” 300 soldati
dell’esercito libanese e 30 altri gruppi, ognuno con una trentina di esperti. Israele
ha dichiarato di aver lanciato volantini di avviso prima del bombardamento, e
che ha fornito mappe per i siti dove potrebbero trovarsi, mappe dichiarate
inutili dall’ONU.
Il giornale israeliano Haaretz ha pubblicato la
dichiarazione anonima di un comandante di un’unità lancia missili in Libano:
«Ciò che abbiamo fatto è folle e mostruoso, abbiamo coperto intere città con
bombe a grappolo».
L’ONU calcola ci siano circa 1 milione di bombe inesplose
nel sud del paese, contro i 650 000 abitanti dell’area, ne sono state eliminate
finora solo 4500; sono state la sganciate quasi solo negli ultimi giorni, durante
i negoziati ONU per far terminare il conflitto.
Perché:
-
per infliggere i maggiori danni possibili a
Hezbollah prima del ritiro - per impedire alla gente di tornare in questa regione,
con 750 punti dove si trovano bombe inesplose.
Alcuni agricoltori libanesi stanno cercando le bombe
da soli o pagando privatamente per l’opera di sminamento, per poter coltivare i
loro terreni.
Nyt 061006
Israeli Bomblets Plague Lebanon
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Sept. 29 — Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly
three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel
dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more
than a year to clear the region of them.
– United Nations
officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million
unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves
of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across
fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools.
– As of Sept. 28, officials here said cluster bombs had severely
wounded 109 people — and killed 18 others.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired
12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb
cut into his head and neck. He was from Sawane, a hillside village with a panoramic view of
terraced olive farms and rolling hills. Muhammad was sitting on a hip-high
wall, watching a bulldozer clear rubble, when the machine bumped into a tree.
A flash of a second later he was fatally
injured when a cluster bomblet dropped from the branches. “I took Muhammad to
the hospital in my car, but he was already dead,” said Yousef Ftouni, a
resident of the village.
The entire village was littered with the bomblets,
and as Mr. Ftouni recounted Muhammad’s death, the Lebanese Army worked its way
through an olive grove, blowing up unexploded munitions in a painfully slow
process of clearance.
Cluster
bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts
say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized
by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for
using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel
was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war,
when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end
the conflict.
Officials calculate that if they are lucky,
and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area.
There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts,
working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations Mine Action Coordination
Center in southern Lebanon
recorded 745 locations
across the south where unexploded bombs had been found. Of the million estimated to be
scattered around, so far 4,500 have been disposed of, according to the
center.
“Our priority at the moment is to clean
houses, main roads and gardens so that the displaced people can return to their
villages,” said Col. Mohammad Fahmy, head of the national mine clearing office.
“The next stage will be cleaning agricultural lands.”
In Lebanon
there are two explanations of why Israel
unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as
possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as
a strategy to keep people from returning right away.
– The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating
whether Israel’s
use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that
restricted when they could be used.
The final days of the war — a conflict that began when
Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon
into northern Israel
and sent militiamen across the border to capture Israeli soldiers — were
marked by a huge Israeli offensive. Israel hoped its final push would,
in part, help force the Security Council to adopt a tougher resolution on Hezbollah
than appeared to be taking shape.
Israel has said it
leafleted areas before bombing and provided Lebanon with maps of potential
cluster bomb locations to help with the clearing process. United
Nations officials in Lebanon
say the maps are useless.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article on Sept. 12 anonymously quoting the head
of a rocket unit in Lebanon
who was critical of the decision to use cluster bombs. “What we did was insane
and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” Haaretz quoted the
commander as saying.
Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to
explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with
spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that
everything done conformed with international law.
In Lebanon the problem of the
unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives
in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding
and harvest their crops. In
some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people
have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs — a practice that officials
have discouraged as dangerous.
But the people are desperate.
“If
I lost the season for olives and the wheat, I have no
money for the winter,”‘ said Rida Noureddine, 54, who farms a small patch of
land on the main road in the village
of Kherbet Salem. There
was a small black object at the entrance to his farm, and he thought it was a
cluster bomb.
“I feel as if someone has tied my arms, or is
holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul,” he said.
The
bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into
bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot
across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact
sheet issued by the Mine Action
Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official
failure rate of 15 percent.
That
means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in
this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. “We estimate there
are one million,” said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine
action center.
Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly
three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded
ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and
from other wars.
After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two
types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type
is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.
She said a large percentage of the unexploded
bomblets were made in America,
while some were produced in Israel.
Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As
they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.
When the device hits, the front end fires a
huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments.
When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails
look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.
“This is what they are living with every day,”
said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at
five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein
family farm.
Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at
home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive
trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.
“I feel that the land has become my enemy,” he
said. “It represents a danger to my life and my kids’ lives.”
Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Lebanon.
New York Times