Cluster weapons were on show last week at the opening of Europe’s largest arms fair in London Docklands despite an appeal from the organisers to hide them away.
The controversial weapons, which pose a potential threat to civilians because they contain many bomblets that can fail to explode in the initial attack, were on offer at the stand of an Israeli arms company, Israel Military Industries (IMI).
The firm said it could provide new types of cluster weapons, now described as ”cargo ammunition”. One is called the M85 bomblet, which, IMI’s catalogue says, has been tested successfully in England.
The company has manufactured tens of millions of the bomblets for Nato, Central and Eastern European, and Asian countries.
Another IMI weapon on display, the anti-personnel, anti-materiel cartridge designed to hit armour and bunkers as well as soldiers in the open, is described as providing a ”real breakthrough in anti-personnel warfare”.
IMI’s catalogue recognises that ”hazardous duds normally constitute a very serious problem for users of cargo ammunition”. These duds, it admits, are ”in essence mines”.
But it adds that IMI has the ”safest self-destruct bomblets in the world”.
A salesman for IMI told The Guardian that he could not speak about the supply of the weapons to the British army, which fired hundreds of them during the war against Iraq. However, asked how many weapons his company sold to Britain, he replied: ”Officially none.”
A spokesperson for BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms company, said this week that it had bought 26 000 rounds of Israeli L20 artillery cluster shells in a contract agreed shortly before the Iraqi war. The British Ministry of Defence has admitted that the army fired more than 2 000 Israeli cluster munitions from howitzers during the battle for Basra.
Cluster weapons contain multiple small bomblets, a significant number of which fail to explode leaving a potentially fatal attraction for civilians, children in particular.
Unexploded cluster weapons have maimed and killed civilians in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Charities and humanitarian agencies say they should be declared illegal along with anti-personnel landmines.
Richard Lloyd, director of the campaign Landmine Action, said dozens of Iraqis had been killed and maimed in southern Iraq and there was a ”high probability” some unexploded bomblets were those fired by British guns.
The UN children’s fund, Unicef, says more than 1 000 children have been injured by cluster bomblets and other unexploded munitions since the official end of the war in Iraq.
The British Ministry of Defence said its policy was one of buying the most effective weapons for the best value for money. Defence officials said with Israeli cluster weapons ”the legacy problem is reduced”.
They say that Israeli cluster weapons have a failure rate of 2%, compared with between 5% and 10% for older types.
Each L20 shell is believed to contain 49 bomblets. With 2 000 fired from British guns around Basra that would leave about 2 000 unexploded bombs. — Â