Conference pushes cluster bomb ban 

A bomb with the capacity to kill long after it's hit the ground is the focus of a major international conference in Wellington this week.
 
Delegates from more than 120 countries are working on a treaty to outlaw cluster bombs.
 
Over 500 representatives from 124 governments and more than 100 non-governmental agencies including cluster bomb survivors are attending the conference, which aims to develop a treaty banning the use of the weapons.

Cluster bombs open in mid-air scattering dozens or hundreds of smaller submunitions - known as bomblets - to the ground.

Over the last 18 months in Lebanon alone, 20 people - many of them children - have been killed by unexploded bomblets.

A former Serbian soldier is among those in New Zealand pushing for a ban at a global level.

As a soldier in the Serbian army, Branislav Kapetanovic's job was defusing cluster bombs one by one. In 2000, he lost his hands and parts of both legs.

Kapetanovic says watching Israel launch over a million of the bombs into Lebanon in 2006 brought back his pain.

"It's even more painful to see that the same things are happening in the same way or in some cases worse and that that kind of suffering is being repeated," says Kapetanovic.

New Zealand is one of seven countries that took the cluster bomb issue out of the Geneva process, which had stagnated for five years.

"Too many people are being killed by cluster munitions fired during a war but then acting as landmines lying dormant on the soil until detonated by some unsuspecting civilian, often children," says Disarmament and Arms Control Minister Phil Goff.

New Zealand troops have just returned home after a year in Lebanon defusing more than 1,800 of the unexploded bombs and munitions fired by the Israelis. Cluster munitions have also been recently used by the United States in Iraq.

Goff says the week-long discussions will focus on developing a treaty banning the use of the weapons, which are deployed from aircraft and cause widespread damage on the ground.

He believes any agreement reached by the negotiations in Wellington will bring pressure in the same way moves to outlaw land mines did.

"I would encourage states to remain open-minded on solutions and possible outcomes. We should all endeavour to build on common ground and find ways to bridge the areas of difference," Goff told delegates at the conference.

He says it is important to make substantive progress at this week's meeting in order to lay a solid foundation for the formal negotiations to be held at the Diplomatic Conference in Dublin in May.

Unfortunately for the delegates at the Wellington conference, some of the countries who use the bombs are not attending the meeting.

US, Israel, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan have all decided not to attend.

"I think with a critical mass support for the cluster munitions treaty those countries that don't...haven't been part of the process and don't sign up to it will still feel constrained about the future use of those munitions," says Goff.

Branislav Kapetanovic is hoping for more than constraint.

"This is a new way this campaigning activism it's a new way of fighting cluster bombs and he hopes its a more efficient one because he knows cluster bombs have to be stopped," says Kapetanovic.