Indiscrimate Death Dealing
War represents the incapability of nations to compromise, to make the effort to understand underlying causes and suspicions between themselves. A human failing that is not about to be solved anytime soon. Nations that value the strengths of their military apparatus spend inordinately massive amounts of public funds on armaments, on training their military. They convince those whom they represent from their seats of government that arms are a requirement for defense.One understands that countries going to war construct armies of young men and women to battle one another for honour and country and principle and protection of the integrity of a country's boundaries, and even on occasion, marching them out for the purpose of protecting the people of countries with whom they go to war. It is not, however, only the members of the military who find early death in the prosecution of war. Civilian casualties are always high, and often little discussed.
Modern warfare is as cruel as hand-to-hand combat when soldiers face an enemy and realize that each is trained to see the other as lesser, undeserving of life, and if the other is not dispatched, then they will themselves be bereft of life. It is a humanely alienating process to perceive the 'other' as deserving of death. We understand that. While deploring it. With the understanding that there are times when that most brutally inhumane of human practises really does become unavoidable.
What should be avoidable, however, is the death visited on civilian populations, by default. There are few countries that would boast the death numbers of innocent civilians. Yet the most cultured, advanced, civil societies on earth develop and construct lethal devices which they strew over an invaded countryside and which, when detonated, take innumerable innocent lives, leaving countless other victims horribly injured, thousands of children among them.
Cluster bombs represent a type of weaponry whereby tiny bomblets are detonated. A cluster bomb can contain up to 600 bomblets, incapable of distinguishing the fighting enemy from an innocent child. Children, in fact, see them lying about innocently, unexploded, on the ground, pick them up, construing them as intriguing objects like toys, and become instant victims. Or they take them along and share them as playthings with other children, until their lethality is released and all die. Or they bring them home to proudly demonstrate their new free toy to their parents, bringing tragedy home.
A country's farm fields and general countryside can be littered with thousands of these lethal weapons, most of which do not detonate on impact, but lie there awaiting detection and activation; for someone to step on one, or pick one up from a spirit of curiosity, all too soon assuaged. Britain is working overtime to destroy its stock of 30 million bombs. France, Germany and Norway have begun destroying their stocks. The United States, Russia and China, all manufacturers of such bombs refuse to, though they're by no means the only countries to maintain their use.
In Oslo, over one hundred countries have signed on to a global ban on cluster munitions. The Oslo Treaty has been modelled on the Canada-led Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, signed eleven years ago. The new treaty will become international law once 30 countries have ratified, a legal process requiring countries to pass their own legislation. That milestone is expected to occur early in 2009. And none too soon.
The destructive capacity of humankind's inventiveness is beyond reason.
Labels: Realities, Technology, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, December 05, 2008
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