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| ‘Cluster bombs as bad as N-weapons’ |
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
TOKYO: A Serbian cluster bomb victim-turned-activist on Monday urged Japan to sign a treaty banning the deadly weapons, saying they were as bad as nuclear arms.
“Cluster bombs are the most monstrous, terrible weapons,” Branislav Kapetanovic, a former mine clearer with the Yugoslav army, told reporters here ahead of a key conference on cluster bombs in Dublin next month.
“We hope the Japanese government will join the voice for the complete abolition of cluster bombs,” said Kapetanovic, who lost his hands and feet in a bomb disposal operation in central Serbia in 2000.
Japan, an ally of the United States, which opposes the planned treaty, will participate in the Dublin conference although it has long been reluctant to fully support a ban on the weapons. Japan has been officially pacifist since its defeat in World War II but its defence forces possess several kinds of cluster bombs, saying they are necessary for self-protection.
“Nuclear weapons are more powerful than cluster bombs. That’s completely true,” Kapetanovic said, referring to United States atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
But he said that in terms of the number of civilian victims they claimed, cluster bombs were just as bad as nuclear weapons. Kapetanovic is on a world tour to seek abolition of the weapons as a spokesman for the Cluster Munitions Coalition, a global network of 200 civil society organisations.
Cluster bombs, notorious for killing and maiming civilians, contain smaller bomblets, which scatter over a wide area and can explode decades after a conflict has ended. The treaty banning the weapons, which is opposed by China and Russia, is expected to be published in Dublin during an event involving almost 100 countries from May 19 to 30. No official records exist of how many people have been maimed or killed by the weapons, but Handicap International estimates that about 98 per cent of victims were civilians, usually children.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
