The author concludes with:

"Australia needs to decide which role it wants to play on the world stage – a leader in the abolition of indiscriminate legacy weapons or a Janus-faced state in contempt of international humanitarian law. The fourth review conference will be a telling time, when true colours will be revealed and the Australian public will see which side of Two-Face prevails."

Unfortunately the Australian public will see nothing as I doubt that much of anything will appear in most media about Australia's role concerning cluster bombs.

Thanks very much for writing about the duplicity.

Australia has never had, used or manufactured Cluster Bombs so why is the government so hell bent on creating the worlds new low bar of Natioanl Legislation when it comes to ratifying the Cluster Bomb Treaty. Stephen Smith and Julia Gillard seem more interested in what are the US national interests and not those of Australia. All they are demonstrating is continued gutless lack of leadership. That said, the Liberals in opposition are no better offering the government bi partisan support. As usual politicians like rules that affect the general population but shy away from any restrictions on themselves. Come on Australia, raise your voices against this bad lagislation. We are Australians, not Americans, and we are better than that. At least we should be.

The two faced act being practiced by the current Australian Government is unsustainable. As a nation we want to be seen as principled humanitarian peaceful and cooperative. What is obstructing that national identity is fear. Fear of being a Caucasian nation in the Asia Pacific without a big superpower to protect us.
Signing the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty was the right thing to do- it reflected our desired national identity. As a nation we have to overcome our fear, embrace our place in the world amongst our neighbors, and end the Alliance with the USA. It is this percieved need to have the strength of the USA military which is complicating our adherance to the Cluster Munitions treaty. As the writer clearly communicated, the upcoming agreement to host US forces in Australia, and our continued support for their wars is the problem.

Australian diplomacy

is there such a thing ?

Gemima Harvey has raised the issue of the ANZUS Alliance in her discussion of the Convention on Cluster Munitions. I agree with her and support the treaty as well as its humanitarian aims. The complicity of several named Ministers of the Australian government with the US Embassy is established fact, backed (gratefully) by WikiLeaks cables and not denied. This deceitful behaviour failed to meet the standards of proper conduct of Ministers. In short, they should resign. The purpose of their actions was intended to undermine the treaty by removing what US officials called "unhelpful language". Their action was at the behest of the USA and solely for their benefit.
We are told repeatedly that the alliance with the US protects our security and that we are getting defence on the cheap. Giving away our moral standards is not cheap. It is undignified and demeans our reputation as a nation that stands for democratic values. We cannot be taken seriously as a partner with any of our neighbours. We are still seen as John Howard’s ‘Deputy Sheriff in the Pacific’ to the great exasperation of SE Asia. More significantly, Australians no longer support this acolyte status.
We need to re-examine the objectives of the treaty and what it has meant to Australia. ANZUS was never intended to protect Australia. The treaty defends US dominance in the region and that is the principal reason for Australia’s participation in a long string of US wars of choice in which we had little say. Our participation has required interoperability and the purchase of very expense weapons systems from the US, which we would not have otherwise required.
This cluster bomb issue is not the first occasion when our standards have been discarded for the sake of meeting the needs of the US alliance. It happened in Vietnam with the treatment of prisoners and again in both current wars. In 1969 Australia voted with the US (and General Salazar’s fascist Portugal) in the UN to defend Agent Orange from the ban on chemical weapons.

Australia will be participating in the CCW process next week, and my opinion is that successful adoption of the CCW protocol on cluster munitions will undermine the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Australia's position at this diplomatic meeting is not supportive of the CCM.

Interesting to look back on the effect of the CCM. Clusters were not used by NATO in the Libyan conflict. One wonders why. I am no military strategist, but I would have thought that the targets presented by Libyan loyalists, clearly identifiable as troop concentrations in a desert setting, would have made them acceptable targets; that their activities would have made cluster munitions an acceptable choice as ground support. Instead, other means were employed. The only use of clusters in this conflict was sheeted home to the Loyalists, who suffered the stigma and political cost of using an indiscriminate weapon, a gift that keeps on killing..

The fact that NATO didn't use them is the coup de grace for clusters.

Cluster munitions are obsolete, and that is the result of the CCM process, which has done an end-run around the CCW talkfest, an unworkable consensus of conflicted participants at the talkfest table: Israel, China, Cuba, the USA, India and Russia. Can you see this lot of strange bedfellows ever reaching a consensus? They have been working on cluster bombs since 1980 and their sudden burst of energy, their development of "an instrument" is in response to the efficacy of the CCM, which actually bans cluster bombs, instead of piss-farting around with ideas that can be distilled into a core text of "we'll ban them when we don't think we might need them anymore".

The draft being put at the CCW next week risks legalising the use of cluster munitions into the indefinite future.


I would be pleased and proud if Australia could come out in clear support of the CCM. It makes no sense at all to support a dysfunctional CCW agreement that does not put an end to spreading more dud cluster bombs around the world.

For more information, goto CMC Website
www.stopclustermunitions.org