Cluster Munitions (Prohibition) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I join all those who have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, on bringing this important Bill before the House. He must be delighted that so many noble Lords have put down their names to speak on the subject. I shall approach the subject from a personal point of view. I was involved in the Cold War when cluster munitions, which are the subject of this Bill, were viewed rather differently, certainly by the military, because of what they were supposed to be able to do. There were two main tasks. The first was airfield denial, which of course had an enormous impact on how the Cold War might have been fought. The second task, which was more immediately appropriate to the Army, related to the fact that we faced a potential mass of men and equipment which we lacked the men and equipment to deal with. One of the ways of channelling that mass to where we could do more was to deny it ground and to hope that it would therefore come to where we were more able to take action. One way to do that was to lay minefields. By and large you laid deliberate minefields, which were marked so that you knew where they were to aid your own movement. You also left a map to show where they were, so that when the combat was over it was easier to clear up the battlefields where these things had been laid. Then came the opportunity to lay minefields more quickly, particularly anti-personnel minefields, by use of a cluster munition, which could deploy quickly over a piece of ground a large number of these weapons that you otherwise could not have used. So they did have an operational purpose against mass. Interestingly, towards the end of the Cold War, our tactics changed. Instead of trying to put a thin line, as it were, right across the front to stop absolutely everyone who was coming, we decided to defend vital ground and to deploy our own forces, some of whom had the task of counter-attacking penetrations. I was lucky enough to command the first division in the British Army that was given this role. We started to do this and realised that movement was crucial to our task. One of the problems on the battlefield was that these indiscriminate unmarked minefields, laid by weapons that were capable of deploying large clusters of munitions, were a menace to our movement, as we did not know where they were. One therefore had to take an operational risk when deploying through these areas, which could well involve the loss of one’s life. That debate was still going on when the Cold War ended. The next time cluster munitions were thought to be ineffectively deployed was in our attacks on airfields during the first Gulf War, when the cluster munitions deployed as airfield denial weapons simply did not work. Therefore, they were a wasted weapon in our locker. The Iraqi ground forces never massed in such strength to justify the use of cluster munitions deploying anti-personnel mines, so these munitions were again shown up to be something of a question mark in the arsenal of military weapons. Soon after that, I left the Army and became involved with the United Nations and the World Bank, particularly on the subject of post-conflict reconstruction. One of the main tasks in post-conflict reconstruction is clearing up the battlefield—clearing up the mess. That is frequently referred to as de-mining. At that time, the World Bank was unwilling to fund de-mining activities because it said that all mines were military and that it did not fund military activities. It took a great deal of time and persuasion to prove to it that ““de-mining”” is an unfortunate word when talking about clearing up the detritus on a battlefield, as that includes large numbers of unexploded weapons of various kinds, not all of which have been militarily laid. The phrase that we tried to put across was, ““There is no development without de-mining””. That resulted in the Word Bank agreeing to fund de-mining operations. The firm that I was with was involved in a lot of these operations—in Mozambique, Angola, Zaire, Somalia, Afghanistan, Laos and other places. What was disturbing with the task in hand was that, although some mines had been militarily laid and marked, a large number of mines had been laid indiscriminately. Whereas one felt confident to say that the battlefield detritus was not all military, one of the biggest problems was the unexploded cluster munitions that could only have been militarily deployed. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, cited the words of General Sir Rupert Smith. I commend to Members of this House a book that General Smith has written, The Utility of Force, in which he analyses the change from what was industrial war between industrial nations, which was the characteristic of the Cold War, even though it never happened. To have armed forces on clearly defined battlefields is a very different affair from what is going on now, which General Smith has defined in the phrase ““war among the people””. It seems to me that what we are talking about—if we are talking about the scale of military operations as currently conducted in Iraq and in Afghanistan and formerly in Yugoslavia—is very much war among the people. If you are conducting war among the people, the weapons you will use must be proportional; they must be used only against military forces and not against the people. One of the main reasons why I so strongly support the Bill of noble Lord, Lord Dubs, is that I do not believe that there is any military justification for the deployment of these mass weapons in a war where the most likely victims are nothing to do with the military conduct. If these wars are political, which I believe they are—and the military must be the servants of the political in all these ventures—the political direction must be sufficiently surgical that military commanders are enabled to decide which weapons they wish to use for which purposes. For all that I have tried to analyse this as best I can, I can find no justification for the deployment of these weapons in any activity that the British Army has been involved with since the end of the Cold War. Therefore, I hope that the Government will listen to the accumulated comments that will no doubt be made during the rest of the debate.