Israeli Bomblets Continue to Trouble Civilians in Lebanon

In case anyone missed this important article from the New York Times, which appeared on October 6th:

New York Times
October 6, 2006
ISRAELI BOMBLETS PLAGUE LEBANON
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN; NADA BAKRI CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM LEBANON.
Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more than a year to clear the region of them.
United Nations officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools.
As of Sept. 28, officials here said cluster bombs had severely wounded 109 people -- and killed 18 others.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired 12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb cut into his head and neck. He was from Sawane, a hillside village with a panoramic view of terraced olive farms and rolling hills. Muhammad was sitting on a hip-high wall, watching a bulldozer clear rubble, when the machine bumped into a tree.
A flash of a second later he was fatally injured when a cluster bomblet dropped from the branches. ''I took Muhammad to the hospital in my car, but he was already dead,'' said Yousef Ftouni, a resident of the village.
The entire village was littered with the bomblets, and as Mr. Ftouni recounted Muhammad's death, the Lebanese Army worked its way through an olive grove, blowing up unexploded munitions in a painfully slow process of clearance.
Cluster bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war, when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end the conflict.
Officials calculate that if they are lucky, and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area. There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts, working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon recorded 745 locations across the south where unexploded bombs had been found. Of the million estimated to be scattered around, so far 4,500 have been disposed of, according to the center.
''Our priority at the moment is to clean houses, main roads and gardens so that the displaced people can return to their villages,'' said Col. Mohammad Fahmy, head of the national mine clearing office. ''The next stage will be cleaning agricultural lands.''
In Lebanon there are two explanations of why Israel unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as a strategy to keep people from returning right away.
The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating whether Israel's use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that restricted when they could be used.
The final days of the war -- a conflict that began when Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel and sent militiamen across the border to capture Israeli soldiers -- were marked by a huge Israeli offensive. Israel hoped its final push would, in part, help force the Security Council to adopt a tougher resolution on Hezbollah than appeared to be taking shape.
Israel has said it leafleted areas before bombing and provided Lebanon with maps of potential cluster bomb locations to help with the clearing process. United Nations officials in Lebanon say the maps are useless.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article on Sept. 12 anonymously quoting the head of a rocket unit in Lebanon who was critical of the decision to use cluster bombs. ''What we did was insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,'' Haaretz quoted the commander as saying.
Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that everything done conformed with international law.
In Lebanon the problem of the unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding and harvest their crops. In some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs -- a practice that officials have discouraged as dangerous.
But the people are desperate.
''If I lost the season for olives and the wheat, I have no money for the winter,''' said Rida Noureddine, 54, who farms a small patch of land on the main road in the village of Kherbet Salem. There was a small black object at the entrance to his farm, and he thought it was a cluster bomb.
''I feel as if someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul,'' he said.
The bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact sheet issued by the Mine Action Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official failure rate of 15 percent.
That means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. ''We estimate there are one million,'' said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine action center.
Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and from other wars.
After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.
She said a large percentage of the unexploded bomblets were made in America, while some were produced in Israel. Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.
When the device hits, the front end fires a huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments. When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.
''This is what they are living with every day,'' said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein family farm.
Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.
''I feel that the land has become my enemy,'' he said. ''It represents a danger to my life and my kids' lives.''
Copyright 2006 The New York Times

--JB

Terror Laws Cause Number of Refugees Admitted to United States to Fall 23 Percent This Year

From the New York Times:


New York Times
September 28, 2006
Terror Laws Cut Resettlement of Refugees
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — The number of refugees admitted to the United States fell 23 percent this year because of provisions in two antiterrorism laws that have sharply reduced the number of resettled refugees, State Department officials said Wednesday.
The laws, the USA Patriot Act and the Real ID Act, deny entry to anyone who belongs to or has provided material support to armed rebel groups, even if that support was coerced and even if the armed groups fought alongside American troops or opposed authoritarian governments criticized by the Bush administration.
The provisions have derailed the resettlement of thousands of refugees fleeing the authoritarian government of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma; hundreds of refugees from Vietnam and Laos who fought alongside American troops in the Vietnam War; and dozens of Cubans who supported armed groups opposed to Fidel Castro in the 60’s, according to the State Department and the United Nations refugee agency.
Many of the refugees were barred from the United States because, under the new laws, they are deemed supporters of terrorist groups, even though the organizations that they support do not appear on the State Department list of designated terrorist groups.
The statutes have broadened the definition of terrorist groups to include any group of two or more people who take up arms against a state, even if the group supports the aims of American foreign policy.
A result, State Department officials say, is that administration officials will resettle 41,200 of the 54,000 refugees whom they had expected to admit by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. That figure is the lowest since refugee admissions plunged for nearly two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The State Department can grant waivers for specific populations that have supported armed groups, if they pose no threat to the United States. In May and August, the department issued waivers for Burmese refugees who have supported the Karen National Union, a group that opposes the government in Myanmar.
But the laws do not allow waivers for refugees who were combatants, received military training from groups deemed to be terrorist organizations or were members of such groups. State Department officials say a change in the law is required to address those populations. In recent weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has met with lawmakers in the House and Senate to discuss such changes.
Ellen R. Sauerbrey, an assistant secretary of state, told senators on Wednesday that the antiterrorism provisions had prevented the United States from resettling 9,500 Burmese this fiscal year. Of that group, 1,500 are expected to enter by Sept. 30 under issued waivers.
“We had anticipated bringing the majority, if not all of those, to the United States,” Ms. Sauerbrey said at a hearing of the Immigration Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
She said the limited waivers meant that the resettlement of many refugees had been indefinitely delayed. In addition to the Burmese, Ms. Sauerbrey pointed to the Cubans and Vietnamese Montagnards.
“We are eagerly looking forward to expanding resettlement,” she said, “to the degree that we can resolve some of these difficulties.”
Refugee advocacy groups, including Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, and conservative groups like Concerned Women for America, the National Association of Evangelicals and American Values, say officials are not moving swiftly enough.
Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, has proposed legislation that would bar only members and supporters of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department.
But State Department officials say they do not expect any movement on such legislation before Nov. 7.
Many refugee advocates fear that administration officials and members of Congress are delaying action because they do not want to be viewed as easing up on terrorism during an election year.
Michael J. Horowitz, a neoconservative who worked in the White House of President Ronald Reagan and testified at the hearing on Wednesday, said in a statement that it was “inexcusable that for more than two years the administration has dragged its feet” in finding a solution for the refugees who fought alongside Americans in Vietnam.
The antiterrorism provisions have also affected 500 asylum seekers in the United States, whose cases have been delayed and has prevented 700 people, who have already been deemed refugees or granted asylum, from becoming permanent residents here for the time being.
Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, urged the administration to redouble its efforts on behalf of the Burmese refugees and others who desperately need to resettle. “I know we have a lot security concerns to watch for,” Mr. Brownback said at the hearing. “But there are huge populations that are absolutely persecuted and have no other option.”

--JB