Bombing children

Two recent news stories warranted more coverage than was given by the media.

One was the World Tribunal on Iraq, in Istanbul in late June, which examined issues such as the legality of the Iraq war, war crimes, the role of the UN and the role of the media.

The other story was the release on July 19 of the Iraq Body Count project's report on civilian casualties in Iraq. The report documents a tally of at least 25,000 civilian fatalities and over 42,000 wounded in two years since the invasion.

A disturbing detail contained in the report is that "children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices, but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance". Almost 10 per cent of fatalities were children under 18. Further down we read that 73.5 per cent of people killed by unexploded ordnance were children.

"Unexploded ordnance" includes cluster bombs, which a number of NGOs pleaded with the invading forces — before the invasion — not to use where there were civilians.

On this matter, a pertinent charge brought by the World Tribunal on Iraq against the Coalition of the Willing governments was that of "using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems".

An open and shut case, really. Guilty as charged!

This item was originally published as a letter to the editor in The Age newspaper (Melbourne, Australia) on 25 July 2005, see here.