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TechnoratiLie-Down Protest Targets Cluster Bombs
More than 100 campaigners against cluster bombs staged a lie-down protest in the middle of O'Connell Street in Dublin this morning.According to gardaÃÂ, the protest started at 7am and lasted about an hour. Campaigners, including survivors injured by cluster bombs, laid down in the median of O'Connell Street close to the Spire.
The protest was as part of the campaign to secure an international agreement banning cluster bombs. An international conference taking place this week in Croke Park aims to ban the manufacture and use of cluster munitions.
Representatives of more than 100 states are attending the conference, although the United States, Russia and Britain - some of the most prolific users of the small munitions - are not attending.
Cluster bombs open in mid-air and scatter as many as several hundred "bomblets" over wide areas. They often fail to explode, creating minefields that can kill or injure anyone who comes across them.
The UN Development Programme says cluster munitions have caused more than 13,000 confirmed injuries and deaths around the world, the great majority of them in Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.
© 2008 Ireland.com
6 Comments so far
Show Allcontinually amused -- I stand corrected, although I don't agree with the line.
War has little to do with personal violence, even if it does (and I don't say it does because I don't know) originate from the same emotion. War is a highly organised (believe-it-or-not) group activity. Personal violence is mostly a question of circumstances.
continually amused... "So are you arguing that for ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED EIGHTY FOUR years from Jesus to William the Silent and the 159 billion years of our "evolution" before that, that NOBODY was murdered, killed, robbed, raped, stuck up, assaulted etc??????"
But that is not the point, is it? I agree peace is not going to break overnight, but leaving around unexploded bombs ready to go off when picked up by children is pure psycho. It is totally sick. There is nothing so horrible that people who do that don't deserve it.
Let the whole world lay down in the street! Cluster bombs, land mines... War, we like to pretend, is a time for heroes. Most often it is manipulated by cowards.
Frank Lieb if we control hand guns how will fight back against right wing assholes if they ratchet up the oppression? Do you gun control advocates even ever THINK about the long term consequences of what you advocate? In a just world we would ban government goons from having weapons of mass killing like cluser bombsand leave weapons in the hand where they belong those of the people in casse governemtns tried to regain the use of those weapons of mass killing. Remember the brave fighters of Lincoln Brigade in their just anarcho socialist struggle against the fascists with gasp eek scary guns.
continually amused, please go back to the Fox home page.
How far can the military go to kill people? We have Stealth Bombers, Nuclear submarines, all kinds of missles, but we don't have cluster bomb machine guns. Imagine how many more innocents can be killed and maimed? Sorry I mentioned that, I'm sure some crazed munition mechanic will thank it a good idea and start working on it.
If we can't control hand-guns, how will we (the U.S.) ever stop the killing!