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Article: Cluster bombs.(U.S. declines to join weapons treaty)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- October 7, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN MAY, representatives of 109 countries met in a soccer stadium in Dublin, Ireland, and agreed to support a treaty to ban cluster munitions. I was present as a member of a delegation from the World Conference of Religions for Peace, and was one of nearly 300 accredited lobbyists in the Cluster Munition Coalition.
The path to Dublin was full of surprises. The first was when talks about cluster munitions stalled in the UN's traditional forum--the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons--and Norway called for a stand-alone process seeking to ban "cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians." Forty-six countries joined Norway, and by the time of ...