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Eight months after the war ended, much of south Beirut is still in ruins. All that's left after these suburbs were pounded by Israeli artillery are vast piles of rubble.

JOHN RODSTED, CLUSTER MUNITIONS COALITION: But you'll see a lot of villages, as we get further out, have been pretty heavily flattened.

But the Israeli invasion of Lebanon left a far more deadly legacy than smashed infrastructure. To see it first-hand, I had to travel south, to the scene of the fiercest fighting.

JOHN RODSTED: We're basically heading due east of Tyre, just in towards the Israeli border, which is an area which was heavily cluster-bombed.

Australian John Rodsted is an expert on land mines and cluster munitions.

REPORTER: It's all around here, though, hey?

JOHN RODSTED: They are all around here. There definitely has been plenty of stuff fired in here.

For 20 years he's documented their use in conflict zones around the world.

JOHN RODSTED, 2002: I walk through the middle of it - it's actually quite good being in the middle - and come back along the top.

In Afghanistan, he filmed this extraordinary stockpile of clusters left behind by the Soviet army.

JOHN RODSTED, 2002: Here we are at Bagram with an estimated 60,000 tonnes of munitions that need cleaning up. Quite a task. I won't fool around in this place for terribly long, because I admit to feeling quite uncomfortable being here.

And last year in Lebanon, Rodsted took his handycam to yet another battlefield.

JOHN RODSTED, 2006: For the last two weeks I've been travelling southern Lebanon, documenting the devastation that's been caused by the Israeli use of cluster bombs here.

Cluster munitions are basically small munitions that come out of a larger one, that's the simplest description of it. So imagine you fire a rocket at something or drop a bomb from an aircraft or an artillery shell, that will open up in flight and rain down a lot of smaller munitions. An average aircraft bomb which was used in Lebanon would probably hold about 600. The rocket systems that were employed there would fire over 7,000 in one firing.

As the bomblets fall, they spread out over a wide area. They're designed to kill large numbers of enemy infantry when they land. But they don't always work.

JOHN RODSTED: The problem arises not in the way that cluster bombs are supposed to be used, but it's in the fact that many of them fail to explode. And the ones that fail to explode then become de facto landmine fields.

Here's another one, it's armed, you can see the hammer out the bottom side of the cap, that's ready to explode.

The failure rates for many cluster bombs are thought to be as high as 20% to 40%.

JOHN RODSTED: If people come along, touch them, move them, bump them, try farming, try rebuilding their house, they will then get blown up by these things.

Since the conflict in Lebanon ended, 30 people have been killed by clusters, and 196 injured. Rodsted has invited me to meet one of the victims. Rasha al-Zaidoni lost her leg after her father brought home a bag of fresh herbs.

TRANSLATOR, (Translation): How was it that the bomb was in the thyme?

MOTHER OF RASHA AL-ZAIDONI, (Translation): It came out in the middle of the bunch of thyme. He brought bunches of zartar, he pulls it out from the roots. She plucks the leaves. The bomb was inside the bunch, it’s only small. I don’t know how it looked, but it blew up when she held it. The bomb exploded and we only came to in hospital.

TRANSLATOR, (Translation): It exploded inside?

MOTHER OF RASHA, (Translation): Yes there, behind the sofa. Shrapnel everywhere.


DRIVER: Take care inside.

Rodsted is taking me to see the site of a cluster strike next to a village.

MAN: Look at that. Four strikes in very short, maybe in 300m.

For several weeks now, a Norwegian aid group has been methodically clearing the area of clusters.

JOHN RODSTED: How big do you think the strike area here is?

DE-MINER: Centre of the strike is directly on the owner's land.

REPORTER: John, what are we going to be doing now?

JOHN RODSTED: Well, I'm going to go down have a look at the strike zone that's here. Basically rocket launchers of M77s have been fired through into this area.

REPORTER: So it's pretty dangerous, what we're going to be doing?

JOHN RODSTED: Oh, not really. We'll do it safely. We're going into a place that's potentially dangerous but we'll do it safely. We don't do risk. At all.

This is not entirely true. He was a commercial photographer in Melbourne, but Rodsted has chosen to spend many years deliberately putting himself in harm's way.

JOHN RODSTED: I think anyone who starts working in this kind of environment, you survive by good luck, not by good management. And if you stay with it, you learn a lot along the way.

Last August, Rodsted learnt an awful lot in south Lebanon just days after the cease-fire.

JOHN RODSTED, 2006: And that didn't take long, did it?

He was investigating reports that Israel had dropped massive numbers of cluster bombs in the final days of the conflict.

JOHN RODSTED, 2006: Well, that proves the point - you no sooner start looking and the first cluster turns up. The only thing we know for sure is where you find one, you will find more.


They hadn't used cluster bombs for the previous 31 days. So where is the logic of firing in up to - the figures are up to 2 million submunitions, 2 million cluster bombs - into southern Lebanon in the last 72 hours of the conflict? It just doesn't make sense. Militarily, it doesn't make sense.

Rodsted also says he found many clusters that dated back to the Vietnam War, years past their expiry date. The Israeli Government refuses to discuss cluster munitions, saying that its army is investigating their use in Lebanon last year. In response to questions from Dateline, the Israeli Defence Force said:

ISARELI DEFENCE FORCE, RESPONSE: "All the weapons and munitions used by the IDF are legal under international law and their use conforms with international standards."

INTERVIEWER: Israel has received some criticism for its use of cluster munitions..

However, in an interview with Al Jazeera in January, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres had this to say.


SHIMON PERES, ISRAELI DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER (EARLIER MEDIA APPEARANCE): About the cluster bombs, to be short and clear - we committed a mistake, we regret it. Apparently it was done without the knowledge even of the Chief of Staff. You know, it so happens that in war there are many mistakes, so the greatest mistake is war itself.

JOHN RODSTED: And here is a third and part of a fourth.

Some armies say modern cluster bombs don't pose an ongoing threat to civilians because they self-destruct even after they've hit the ground. When Rodsted went to Lebanon last year, he wanted to test these claims.


JOHN RODSTED: Here in a field in southern Lebanon I'm standing in a very small area amongst a mass of M85 cluster munitions, and they are all the type with the self-destruct mechanism. Each one of them has failed to explode. Some are armed, some are not armed, but they are all laying about, equally dangerous, ready to blow up the first person who comes into contact with them. At my feet is absolute graphic proof of how a self-destruct mechanism, or a smart bomb, is just a dumb idea.

Months after they were dropped, it's a lot harder to find the clusters - they often lie buried under the ground. It will take up to four weeks for a team of 10 de-miners to clear this area, roughly the size of two football fields. They've already removed several hundred.

JOHN RODSTED: Basically he's scouring the ground, every inch of it, with a metal detector and if he gets a signal, then he gets down and excavates it and finds out if it's a cluster bomb and if it is, then they destroy it in place.

REPORTER: It's a very slow process.

JOHN RODSTED: It's a very slow process, but if they're not accurate then they're going to end up leaving something behind which is going to be found by the local people. So it doesn't matter how slow it is as long as it's done right, that's what's essential.

DALYA FARRAN: Do you remember which village?

The United Nations Mine Action Centre says the process is slow because the Israeli Government refuses to give details of where the clusters were fired. Dalya Farran says NATO forces provided this information in Kosovo and Afghanistan.

DALYA FARRAN: We have samples of what the NATO provided the UN, like the types of clusters, the quantities, and the location. You will find all the grid references, all the numbers showing exact geographical area. It helped a lot with the UN programs in these countries. But it is not happening here.

According to the Israeli Defence Force:

ISRAELI DEFENCE FORCE: "The IDF supplied UN forces with maps indicating areas which may contain unexploded ordinance of different types. These maps allow UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army to clean out those areas affected by the fighting."

REPORTER: So what have we got here?

DALYA FARRAN: Well, this is a sample of the maps that the Israelis provided to us through UNIFIL and so on, and basically they are useless, we cannot use them.

REPORTER: Why is it useless?

DALYA FARRAN: Because it doesn't have any of the information we wanted about cluster bombs. It's very vague, and we can't even use it for unexploded ordinance. Have a look. You can see. "Areas likely to contain unexploded ordinance" - this is very vague, no? And then it includes areas that are highly likely to contain unexploded ordinance, and then they say that this is not exhaustive. So basically there could be other areas where there are different targets that are not on this. 
Plus, if you look at this sheet, it covers a very large area, like sometimes a whole village, and other examples. So we are not going to send a team to the whole village to search for unexploded ordinance, it could be a hand grenade, it could be anything.

REPORTER: So that's pretty useless, is it?

DALYA FARRAN: Definitely.

This is a map of cluster strikes drawn up by the United Nations Mine Action Centre. It has identified more than 900 separate strike areas so far. There's evidence Hezbollah also used cluster munitions in the conflict. Human Rights Watch says it knows of two attacks in northern Israel, while Israeli police have said 113 cluster rockets were fired by Hezbollah.

JOHN RODSTED: All the way through this part of Lebanon it's all olive groves and orange groves and it's a very heavily dependent agricultural area. And you look through here you imagine the cluster bombs raining down through here. They've got little fabric tapes on the back, and they can just hang themselves up on the branches. So even if you do a ground clearance and even if you do a sub-surface ground clearance you can still have them hung up in the trees. And they're little, you can lose them, and quite simply come and shake the tree, something could drop out on your head and blow your brains out.

REPORTER: You wouldn't shake it, John, this tree?

JOHN RODSTED: I wouldn't shake it, no, I wouldn't shake any of the trees. And it's a lot harder, look at the tree that way, you're looking into it, it's dark. It'd just become silhouetted, you wouldn't see it. So people are going to find problems in the farms for a long time to come.

John Rodsted was part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the coalition that secured a landmine treaty in 1997 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now many of the same people are collecting evidence which they hope will lead to a similar ban on cluster bombs.

TRANSLATOR, (Translation): This is John.

JOHN RODSTED: How are you feeling?

SAMER ABDULAAL, (Translation): Good. Thank you.

And that's why Rodsted is visiting Samer Abdulaal, a recent victim. He's a shepherd who lost most of his goats after the herd twice stumbled onto cluster bombs.

JOHN RODSTED: When he was taking his goats on that land, did he see things around, did he see little cluster bombs or something?

SAMER ABDULAAL, (Translation): The land is full of them.

TRANSLATOR, (Translation): Did you know that?

SAMER ABDULAAL, (Translation): Yes, of course, but where can I go? Every time I go there, I report it, that there's something wrong, there are strange objects on the land, but they say nothing.

Then, in January, his leg was blown off.


JOHN RODSTED: So he's lost his right leg, and what damage has happened to his left leg?

SAMER ABDULAAL, (Translation): The second leg is fractured and has injuries all over.

JOHN RODSTED: So what message has he got for people who still believe cluster bombs are still a good idea and should still continue to be used?

SAMER ABDULAAL, (Translation): Whoever thinks of using them has no religion. If they had, they wouldn't use it. They don't fear God. They were throwing them as if they were sowing seeds.

Partly because of what's happened in Lebanon, there's now growing international support for a ban on cluster munitions. Earlier this year, the Norwegian Government hosted a conference to discuss a treaty that would prohibit their use. John Rodsted was one of many campaigners who travelled to Oslo. Government representatives from 49 countries accepted Norway's invitation.

JONAS GAHR STORE, NORWEGIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: I would like to try and cut through the complexities at the outset and agree on the joint purpose of this meeting.

Jonas Gahr Store is Norway's Foreign Minister.

JONAS GAHR STORE: Our mission should be to spare innocent lives in future generations from the devastating effects of weapons which belong to the past. I urge you to make good use of these two days.

REUTERS REPORTER: How good of a treaty can you get if you don't have the big munitions-producing countries like the United States, Russia, China, aboard? How effective can a treaty like that be?

JONAS GAHR STORE: Well, a treaty without those countries is weaker than a treaty with those countries. The question is, where do you begin?

The UK, Canada and New Zealand are all here, along with France, Germany and Japan. But a notable absence is Australia. Like the Americans, the Howard Government prefers to discuss cluster munitions through the existing UN treaty process known as the CCW, or Convention on Conventional Weapons.

JOHN RODSTED: There's absolutely no reason why Australia shouldn't be here, particularly for the fact that Australia does not have cluster munitions in the arsenals of the military. So why are they not here? Great question. Where's the agenda to that? They'll turn around and say it should be dealt with in the CCW. The CCW is a process of consensus, which means that one party can scupper the entire thing, and that's what happens.

JONAS GAHR STORE: I believe that it will be a tremendous boost to this process if Australia joined it. We have been active participant in CCW, we have nothing in principle against that process, we simply observe, as do many other states, that there is no progress. And then we have to ask ourselves should we sit and observe this and accept it, and we have decided not to accept it.

JOHN RODSTED: Get yourself primed and take them on, but whatever you do, don't take on government half-cocked. 'Cause you'll just discredit it. So, load your gun, then use it. There's a disarmament message.

REPORTER: So how's it all gone so far?

DON MACKAY, NEW ZEALAND AMBASSADOR, GENEVA: I think it's gone very well. The main objective of the meeting is to get agreement on moving the process forward, and that has come through very clearly.

REPORTER: Would you like to see the Australians here?

DON MACKAY: One always likes to see the Australians.

JOHN RODSTED: There is no arbitrary way of forcing a change. It's got to come down to the world wanting to come together to wilfully disarm on a certain kind of munition. You're asking the axe murderer to put down the axe, basically.

One of the campaigners says government delegates were impressed when they saw John Rodsted's footage.

DELEGATE: That was followed by a video of John in Lebanon, walking around, finding the M85s...

WOMAN: Terrifying.

DELEGATE: with the self-destruct mechanism that didn't self-destruct, and he's just walking through this field, and you could just feel people in the room getting kind of nervous. I thought it was really brilliant.

It seems Rodsted's graphic footage pushed some countries over the line.

REPORTER: So, John, what's the latest, what's been going on inside with the government delegations?

JOHN RODSTED: Yesterday they weren't talking overly positive about the process and today they've just come out in support of it.

REPORTER: What's changed their minds, do you think?

JOHN RODSTED: It's education. The thing that changes their minds has been the education.

While John is talking, we're joined by a former British Army officer, Simon Upton, who's one of the leading campaigners here.

SIMON UPTON, FORMER BRITISH ARMY OFFICER: It's worked! We pulled it off.

JOHN RODSTED: Mate. This is a happy boy! What have you pulled off?

SIMON UPTON: The UK has signed up to the declaration on concluding an international treaty on cluster munitions in 2008. Germany also. Basically of 49 nations, the only state that walked is Japan. But we have got, we've got some of the big guys - we've got the UK, against all expectation. Last night there was no way they would have signed up to it. They've changed their mind, and I think that's partly as a result of pressure from NGOs, and pressure from other states. But we've got it!

JOHN RODSTED: Excellent.

SIMON UPTON: Right. Well, I better go write. I better change my press release.

There will be a new round of talks taking place in Peru next month.

WOMAN: Australia needs to come on board. We are waiting for Australia.

The United Nations estimates that it will take at least another eight months to clear south Lebanon of clusters. Any treaty will come too late for this young woman, who lost her leg while sorting through a bundle of herbs. But if John Rodsted gets his way, civilians will no longer be killed and maimed months, even years after a war has ended.

JOHN RODSTED: All we can do is try and take the information we learn here to the international community and say "Well, look, here is the story of one young girl, and what's happened to her. We can't bring back her leg. Wish we could, we can't. But we can hopefully try and stop this from happening in the future."

GEORGE NEGUS: You have to wonder if Israeli Prime Minister Olmert agrees with Shimon Peres's comment that it was a mistake to drop them in the first place? We will continue, by the way, to try and get an interview with the relevant minister from the Olmert Government. And it now seems that Australia has agreed to participate in the next round of ban talks in Peru, as an observer.

https://www.journeyman.tv/film_documents/3522/transcript/

SEE ALSO:

https://treaties.unoda.org/t/cluster_munitions

enough is enough — bring him home......