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Array
(
[sid] => 38457
[catid] => 1
[aid] => mick
[title] => LANDMINES FROM THE SKY
[time] => 2004-03-13 09:25:05
[hometext] =>
[bodytext] => As early as Vietnam They rained down Landmines from the sky Inviting little children Come play with me And die In Nam they were called the ‘pellet bomb’ Exploding dart fragments Screaming through the air Nguyen Thi An was fifteen years old First she heard the sirens Then the engines Then the explosion She ran from her home She found her Mother, father and brother bathed in blood Her sister, Binh was covered in metal pieces The darts were inside They were of a special plastic designed to avoid x-rays and so harder to find They moved in her body for days before she died Next came the ‘Rockeyes’ Tested in Laos Dispersed to 160 bomblets Half touched down and lay in wait When stepped on or moved they exploded to maim or kill To this day Perhaps 20,000 a year die from these in Laos Laos was not even at war with America In Afghanistan the technology had come even further And an estimated 70,000 bomblets litter that land O/ “I saw twenty dead children on the streets of Kuduz.” (Zumeray, a refugee witness) At Qala-i-Jhangi American bombers Cluster bombed Taliban prisoners Survivors were “oiled” and set alight Up to 4,000 died that day And in Iraq the story is much the same New technologies of death To win dollars for this game O/ ‘The object picked up by the two children was a bomblet from an unexploded cluster bomb. It went off in the front yard, leaving a neat six-inch hole in the concrete floor. Tiny fragments of shrapnel flew upwards into Hala’s legs and into Ali’s face. At least one of them is still lodged deep in his cheek. Their father clutches the screaming boy, weeping silently.‘ “They thought it was a kind of ball,” said Hala’s aunt, weeping. “They only wanted to play.” O/ Cluster bombs lie They are land mines from the sky An invitation to any child Come play with me... And die. O/ A cluster bomb is a 14-foot weapon that weighs about 1,000 pounds. When it explodes it sprays hundreds of smaller bomblets over an area the size of two or three football fields. The bomblets are bright yellow and look like beer cans. And because they look like playthings, thousands of children have been killed by dormant bomblets in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. Each bomblet sprays flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter inch of steel. The failure rate, the unexploded rate, is very high, often around 15 to 20 percent. When bomblets fail to detonate on the first round, they become land mines that explode on simple touch at any time. Regarding the use of cluster bombs, among other war crimes, such as the use of depleted uranium, 'the wanton destruction of cities and towns,' collective reprisals against civilians in Operation Hammer, the U.S. media is still silent. Years ago in the midst of France's brutal war in Algeria, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre admonished the French intelligentsia: 'It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues.' http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0126-04.htm Cluster Bombs: War Crimes of the Bush Administration [comments] => 2 [counter] => 2289 [topic] => 41 [informant] => Steeleyes [notes] => [ihome] => 0 [alanguage] => english [acomm] => 0 [haspoll] => 0 [pollID] => 0 [score] => 4 [ratings] => 1 [editpoem] => 1 [associated] => [topicname] => political )
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