Dozens of Lebanese protest cluster bombs with sit-in in Beirut

The Associated Press
The International Herald Tribune
November 5, 2007

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Dozens of people held a sit-in protest Monday in downtown Beirut against the use of cluster bombs and mines that have killed and wounded scores of Lebanese over the past years.

Some 70 protesters lit candles on Parliament Square which was decorated with posters of victims of cluster bombs and mines, as well as pictures depicting different types of the bombs.

An undetermined number of mines and cluster bombs are still believed to be scattered across Lebanon, left behind from the 1975-90 civil war, the Israeli occupation and the 34-day conflict in the summer of 2006 between Israel and the militant Hezbollah group.

U.N. ordnance-clearing experts say that up to 1 million have failed to explode and now endanger civilians in the area.

Members of the nongovernment Norwegian People's Aid organization took part in the Beirut sit-in. Earlier Monday, a seminar about the bombs was held at the parliament.

Lawmaker Abdul-Latif el-Zein accused Israel of making the work of the Lebanese troops and volunteers difficult by not providing maps of mines planted during the Jewish state's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in 2000.

"We are in bad need of the maps but Israel ... makes the mission of people who work in this field and the Lebanese army very difficult," el-Zein said.

Legislator Michel Moussa, who heads the parliament's human rights committee, said the "use of such deadly weapons should be banned."

Dalya Farran, a spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Mine Action Coordination Center, or MACC, has said that since the end of last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, 25 civilians were killed and 185 wounded by cluster bomb and other ordnance explosions. Thirteen mine experts have also died during minesweeping operations. The most recent fatality was a British expert who died in an Oct. 11 blast.