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Belgrade - A two-day conference dedicated to the prohibition of cluster bombs began Wednesday in Belgrade. The meeting was scheduled on the initiative of the Serbian government, which last week received information from the United Nations on the locations of cluster bombs that were dropped on its territory during the 1999 NATO-led bombing campaign, which ended inter-ethnic clashes in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo.
The conference, attended by officials from 23 countries, stems from the so-called "Oslo process" launchedby Norway earlier this year after several countries that had signed the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) rejected a proposal to include cluster bombs.
The conference is also expected to focus on providing assistance to civilians severely injured in cluster bomb-related incidents and financing disarming projects in countries where remaining, unexploded munitions present an everyday danger to civilians.
It is believed that some 2,000 cluster bombs, containing 380,000 sub-munitions, were dropped on Serbian territory during the 1999 bombing campaign.
About 20,000 unexploded bombs are presumed to still be scattered around its territory.
Since the bombing campaign ended, at least six people, including three children, were killed by exploding cluster bombs, and 12 more have been injured.
Cluster bombs pose the greatest problem in countries in conflict such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. However, they are also present in Europe, particularly in the former Yugoslavia - Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina - where war erupted in the 1990s.
The chief manufacturers of cluster bombs, the US, China and Russia, have not taken any action related to the Oslo process.
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