Explosive Remnants of War:The Problem; Strategic Insights: v.2, issue 4 (April 2003)

Abstract

US troops who were engaged in eastern Afghanistan to search out and destroy the caves used by Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces described the area as being littered with US cluster bombs and unexploded ordnance, which caused great danger to troops as they searched the peak. Recent studies of contemporary conflicts have shown that the threat posed by Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) to the civil population as well as to peace keeping forces is of great humanitarian concern. Because of a lack of specific legal regulations on the issue of ERW, a large number of innocents have been killed or injured by ERW after conflicts have ended. Since the late 1990s, the issue of ERW has been listed on the agendas and comprehensively discussed during several conferences of experts and Meetings of States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). However, the latest discussions have shown that there is still a lack of basic understanding of how imminent the threat is and how to deal with it.