(Dublin: 22 May 2008) Outside the entrance to the main plenary room I’ve noticed a sign telling the story of “The Big Fight,” a boxing match between then-heavy weight champion Muhammed Ali and Al “Blue” Lewis that took place in 1972 at Croke Park, the venue for our Dublin conference on cluster bombs. While we made some progress on victim assistance today, deliberations were tense and difficult on other parts of the ban treaty text and it appears we are indeed headed into our very own “Big Fight.”

The battlelines have been drawn on the awkwardly named issue of “interoperability” as states debate new treaty text proposed by the Swiss chair that would, if passed, allow treaty member states to assist non-treaty members to use cluster munitions in their operations. Yesterday, the United States made a public statement expressing concern that the current “interoperability” language could inhibit its ability to carry out humanitarian relief operations. While the U.S. is not participating in the Oslo Process to ban cluster munitions, it is like the elephant in the room given its recent use of the weapon in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many states supported the interoperability loophole (including New Zealand!!!) tho several with a conscience raised their concern. One government likened the proposal to objected using this analogy: under the new text it would be permissible for a gas station attendant from a treaty member state to fill the petrol tank of a non-treaty member’s vehicle, but if the attendant would be powerless to act if they saw that the vehicle was filled with weapons that the driver said would be used to kill people.

It’s been a very long day and I’m not sure I’ve explained the interoperability problem very well. All the campaigners were up at 6.00am this morning for a media event downtown in O’Connell Street. We lay down on a strip of pavement in the middle of this road as media used a crane to shoot stills and video of the group in an attempt to capture what a cluster munition strike would look like in the heart of Dublin. I took a few photos from the point of view of the pavement. - Mary Wareham, Oxfam NZ/ANZCMC

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