Policy

Libya has not acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Monitor is not aware of any statements on the cluster munition ban by the National Transitional Council (NTC) of Libya, which announced the liberation of the country on 24 October 2011. The NTC is an interim government, and Libyans are scheduled to elect a 200-member assembly to oversee writing a new constitution and form a government in 2012.

The previous government of Libya participated in three regional conferences held during the 2007–2008 Oslo Process that developed the convention, but attended the formal negotiations in Dublin in May 2008 as an observer only and did not join in the consensus adoption of the convention.[1] Libya did not attend the Oslo Signing Conference in December 2008. It participated in a regional conference on cluster munitions in Pretoria, South Africa in March 2010 and attended the First Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions in Vientiane, Lao PDR in November 2010 as an observer, but did not make any statements.

No representatives from Libya participated in any meetings of the convention in the second half of 2011 or the first half of 2012.

Libya is not a party to the Mine Ban Treaty. On 28 April 2011, the NTC formally pledged not to use landmines.[2]

Libya is not a party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Production, transfer, and stockpiling

Libya is not known to have produced or exported cluster munitions. 

Libya possesses a stockpile of cluster munitions, but its current status and composition are unknown. Jane’s Information Group in the past listed Libya as possessing KMG-U dispensers (which deploy submunitions) and RBK-500 aerial cluster bombs, again presumably of Soviet/Russian origin.[3] It also possesses Grad 122mm surface-to-surface rocket launchers, but it is also not known if the ammunition for these weapons includes versions with submunition payloads.[4]

From the recent conflict, it is now also known that Libya has stockpiled RBK-250 cluster bombs, MAT-120 mortar projectiles with submunitions, and an unidentified type of cluster munition with dual purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) submunitions.

In June 2011, Spain confirmed that it had transferred a total of 1,055 MAT-120 cluster munitions containing 22,155 submunitions to Libya in 2006 and 2008.[5]

Use

During the 2011 conflict, government forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi used three different types of cluster munitions at locations including Ajabiya, Misrata, and in the Nafusa Mountains near Jadu and Zintan. NATO air strikes on a military depot at Mizdah created unexploded ordnance from munitions stored by Libya, including unexploded submunitions.

In April 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and The New York Times documented the use of MAT-120 mortar cluster munitions by government forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in residential areas of the city of Misrata.[6] The clearance agency Mines Advisory Group (MAG) estimated a dud rate of 9.5% for the MAT-120s used in Libya.[7]

In February 2012, The New York Times reported that MAG clearance staff had found the remnants of an RBK-250, an air-dropped cluster munition, and about 30 PTAB-2.5M submunitions, “some exploded, others not,” a month earlier in the desert 20 miles south of the city of Ajdabiya. Manufactured in the Soviet-era, the cluster munition was found “where journalists witnessed low-elevation airstrikes by Libyan government aircraft” in March 2011 “often against convoys and concentrations of anti-Qaddafi fighters who roamed the highway between Ajabiya and Ras Lanuf.” [8]

On 8 March 2012, Human Rights Watch found two different types of intact submunitions that had been scattered from their storage site in bunkers at Mizdah military depot, 160 kilometers south of Tripoli, during NATO air strikes in 2011. HRW found approximately 15 PTAB bomblets and about three dozen DPICM submunitions of an unidentified type.[9]

In March 2012, the United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry on Libya reported that the same unidentified DPICM and 122mm cargo rockets used by the Libyan government were also found in the Nafusa Mountains near Jadu and Zintan.[10]

The European Union and at least ten States Parties and signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions condemned or expressed grave concern about the Libyan government’s use of cluster munitions in 2011.

There has been no evidence of cluster munition use in Libya by countries that were involved in the NATO military action, including by the US and other states that have not yet joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions.[11] In its formal response to the UN Commission of Inquiry, NATO confirmed that it did not use cluster munitions in the Libya operation.[12]

Previously, Libyan forces used aerial cluster bombs, likely RBK bombs of Soviet/Russian origin, containing AO-1Sch and PTAB-2.5 submunitions, at various locations during its intervention in Chad during the 1986–1987 conflict.[13] On 25 March 1986, US Navy aircraft attacked Libyan ships using Mk-20 Rockeye cluster bombs; on the night of 14–15 April 1986, US Navy aircraft dropped 60 Rockeye bombs on the airfield at Benina.[14] On 27 November 2009, a commercial oil company survey crew in Libya found remnants of a German World War II-era “butterfly bomb” (an early version of a cluster bomb) and an explosive ordnance disposal expert subsequently identified six more such cluster munition remnants.[15]