After the Monday talks, Lebanese parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who hosts the talks in central Beirut, said that the atmosphere at the first session had been positive.

The participants had succeeded in "breaking the ice" and agreed on a "media truce" to stop attacking each other by media reports. "It is necessary to reach a solution because we cannot stay in this situation. Everyone is keen to unite in order to resolve issues," Berri added.

All major political leaders attended the Tuesday's dialogue amid tight security, except for Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah for safety reasons, who was represented by cabinet minister Mohammed Fneish as well as parliament members Mohammed Raad and Hussein Hajj Hassan.

Hezbollah is calling for the formation of a national unity government to "face up to the challenges with which Lebanon is confronted".

Nasrallah has said he wants his Shiite party, which has two ministers in the cabinet dominated by the ruling anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, and allies to comprise one-third of the cabinet. That effectively means that Hezbollah and its allies could veto key decisions.

A two-thirds vote in the cabinet is needed to pass decisions that are not made by consensus. A resignation of one-third of the cabinet automatically brings down the government. Nasrallah has threatened that if talks fail, Hezbollah would "go to the streets" to demand a unity government and call for early parliamentary elections.

In response to Nasrallah's warning, anti-Syrian Christian leader Samir Geagea said his camp was ready to stage counter-protests.

The dialogue, launched in early March, had been scheduled for July 25. But the outbreak of the 34-day Israel-Hezbollah conflict on July 12 has prevented the resumption of the talks. During the previous sessions, the political leaders failed to reach consensus on the future of Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, a staunch Syrian supporter, and the disarmament of Hezbollah. Last year, there were bombings to target anti-Syrian figures and commercial centers in Christian areas, killing two prominent anti-Syrian journalists and a politician.

The largest explosion was in Feb. 2005, killing former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 22 others in central Beirut. Anti-Syrian groups have accused Damascus of backing the bombings, an accusation denied by Syria which later was forced to withdraw its army from Lebanon.

"This freeze is essential until the international community puts in place effective legal instruments to address urgent humanitarian concerns about their use," Egeland said in a statement ahead of the convening of the Third Review Conference on the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva on Tuesday.

He said a protocol to the Convention on explosive remnants of war would take effect during the 10-day conference.

"I call upon all states to ratify and implement it (the protocol) in order to help us in the humanitarian community address the challenges posed by cluster munitions in post-conflict settings," he said.

In November 2003, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, which brings together UN agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the World Bank and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), called for an immediate freeze on the use of cluster munitions.

While some progress has been made in the intervening years, these weapons have continued to be used with devastating effect, most recently in Lebanon and Israel by both sides to the conflict, Egeland said.

According to UN reports, the density of cluster munitions in southern Lebanon is higher than in Kosovo and Iraq, and denser in built-up areas.

Unexploded cluster munitions pose a constant threat to the return of some 200,000 refugees and internally displaced persons, to the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have returned to or remained in their homes and villages, and to the lives of humanitarian and reconstruction workers and peacekeeping personnel.

Lebanon is only the most recent of countries to be challenged by the legacy of unexploded cluster munitions.

Countries like Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam continue to bear the burden of unexploded cluster munitions some 30 years after the end of conflict, impeding the safe cultivation of land and the development of infrastructure.

"Ultimately, as long as there is no effective ban, these weapons will continue to disproportionately affect civilians, maiming and killing women, children, and other vulnerable groups," Egeland said.

The states gathered for the Geneva conference should commit to immediately freeze the use of cluster munitions and strengthen existing international humanitarian law, he added.

The chief judge then convened the session and called the first witness, Qahar Khalil Mohammed.

On Sunday, another five-judge panel convicted Saddam in the deaths of nearly 150 Shia Muslims following a 1982 assassination attempt against him in the town of Dujail in 1982.

He and two others were sentenced to death by hanging. Four co-defendants received lesser sentences and one was acquitted.

The Anfal trial will continue while an appeal in the Dujail case is underway. The prosecution says about 180,000 Kurds, most of them civilians, were killed in the crackdown in 1987-88.

On Tuesday, Mohammed told the court that he and other men from his village surrendered to Iraqi soldiers after being promised that Saddam had issued an amnesty for them.

Instead, the 33 men were lined up at the bottom of a hill and soldiers opened fire on them.

"When they fired in our direction, we all fell to the ground," he said.

Mohammed said he was wounded but survived and managed to get away.

"When I went back, I saw my father and two brothers had been killed, as well as 18 of my relatives," he testified.

On Monday, the chief prosecutor in the Dujail case said a nine-judge appeals panel was expected to rule on Saddam's guilty verdict and death sentence by the middle of January. That could set in motion a possible execution by mid-February.

Iraqi authorities imposed a lockdown on Baghdad and surrounding provinces in anticipation of the Sunday verdict. Those measures were lifted Monday after a feared surge in violence failed to materialize, although there were pro-Saddam rallies throughout Sunni Muslim areas of the country.

Shias and Kurds, who suffered terribly under Saddam's rule, hailed the sentence as just.

If the appeals court upholds the sentences, all three members of the Presidential Council - President Jalal Talabani and Vice-Presidents Tariq al-Hashimi and Adil Abdul-Mahdi - must sign death warrants before executions can be carried out.

Talabani said Monday that although he opposes capital punishment, his signature is not needed to carry out Saddam's death sentence. Talabani, a Kurd, has permanently authorized Abdul-Mahdi, a Shia, to sign on his behalf. Abdul-Mahdi has said he would sign Saddam's death warrant, meaning two of three signatures were assured.

Al-Hashimi, the other vice-president and a Sunni, gave his word that he also would sign a Saddam death sentence as part of the deal under which he got the job April 22, according to witnesses at the meeting, which was attended by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

"We wanted a written promise before the first meeting of the new parliament. But later and during a meeting in the presence of American and British ambassadors and other politicians, the promise became oral in which he vowed not to oppose important rules and laws - especially those related to Saddam," Deputy Parliament Speaker Khaled al-Attiyah told AP.

"The US should (first) settle the problem of its illegal presence in Iraq. Its presence in the country is completely illegal now that a popular government has been established and a constitution approved by the state," he said.

"Iraqis are a civilized people with a rich culture and political tradition," he added.

Alluding to the death sentence handed down Friday by an Iraqi court on former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the spokesman recalled the US' support for Saddam Hussein during the decades when he committed the crimes against his people for which he was indicted.

"Washington had a role in Saddam's crimes," Elham said.

He said Iraq had no sophisticated problems which could not be solved.
"If the US withdraws from Iraq, the Iraqi people will manage their affairs."
He said the US needs to observe political and moral rules.

"Washington brought in soldiers to a region who are quite unfamiliar with its environment. These soldiers are at the service of arrogant US military officials."

The spokesman urged the US to compensate for its mistakes in Iraq and leave the country's affairs to its people.

When the state was run by warrior kings, this was comprehensible: they owed their existence to overwhelming force. Now weapons budgets and foreign wars are, if anything, an electoral liability. But the pattern has never been broken.

In Geneva today, at the new review of the conventional weapons treaty, the British government will be using the full force of its diplomacy to ensure that civilians continue to be killed, by blocking a ban on the use of cluster bombs. Sweden, supported by Austria, Mexico and New Zealand, has proposed a convention making their deployment illegal, like the Ottawa treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. But the UK, working with the US, China and Russia, has spent the past week trying to prevent negotiations from being opened. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Most of the cluster bombs dropped during the past 40 years have been delivered by Britain's two principal allies - the US and Israel - in the "war on terror". And the UK used hundreds of thousands of them during the two Gulf wars.

Cluster munitions are tiny bombs - generally about the size of a drinks can - packed inside bigger bombs or artillery shells. They scatter over several hectares and they are meant to be used to destroy tanks and planes and to wipe out anti-aircraft positions. There are two particular problems.

The first is that the bombs, being widely dispersed, cannot be accurately targeted. The second is that many of them don't detonate when they hit the ground. Officially, cluster bombs have a failure rate of between 5% and 7%. In reality it's much higher. Between 20% and 25% of the cluster munitions Nato forces dropped during the Kosovo conflict failed to go off when they landed. The failure rate of the bombs dropped by the US in Indochina was roughly 30%. Of the cluster bombs that Israel scattered over Lebanon, 40% did not detonate.

The unexploded bombs then sit and wait to be defused - leg by human leg. They are as devastating to civilian populations as landmines, or possibly worse, because far more of them have been dropped. Even 30 years or more after they land - as the people of Vietnam and Laos know - they can still be detonated by the slightest concussion.

A report published last week by the independent organisation Handicap International estimates that around 100,000 people have been killed or wounded by cluster bombs. Of the known casualties, 98% are civilians. Most of them are hit when farming, walking or clearing the rubble where their homes used to be. Many of the victims are children, partly because the bombs look like toys. Handicap's report tells terrible and heartbreaking stories of children finding these munitions and playing catch with them, or using them as boules or marbles. Those who survive are often blinded, lose limbs or suffer horrible abdominal injuries.

Among the case histories in the report is that of a family in Kosovo who went to swim in a lake a few kilometres from their village. One of the children, a six-year-old called Adnan, found a metal can on the bank and showed it to his family. It exploded. His father and older brother were killed and Adnan was gravely wounded. His sister later returned to the lake to collect the family's belongings, stepped on another Nato cluster bomb and was killed.

The economic effects of cluster bombs can also be deadly. Like landmines they put many agricultural areas out of bounds, because of the risk of detonating one while ploughing or harvesting. In some parts of Lebanon the fields have remained unharvested this year. Cluster bombs dropped on to the rubble of Lebanese towns have made reconstruction slow and dangerous.

The numbers of cluster bombs deployed are mind-boggling. The US air force released 19m over Cambodia, 70m in Vietnam and 208m in Laos. Over much shorter periods, the US and the UK dropped some 54m cluster bombs on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war and around 2m during the 2003 Iraq invasion. Israel scattered 4m cluster bombs over Lebanon during its latest invasion earlier this year, almost all of them during the final 72 hours. It looked like revenge, or an attempt (like its deliberate bombing of the Jiyeh power plant, causing a massive oil spill) to cripple Lebanon's economy. Since the invasion, more than two Lebanese civilians have been blown up by cluster bombs each day on average.

The only other nation which has used cluster bombs extensively since the second world war is Russia, which dropped large quantities in Afghanistan, and which scatters them in Chechnya, sometimes deliberately bombing market places and other civilian targets. Apart from that they've been deployed in small numbers by Sudan, Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Serb forces, Hizbullah and warring factions in Tajikistan. What good company we keep.

These weapons are arguably already illegal. A protocol to the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks which "are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction" and "which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated". I think 98% would be a fair definition of "excessive".

But their deployment will continue until there is a specific treaty banning them. It's clear the US and UK governments know their use is wrong. Handicap International reports that the Coalition Provisional Authority (the administration set up by the US to govern Iraq in 2003) "strongly discouraged casualty data collection, especially in relation to cluster submunitions". During a debate in the House of Lords last month, the Foreign Office minister, Lord Triesman, made such a feeble show of justifying their use that you couldn't help suspecting he was batting for the other side. The only justification he could find was that, unlike landmines, cluster bombs are not intended to lie around undetonated.

Two days ago, a letter sent to the defence minister by the international development secretary, Hilary Benn, was leaked to the press. He argued that "cluster munitions have a very serious humanitarian impact, pushing at the boundaries of international humanitarian law. It is difficult then to see how we can hold so prominent a position against landmines, yet somehow continue to advocate that use of cluster munitions is acceptable."

But Benn appears to be alone. The foreign office maintains that "existing humanitarian law is sufficient for the conduct of military operations, including the use of cluster munitions, and no treaty is required". The government seems unable to break its habit of killing.