In early September a Widaia raid killed a young boy named Digiliak, while a Gutelu raid killed two Widaia. On the next day, warfare was abruptly ended on the Gutelu southern frontier by the establishment of a Dutch patrol post there, but it continued on another Gutelu frontier.
Each of the actions described so far produced only limited tangible consequences, because few people died and no population was driven out of its homeland. Five years later, on June 4, 1966, a large-scale massacre took place. Its origins lay in tensions within the Gutelu Alliance, between the alliance’s leader, Gutelu of the Dloko-Mabel Confederation, and jealous leaders of the allied Wilihiman-Walalua and Gosi-Alua Confederations. Several decades previously, the latter two confederations had been at war with the Dloko-Mabel Confederation until a switch of alliances. It is unclear whether Gutelu himself planned the attack on his former enemies, or whether he was unable to restrain hotheads among his own people. If the latter interpretation were true, it would illustrate a recurrent theme in tribal societies that lack the strong leadership and monopolization of force characterizing chiefdom and state societies. The attack was carefully scheduled for a day when the local missionary and Indonesian police (who had gained control of western New Guinea from the Dutch in 1962) happened to be away. Dloko-Mabel warriors and other northern members of the Gutelu Alliance snuck across the Elogeta River at dawn under cover of fog to attack the alliance’s southern members. Within an hour, 125 southern adults and children of both sexes were dead or dying, dozens of settlements were burning, and other alliances alerted to the impending attack joined in to steal pigs. The southerners would have been exterminated except for help that they received from another alliance further to the south that had formerly been their allies. The result, besides all those deaths, was a flight of southerners further towards the south, and a split in the Gutelu Alliance between southerners and northerners. Such massacres are infrequent events with big consequences. Karl Heider was told of four other such massacres, burnings of villages, pig plundering, and population shifts between the 1930s and 1962.
The war’s death toll
All of the fighting between April and early September 1961 resulted in only about 11 deaths on the southern frontier. Even the massacre of June 4, 1966, produced a death toll of only 125. To us survivors of the 20th century and two world wars, such numbers are so low as not even to be worth dignifying with the name of war. Think of some of the far higher death tolls of modern state history: 2,996 Americans killed within one hour in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001; 20,000 British soldiers killed on a single day, July 1, 1916, at the Battle of the Somme during World War I, mowed down as they charged across open ground against German positions heavily defended by machine guns; about 100,000 Japanese killed on or after August 6, 1945, by the American atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Plate 37); and over 50,000,000 total deaths as a result of World War II. By these standards, the Dani fighting that I just summarized was a tiny war, if it is considered a war at all.
Yes, as measured by the absolute number of people killed, the Dani War was indeed tiny. But the nations involved in World War II were far more populous, and offered far more potential victims, than did the two alliances involved in the Wilihiman-Widaia war. Those alliances numbered perhaps 8,000 people in all, while the major participants in World War II had populations ranging from tens of millions to nearly a billion. The relative death toll of the Dani War—the number of Dani killed as a proportion of the total population involved—rivaled or eclipsed the casualty rates suffered by the U.S., European countries, Japan, or China in the world wars. For example, the 11 deaths suffered by the two Dani alliances on the Gutelu southern front alone, in the six months between April and September 1961, represented about 0.14% of the alliances’ population. That’s higher than the percentage death toll (0.10%) from the bloodiest battle on the Pacific front during World War II: the three-month struggle for Okinawa, employing bombers and kamikaze planes and artillery and flame-throwers, in which about 264,000 people (23,000 American soldiers, 91,000 Japanese soldiers, and 150,000 Okinawan civilians) died, out of a total American/Japanese/Okinawan population then of around 250,000,000. The 125 men, women, and children killed within an hour in the Dani massacre of June 4, 1966, represented about 5% of the targeted population (about 2,500), the southern confederations of the Gutelu Alliance. To match that percentage, the Hiroshima atomic bomb would have had to kill 4,000,000 rather than 100,000 Japanese, and the World Trade Center attack would have had to kill 15,000,000 rather than 2,996 Americans.
By world standards, the Dani War was tiny only because the Dani population at risk of being killed was tiny. By the standards of the local population involved, the Dani War was huge. In the next chapter we shall see that that conclusion also applies to traditional warfare in general.
CHAPTER 4
A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars
Sources of information Forms of traditional warfare Mortality rates Similarities and differences Ending warfare Effects of European contact Warlike animals, peaceful peoples Motives for traditional war Ultimate reasons Whom do people fight? Forgetting Pearl HarborDefinitions of war
Traditional warfare, as illustrated by the Dani War described in the previous chapter, has been widespread but not universal among small-scale societies. It raises many questions that have been hotly debated. For example, how should war be defined, and do so-called tribal wars really constitute wars at all? How do the death tolls from warfare in small-scale societies compare to death tolls from state warfare? Does warfare increase or decrease when small-scale societies become contacted and influenced by Europeans and other more centralized societies? If fighting between groups of chimpanzees, lions, wolves, and other social animals furnishes precedents for human warfare, does that suggest a genetic basis of warfare? Among human societies, are there some especially peaceful ones? If so, why? And: what are the motives and causes of traditional warfare?
Let’s begin with the question of how to define warfare. Human violence assumes many forms, only some of which are normally taken to constitute war. Anyone will agree that a battle between large armies of trained professional soldiers in the service of rival state governments that have issued formal declarations of war does constitute war. Most of us would also agree that there are forms of human violence that don’t constitute war, such as individual homicides (the killing of one individual by another individual belonging to the same political unit), or family feuds within the same political unit (such as the feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families of the eastern United States beginning around 1880). Borderline cases include recurrent violence between rival groups within the same political unit, such as fighting between urban gangs (commonly referred to as “gang warfare”), between drug cartels, or between political factions whose fighting has not yet reached the stage of declared civil war (such as the fighting between armed militias of fascists and socialists in Italy and Germany leading up to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s assumptions of power). Where should we draw the line?