Just Collateral Damage

Ordinary people are targets of war everywhere, even though international laws forbade it 50 years ago

If Earth formed 24 hours ago, humans have been around for just 1 second. And in that second, the time we’ve been good to each other is so short, you’d need to measure it with an atomic clock. Ancient Romans thought nothing of burning down enemy cities and slaughtering whole populations. At Carthage, in 146 BCE, they killed “hundreds of thousands” over two days, and sold 50,000 survivors into slavery. Civilians – women, children, artisans, traders – were fair game as late as WW2, when Nazis blitzed London night after night. And don’t forget, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrors inflicted entirely on civilians.

For a while, it seemed WW2 had jolted our collective conscience. Geneva Conventions of 1949 laid down dos and don’ts for treatment of PoWs – some 3.5mn Soviet PoWs had died in German captivity – and civilians in occupied territories. Thirty years later, rules were written to protect civilians in active warzones. But after four years of war in Ukraine, and now the fourth week in Iran, it’s clear that these rules are observed only in the breach. Civilians in Kyiv, Mariupol, Tehran, Tel Aviv, are no more safe in enemy hands than Carthaginians all those centuries ago.

In Ukraine, residential blocks are attacked with drones and missiles regularly. Russia allegedly took away 20,000 Ukrainian children. It has knocked out Ukrainian power infra every winter, to make non-combatants suffer. In Gaza, 2mn people – 90% of population – are displaced or homeless. Did they have a hand in the Oct 2023 Hamas attack in Israel? No, but they are “collateral damage”. So are a million Lebanese. Everywhere, in every war, civilians bear the brunt. Trump and Bibi’s “excursion” in Iran started with a “mistaken” missile strike on a girl’s school. Since then, Iran has picked soft targets across West Asia, in Dubai, Qatar, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. In our immediate neighbourhood, the open war between Pakistan and Afghanistan has killed hundreds of civilians, including patients at a Kabul hospital.

Should WW3 break out – it seemed possible when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 – what are the odds it would spare civilians? On current evidence, international humanitarian laws exist only on paper, and countries that pushed them once – US, and Russia as part of USSR – show a cynical disregard for them now. But this absence of restraint in war should bother countries that are watching from the sidelines. India, China, Japan, all of Europe, S Africa, Canada, Brazil, should speak up. All is not fair in war. Not anymore.