Wilihiman were lightly wounded in the day’s action. The Wilihiman now felt that they had avenged the death of their Gosi-Alua ally, and they celebrated by dancing into the night.
On May 25 Gutelu warriors on their alliance’s northern front killed a man of the Asuk-Balek Confederation, allied with the Widaia and figuring in the August 25 death to be described below.
On May 26 both sides issued challenges, carried out raids, and fought until late in the afternoon, whereupon they went home. Twelve Wilihiman were wounded, none of them seriously.
On May 29 the Widaia reported that their warrior wounded on April 15 had just died, leading the Wilihiman to launch a celebratory dance that had to be interrupted because of a report of a Widaia raid on the northern frontier.
The Widaia were now feeling restless because they had suffered two deaths without being able to take revenge. On June 4 they sent out an ambush party that developed into a battle involving a total of about 800 men, broken off because of darkness. Three Wilihiman were lightly wounded.
A full-fledged battle developed on June 7, involving 400 or 500 warriors on each side. Amidst a hail of spears and arrows from opposing groups 20 meters apart, hotheads dashed to within 5 meters of the enemy, constantly darting to avoid being hit. About 20 men were wounded.
A Widaia raid on June 8 was inferred from footprints but not spotted.
On June 10 the Wilihiman devoted themselves to a ceremony, and no one was out in the gardens or manning the watch-towers. In the late afternoon of the hot day a Wilihiman man and three young boys went to drink cold water at the river, where they were surprised by 30 Widaia divided into two groups. When the first group popped out, the four Wilihiman fled, whereupon the second group of Widaia in hiding attempted to cut them off. The Wilihiman man and two of the boys managed to escape, but Wejakhe, the third boy, could not run fast because of an injured leg, was caught, was severely wounded with spears, and died that night.
On June 15 Wejakhe’s Wilihiman relatives staged an unsuccessful raid.
On June 22 the Widaia shouted out a challenge, and a battle with about 300 men on each side developed along with an ambush. Four men were lightly wounded. A Dloko-Mabel man was seriously wounded by an arrow point that broke off in his shoulder and that his companions attempted to extract, first by gripping it with their teeth and pulling, then by operating (without anesthetic) with a bamboo knife.
On July 5, after two weeks without fighting, the Wilihiman raided a Widaia garden. A Wilihiman man named Jenokma, who was faster than his companions, impetuously sprinted ahead after a group of six fleeing Widaia, was cut off, and was speared. His companions fled, and the Widaia carried off his corpse but brought it back that evening and set it down in the no-man’s land for the Wilihiman to retrieve. Three Gosi-Alua allies of the Wilihiman were lightly wounded. The Wilihiman were now depressed: they had hoped to make a kill, but instead it was they who had just suffered another death. An old Wilihiman woman lamented, “Why are you trying to kill the Widaia?” A Wilihiman man replied, “Those people are our enemies. Why shouldn’t we kill them?—they’re not human.”
On July 12 the Wilihiman spent all day waiting in ambush until they issued an open challenge around 5:00 P.M. However, it was a rainy day, so the Widaia didn’t accept the challenge or go out into their gardens.
On July 28 the Widaia staged a raid that was spotted by a group of eight Wilihiman men at a watch-tower. The Wilihiman hid themselves nearby. Not realizing that there were any Wilihiman around, the Widaia came to their tower, and one of them climbed it for a look. At that point the hidden Wilihiman jumped out, the Widaia on the ground fled, and the one man up on the tower attempted to jump down but wasn’t fast enough and was caught and killed. That evening the Wilihiman returned his body to the Widaia.
On August 2 a small battle was provoked when a Widaia pig either was stolen by the Wilihiman or strayed from their territory.
On August 6 a large battle developed between the Wilihiman, the Widaia, and allies on both sides. A parallel battle took place between Widaia and Wilihiman boys as young as six years old, standing on opposite sides of a river, firing arrows at each other, and urged on by older men. Only five men were lightly wounded, because the battle degenerated into more name-calling than fighting. Some sample insults: “You are women, you are cowards.” “Why do you have so many more women than your low status deserves?” “I have five wives, and I’m going to get five more, because I live on my own land. You are landless fugitives, that’s why you have no wives.”
On August 16 another large battle drawing in allies on both sides took place. At least 20 men were wounded, one possibly seriously by an arrow shot into his belly. The Wilihiman now felt tense, pressured by their inability to avenge their two recent dead, and under a collective obsession to kill an enemy quickly. The spirits of their ancestors wanted revenge, which they themselves had not delivered. They felt that ancestral spirits were no longer supporting them, and that they depended only on themselves; that fear lowered their desire to fight.
On August 24 a Widaia woman unhappy with her husband fled to Wilihiman land in order to seek refuge. A group of Wilihiman wanted to kill her to avenge Jenokma’s death on July 5, but they were dissuaded from doing so.
On August 25, as I related in Chapter 2, four Asuk-Balek men from the other side of the Baliem River came to visit relatives of two of the men in the Dloko-Mabel area. They ran into a Wilihiman group, who immediately realized that these were allies of their enemies, and that the two who had no local relatives should be killed. One of the two succeeded in fleeing, but the other was overpowered and killed. As Wilihiman men dragged off the dying Asuk-Balek, young boys ran alongside him, piercing his body with tiny spears. The killing triggered wild rejoicing and singing everywhere among the Wilihiman, followed by a celebratory dance. The Wilihiman concluded that the Asuk-Balek had been steered to them by their ancestral spirits, or else by Jenokma’s ghost. Even though the revenge was not tit-for-tat (the death of just one enemy for the earlier deaths of two Wilihiman), tension decreased. The killing of even one enemy was the surest sign that ancestral spirits were now again helping them.
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
