July 2002

I was watching the series Young Indiana Jones. Usually I don't really follow it, but this night I got stuck with it, because it was a really interesting episode. Young Indiana was caught up somewhere in Africa helping some inland tribe as a doctor I think it was.
I was struck by one particular part of the episode.
Young Indiana and the leader of the tribe and some others were sitting around the fire at night, discussing all kinds of topics, of which one was warfare.
The leader of the tribe told Young Indiana about how his people lost two cows and a goat to another tribe in the last war they were battling. Young Indiana was mightily surprised and wondered what was so bad about "only two cows and a goat". He asked if they didn't lose any men of the tribe and when the leader told him they didn't, Young Indiana got even more confused.
The leader of the tribe started explaining how a war was fought over there.
The basic rule of warfare among the tribes there was that they tried as much as possible to avoid human killings. The war was about getting more land, not about killing people. They didn't want to kill people and they did everything in their power to prevent it.
Ofcourse in wars you cannot guarantee anything, so occasionally it would happen that either one of the tribes would lose one or two men (you see Young Indiana raise his eyebrow and shake his head in confusion when he hears that occasionally one or two men lose their lives, since he's used to bodycounts of many thousands in his knowledge of warfare). But in all cases where a tribe would lose a life, the other tribe would compensate that life with a piece of their cattle. Not that a cow or a goat or a sheep could ever replace the killed person, but it showed the respect for Life in general and as a way of apology that they didn't mean to purposely take that life.
A compensation for a lost life...

Ofcourse the tribe leader was completely shocked that during wars in the western world basically all that mattered was body count. He couldn't believe what he heard when Young Indiana told him that casualties in numbers of 20.000 were very normal.

In what kind of world are we living anyway, when we pretend that we are allowed to take Life and throw it away as if it were a piece of an old newspaper?
In what kind of world are we living, when we don't know anymore how to respect other people's properties and privacies?
What is it that we need, before we see that everyone is equal and has equal rights and above all, has the right to live...?