Starvation as a weapon of war: An all too familiar horror in history

Indigenous Americans

Interestingly, a potentially relevant historical parallel to the Israel-Gaza conflict comes from North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. It involved a colonial power inflicting pain during wartime through the deliberate starvation of a native population.

Evidence for its existence can be found in the language of members of the Iroquois Confederacy — a collection of Native American nations. The Iroquoian word for president of the United States to this day is Conotocarious, which means "Town Destroyer."

They initially applied the name to General George Washington, who went on to become the first president of the new American republic. It was given because of the brutal military campaign carried out by the Continental Army against members of the Iroquois Confederacy.

General Washington ordered the "total destruction and devastation" of Indigenous villages across what today is the state of New York. It was retaliation for attacks by some of the Iroquois allied with the British against American settlements.

The military campaign stretched over four months and involved the complete annihilation of over 40 Iroquoian villages, including crops and food supplies. The devastation weakened the Iroquois Confederation militarily, led to the depopulation of a major part of the region and caused hundreds of deaths during the subsequent winter.

Similar tactics against other Indigenous nations would be applied as the United States expanded westward in North America.  Widespread resistance, including violence against American soldiers and settlers, greeted the colonisers as they encroached.

To undermine this defiance of American power, Indigenous food supplies became a prime target in the 1860s and 1870s.  A deliberate decimation of the buffalo — a major source of food for many Indigenous nations in the western half of North America, including the Sioux, ensued. 

The United States' northern neighbour, Canada, learned from the American experience: the Canadian government withheld food rations in the 1880s to starve any recalcitrant Indigenous peoples to accept the lands assigned to them through treaties.

Notable starvation campaigns

Numerous nations in the last 100 years have used starvation as a weapon of war. One of the deadliest occurred during World War II when the forces of Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and surrounded the city of Leningrad — now Saint Petersburg, Russia.

To encourage the city to capitulate, the Germans cut off food supplies for 28 months, from September 1941 until January 1944.

The city never surrendered, but it paid a terrible price: 22% of Leningrad's population of nearly three million people died from causes related to the food shortage.

Many survivors did not escape unaffected. A medical study over several decades after the war found that men who experienced the Leningrad starvation suffered far more health complications compared to Russian men who did not.

A notorious example of the devastation of a population through starvation as part of a military campaign occurred in Nigeria between 1967 and 1970.

A civil war erupted with an ethnic group, the Igbo, declaring independence in the form of a new state called Biafra. Over three years, the Nigerian government crushed Biafra through a military campaign that included a strict blockade, which led to anywhere from 500,000 to two million civilian deaths.

More recently, starvation of civilians has been a recurrent tactic in several regional conflicts. 

Starvation was weaponised during Syria's civil war in 2011. The government, for instance, deliberately targeted markets while blocking the arrival of supplies. Also, Yemen's civil war, during a similar timeframe, saw the blockading of ports that have led to widespread hunger and death.

In South Sudan, as part of an ongoing civil war since 2013, there was an organised campaign to disrupt food supplies through raids. Hundreds of thousands died in the conflict. 

Lincoln's Lieber Code

Not surprisingly, the deliberate use of hunger as a weapon of war is controversial even as it continues to be used across centuries. In the 1860s, during the American Civil War, the ultimately victorious North tried to codify famine as an acceptable military tactic.

President Abraham Lincoln's administration issued The Lieber Code in April 1863. Drawn up by a Prussian-American academic named Francis Lieber, he catalogued what he argued were legitimate rules of warfare.

Article 17 on his list explicitly endorsed famine as an acceptable military tactic: "War is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy." 

In the 20th century, repeated attempts have been made within international law to designate the deliberate starvation of a civilian population as a war crime.

The Commission on Responsibility, established after World War I, specifically listed forced starvation as a violation of the law and prosecutable.

On its part, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, enacted in 2002, explicitly declared as a war crime the intentional "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions."

Despite these prohibitions, starvation as a weapon of war continues. It does so, at least in part, because of a blurring of the lines. Namely, several countries allow for the withholding of food, including through blockades, if the purpose is to achieve a military objective and not to starve civilians deliberately.

The two are inevitably intertwined, of course, both in the past and the present and, given the nature of humanity, in the future as well.