From Genghis Khan on horseback to Winston Churchill in his underground Cabinet War Rooms, from Osama Bin Laden in a mountain cave to the dreadlocked militiamen of northern Uganda, wartime leaders have unleashed horror on civilians.
The limits that might seem reasonable in peacetime can be a lot less clear cut in the heat of conflict, a humanitarian expert argues in a new book.
Killing civilians isnÂ?t anything new, but if we understand how people justify the act, maybe we can make it less acceptable, argues author Hugo Slim, whoÂ?s seen plenty of wars and their aftermath as an aid worker in Africa and the Middle East.
Â?Dragging a stick around a huddle of people to mark them as sacred is exaggerated because civilian identity is ambiguous,Â? Slim writes in his book, Â?Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in WarÂ?. Â?But itÂ?s necessary because without it everyone would be fair game, and then mass killing and suffering become the norm.Â?
ThereÂ?s nothing uniquely modern about civilians being targeted in large numbers, according to Slim, whoÂ?s the grandson of celebrated British military commander Field Marshal the Viscount Slim.
Throughout history and across the world, civilians have been massacred, raped, rounded up and been forced to flee. TheyÂ?ve died from famine and disease after wars have reduced them to poverty, and had their dignity and their identity taken away.
WhatÂ?s going on in leadersÂ? minds when they get on their mobile phones or sit down in air conditioned rooms and decide to target civilians?
Commanders, governments and soldiers regularly dehumanise their enemies by describing them as animals or germs, but they justify their actions in wide-ranging ways, Slim argues.
At one extreme you have genocidal movements who dehumanise their enemy completely and want to wipe out a whole group, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis being the obvious example.
In the middle of the spectrum, Slim groups HamasÂ? attacking Israelis from its base in the Palestinian territories, HezbollahÂ?s doing the same from Lebanon or British World War Two Prime Minister Winston ChurchillÂ?s bombing the German city of Dresden - all examples of leaders targeting civilians deliberately and justifying their acts as exceptional cases.
They use the argument that itÂ?s necessary to break the rules because the cause is so righteous, or the fight is so asymmetrical, and because the method is effective.
At the pro-civilian end of the spectrum, Slim places armies like the British, the United States and the Israelis, which he says on the whole do their best to avoid killing civilians, and sometimes even prosecute soldiers for it as a crime.
When they do kill people - which he says they do quite often - they say itÂ?s a regrettable accident of war, not their explicit policy, although they sometimes cushion the blow with euphemisms like Â?collateral damageÂ?.
In contrast, Al Qaeda head Osama Bin Laden argues that itÂ?s legitimate to kill Western civilians in revenge for the actions of their governments. Civilians are complicit, Bin Laden argues, because theyÂ?ve elected their leaders and so deserve to be punished as a group.
What is a civilian anyway? The word itself didnÂ?t appear until the 20th century, but the idea that certain groups should be off limits in conflict is an ancient and pervasive concept.
As far back as the 13th century, Slim writes, Pope Gregory IX was saying that some people should be protected from war if they were priests, monks, pilgrims, travellers, merchants, peasants, women or children.
Yet once you start looking at it, the category of people who are not involved in war and therefore Â?innocentÂ? is very hard to pin down. Even in the Geneva Conventions, itÂ?s only defined as people who are not combatants.
You can see why governments and their armies often donÂ?t accept civiliansÂ? neutrality, when itÂ?s true that civilians often arenÂ?t neutral, either in their actions or their thoughts, Slim says.
Is a militia leaderÂ?s girlfriend innocent?
Or a newspaper editor whoÂ?s spewing racist hate rhetoric on a daily basis?
In ColombiaÂ?s complex and long-running conflict, right-wing paramilitaries have attacked butchers, saying they were justified targets for having sold the meat of cows stolen from landowners by guerrillas and exchanged with peasants for food.
By profiting from the spoils of war, are the butchers really complicit?
SlimÂ?s response is that you have to be realistic and acknowledge the ambiguities, but then say we need to put these people off limits anyway.
Â?(Because)Â? when we stop seeing the enemy as people like us we become truly terrible,Â? Slim says.
MORAL SELF-INTEREST
But how do you tell that to an angry man with a gun, especially if heÂ?s got revenge in his heart?
Slim Â? who is director of an organisation called Corporates for Crisis, working to boost investment in post-conflict societies like northern Uganda - has looked into the fields of business theory and psychology to come up with strategies and suggestions.
To start with, he says, you have to find the arguments that will resonate with what people know, so theyÂ?ll remember the individual humanity of their enemies and make them feel that itÂ?s right that civilians should be left out of the battle.
And then you might have to back it up with coercion, upholding international laws and coming down with military force if necessary.
ItÂ?s important to find incentives, not just the reasons why it might be to someoneÂ?s political or financial benefit in the long run, but appeal to their moral self-interest too, he says.
TheyÂ?ll be wondering: Â?Can I love if I have done these things?Â? says Slim, who studied theology at Oxford University. Â?Can I return to my family? What happens to my soul?Â?
Slim doesnÂ?t think heÂ?s being naive. During his work with Save the Children, the United Nations, Oxfam, the British Red Cross and the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, heÂ?s seen wars up close.
And heÂ?s talked to dozens of people who have survived them, as well as to men, women and children whoÂ?ve done their share of killing. Yet he still seems to think itÂ?s possible to change things.
Because in every conflict, in every place where moral rules of how human beings should treat each other have been trodden into the ground, there are moments when soldiers show compassion.
From the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1994 war between Azeris and Armenians to Liberian villages razed in the 1990s, Slim argues there have always been some soldiers who let the people of their enemies survive in the midst of massacre.
When they explain why, itÂ?s because they saw the civilians at their mercy as people like their own families, and treated them that way for the seconds when it counted.
And that recurring compassion is what societies who want to protect civilians can build on, he says.
Look at how little it takes to make us killers. Slim cites repeated studies that have found that when put in the midst of a group expected to kill, 80 percent of us will not resist.
Only 10 percent of us will ask to do something else instead, and just 10 percent will actively resist, the researchers say.
Â?As with playing the violin or gutting a fish, the worst time is the first time and then we get used to it and get better at it,Â? he writes.
But the flip side of that, Slim argues, is that if you change the groupÂ?s attitude to one of immense disapproval towards killing civilians, then individuals will go along with that.
Â?I donÂ?t think itÂ?s a hard thing to persuade people at all,Â? Slim says.
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