Laws of Yesterday’s Wars Symposium – Rules and “Right” in Iban Laws of War

Editor’s note: The following post highlights a chapter that appears in Samuel White’s third edited volume of Laws of Yesterday’s Wars published with Brill. For a general introduction to the series, see Dr Samuel White and Professor Sean Watts’s introductory post.

Ethnohistorical studies of the laws of wars offer the opportunity to find commonality of principles and to seek universality in modern international humanitarian law (IHL). They also challenge us to consider alternate conceptions of rules as a system to regulate and to justify war. The Iban people of western Borneo, whose “laws of war” were but one element of a system of “right” intended to maintain the world’s spiritual balance, offer such a challenge.

Unlike many other regions, where customs regulating war emerged strongly from conflict on land, Borneo was part of an essentially maritime zone. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the island was located at the confluence of regional maritime trading, raiding, and slaving routes and subject to shifting settlement and rule throughout its coastal and riverine areas. The Iban came to dominate among the peoples of the north-western coast, under the weakening suzerainty of the Sultan of Brunei. Their shallow-draughted bangkong boats were particularly suited to coastal raiding and they raided both for their own ends and as allies of various Malay chiefs for and against the Sultan.

In addition, the region had a long history of Chinese trade influence and, by the nineteenth century, European expansion. In Borneo, however, Britain and the Netherlands were focused not on colonial acquisition but on maritime dominion. The means by which this form of European dominion was justified was through the delegitimisation of non-European access to the sea, which turned on a narrative of regional piracy. In particular, Iban forms of power, influence, and war were not recognised as legitimate, but were characterised as unlawful piracy.

Iban Adat

The Iban approach to self-regulation, generally and with respect to warfare, was based on unwritten but highly codified adat. Often translated as “customary law,” it represented much more than a code of rules.

Adat involved the basic values of life, the system of agriculture, and the code ordering Iban society. Adat sought to maintain a state of ritual well-being with gods and spirits. A breach of adat could be detected through the disruption of this balance, for example through the experience of illness or calamity, and had to be remedied through both secular and spiritual means. Conversely, as commentators note, “the correctness of adat, when properly adhered to, [was] demonstrated by a continuing state of spiritual well-being expressed outwardly in terms of health and material prosperity.” For this reason, the Iban community depended on its members behaving in accordance with custom, including the principle of minta adat, meaning “to ask for adat.” That is, a wronged person was “expected to insist upon compensation” while longhouse leaders were responsible to ensure the proper sanctions were applied to restore “social harmony and spiritual health.”

Adat was complemented by the practice of augury. While adat regulated matters capable of human control, augury provided guidance against residual uncertainty. Thus, reading omens from birds was also an essential part of being “on the warpath” in the Iban way of life.

Iban Means and Methods of War

When supported by adat and augury, Iban means and methods of warfare centred on maritime raiding and the practice of headhunting, the latter both as a reason to raid, and the result of raiding. For example, taking a new head was required to end the mourning period for a deceased person. Headhunting also played a role in key parts of the agricultural cycle, and was essential for a man to gain the status of raja berani (wealthy and brave), an important step in securing a high value bride.

Iban oral traditions relating to the conduct of war identified key principles for both the proper resort to force, and the way it was to be conducted, including the proper disposition of heads taken. For example, a tradition recorded that after the submission of the Kantu tribe, Rukok instructed Sampar that “if a warleader leads a party on an expedition, he must not allow his warriors to fight a guiltless tribe that has no quarrel with them,” and “if the enemy surrenders, he may not take their lives, lest his army be unsuccessful in future warfare and risk fighting empty-handed war raids (balang kayau).” Further, the “first time that a warrior takes a head or captures a prisoner, he must present the head or captive to the warleader in acknowledgement of the latter’s leadership.”

This tradition is indicative of a system less about prohibited conduct in war than the following of the right means and methods, with right intent, and right omens. An interesting aspect of this is the social requirement that fighting, while expected, was nonetheless voluntary: “[W]hen an Iban became a member of a fighting group it was by his own choice, and . . . in joining an attack (always in hope of taking a head) he was doing what he most wanted to do.” Further, “Any mature man who had occasion to mount an attack . . . could become a pun ngayau (lit. originator of war)” whom others could choose to join if they wished.

Adat also defined the punishment and propitiation required to make good wrongful conduct (penyalah). This often took the form of fines or reparations, paid using large ceramic jars, some of which were up to a thousand years old. For example, if “a warrior killed his fighting mate by mistake while on the warpath, the killer must also pay a pati nyawa compensation of two valuable jars to the deceased’s family. Failing to pay this, he must surrender himself to become their slave together with his descendants.” When the perpetrator was unknown or could not pay the fine, the tuai rumah (headman) of the longhouse might “fine himself” in order to redress the breach, and restore the cosmic balance.

The complexity of the spiritual balance maintained through adat played out in the Iban confrontation with James Brooke, a self-funded adventurer who secured the rule of Sarawak for himself and then enlisted the aid of the Royal Navy against Iban “piracy” in the 1840s. Brooke’s expeditions had a “profound, non-material” effect on the Iban through the destruction of their longhouses and ritual objects such as ceramic jars. Efforts to restore the spiritual balance had to follow. As a result, some Iban reacted to Brooke by seeking to restore their power and prowess through association with his expeditions or, conversely, by opposing him, both of which provided opportunities for taking heads, raiding, and renewing pioneer migration to new river systems to the north, all of which served to propitiate the loss.

Further Observations

During the nineteenth century, Iban adat was a system that, among its fundamental spiritual purposes, reduced and regulated conflict involving Iban to occasions, means and methods which were “right.” Studying adat thus specifically challenges the reader to consider how a system of life which was reliant on rules to maintain the cosmic balance regulated the justness of practices rejected as illegitimate both by contemporary British law (piracy), and by modern laws of war (headhunting).

Such comparisons bring out challenges of IHL as it has evolved in a secular European model of law. For example, the view that law sets the minimum standard of right conduct in war, whereas ethics (or religion) may separately require further constraint, is often advocated. However, there is a parallel argument that IHL, as a specialist body of law, in fact seeks to reflect ethical standards as legal requirements, through its objectives and the way it codifies rules. That is, IHL mandates judgment-based standards such as proportionality in attack, and the feasibility of precautions. It is difficult to see, for example, how a commander could decide that the expected incidental death or injury to civilians in a specific situation could be legally proportionate to the expected military advantage, but ethically disproportionate. The Martens clause, as I observe elsewhere, also explicitly preserves in law a role for the “dictates of public conscience,” suggesting a concept of “right” codified into IHL above individual judgment.

Further, comparison with adat challenges IHL students as to the use of rules-based legality as an argument itself to establish the justness of war from both ad bellum and in bello perspectives, that is, debating whether an action is just by assessing whether it is lawful. The conceptual confusion is also conveyed in the debate about whether “lawfare,” or the use of law instrumentally to achieve a broader strategic objective, is acceptable because rules are themselves instrumental, or whether it is an inherently pejorative idea because we apply rules in pursuit of a higher ideal of justness.

Iban adat, by comparison, is deliberate in applying rules, indeed requiring compliance for the higher purpose of maintaining universal “right” and balance. It offers us clarity that helps shed light on the potential distinctions between rules and right, and conflation of rules as right, in our own laws of war.

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Wing Commander Angeline Lewis is a senior legal officer in the Royal Australian Air Force.

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