Perfidy is a deliberate violation of trust and is considered a war crime in some regions. It involves gaining someone’s trust before deceiving them and is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Examples include flying a false flag and using false insignia. The issue has become more prevalent in modern warfare.
Perfidy is a willful and deliberate violation of faith. It is prosecuted as a war crime in some regions of the world and can have consequences in even the most ordinary civilian courts. Many people consider perfidy a particularly nasty crime because it involves gaining someone’s trust before deceiving them, and it’s actually prohibited by the Geneva Convention, among numerous other places.
The word comes from the Latin prefix per-, meaning “destruction” and fides, meaning “faith,” so perfidy could be considered a literal destruction of faith. The term is usually used specifically in the context of discussions of war crimes, although it could be argued that acts of minor perfidy occur on a daily basis in many regions. How many times, for example, has a seemingly reliable nurse assured you that a shot “won’t hurt at all” if you sit still?
There are different forms of perfidy. It is probably easier to define this term by illustrating an example. Let’s say there was a civil war in a country divided over religious grounds. Eventually, a treaty is reached between religions A and B, agreeing to allow people of religion A to leave the country under United Nations guard. If representatives of religion B disguise themselves as United Nations personnel for the purpose of deceiving members of religion A into thinking they are safe so that those people can be taken to another place to be killed or sent to labor camps, this is perfidy.
Under the Geneva Convention, things like flying a false flag, pretending to be a non-combatant, feigning injury to gain access to enemy lines, negotiating in bad faith, and using false insignia are all considered perfidious. These actions involve a willful breach of trust, relying on people to assume things like the idea that a ship flying the American flag, for example, is American. You might think of perfidy as deliberate deception.
Such deception is differentiated from misleading behavior in many rules of warfare. If enemy troops enter false information about their movements, for example, this is considered misleading, but not malicious. While it is an intentional deception, it is not based on the abuse of the basic rules of engagement, and indeed the distribution of incorrect information on troop movements is extremely common among many armies.
The question of perfidy has been a growing concern in modern warfare, thanks to the changing faces of military activity. In the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, a number of Iraqi military personnel committed perfidy by posing as civilians, sometimes putting US military members in an awkward position, not knowing whether “civilians” were really civilians. .
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