originally published in Africa Review, Kenya
The numbers grip us: 800,000 dead in a genocide; 5.4 million killed in war; over 7,000 raped in a matter of months; over a million displaced.
For a world suffering from attention-deficit disorder, a world where most people in skyscrapers really couldn’t care less, the who and the why of a conflict barely seem to matter. What catches attention are big, round, deadly numbers.
A new report released by a human conflict expert at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, Dr Andrew Mack, casts doubt over the accuracy of many war-time numbers, as well as arguing that overall deadliness of wars was diminishing.
Dr Mack’s prime focus was the 5.4 million DR Congo death toll compiled since 1998 by the New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC), a private relief agency.
The report argues that fatalities in the country related to war may actually be half of what is currently advertised.
“While no one doubts that the death rate in the DRC is tragically high, critical analysis suggests that a number of the key assumptions made by the organisation’s researchers are highly questionable and that the claim that 5.4 million Congolese have died because of the war cannot be sustained,” the report states.
Genocidal fugitives
The war in eastern Congo – started by Rwandan genocidal fugitives fleeing across the border and climaxing in a multi-national war – became famous for its infamous numbers. Since 1998, over 5 million people have been killed, more than in any other conflict since World War II.
While it has been common knowledge that the vast majority of the deaths were the result not of bullets, but war-related poverty and disease, the shocking figure has made the crisis resonate loudly across the world than most conflicts in Africa tend to do.
Indeed it was as a result of the high IRC figures that the UN Security Council sought to mobilise support for its massive and costly peacekeeping programme in the country, with an annual budget of over $1 billion and over 20,000 soldiers, most of them stationed in the country’s east. The results on the ground are questionable at best.
The UN peacekeeping mission in eastern DRC is the largest such operation in the world.
The research doesn’t bring new numbers to the table, but it studies how basic assumptions – sometimes wrong – can dramatically alter results of surveys.
According to Dr Mack, one of the key ingredients in calculating the number of Congolese fatalities – the pre-war mortality rates – may have been off.
“It turned out that a modest increase in the baseline mortality rate (33 per cent) had a huge impact,” said Dr Mack in an email interview.
“The IRC’s best estimate for this period was 2.83 million. With the new baseline, this figure drops to less than 900,000.”
Killed in wartime
This would drastically bring down the total number of the supposed dead in the conflict over the last 10 years.
Pre-war mortality rates, compared to war-time mortality rates, are a key way of estimating how many people are killed in wartime. In the case of the fighting in the DRC, most of the fatalities have been indirect: hunger, disease and poor hygiene.
The other major critique of the previous numbers – conducted through multiple surveys by the IRC and others – is that those surveyed were not geographically randomised enough to ensure that they represented the entirety of the population. If a survey is too narrow in geographical scope, it can run the risk of representing that specific region rather than the whole of the country.
“We argue that the challenges of measuring pre-war mortality trends (most of which are declining), are just too challenging for surveys to be successfully used to estimate excess mortality tolls. The data is just too bad,” says Dr Mack.
It’s the kind of thing African government have long suspected and complained about; numbers of dramatic political importance – numbers that weigh on decisions of financial, military and food aid – being not only inaccurate, but sometimes purposely pumped up for political overkill.
“There has never been an occasion in which we have known, for certain, how many people have been killed or died as a consequence of a war,” says Dr Mack.
“Humanitarian workers don’t need to know how many people have died since a war began. They need to know who is at risk of dying, why and of what causes.”
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