How many civilians have died? TheStar.com - columnists - How many civilians have died?
September 20, 2007
Haroon Siddiqui
How many civilians have been killed, maimed and displaced in Iraq and Afghanistan? I spoke to four leading experts on this grim topic, which governments avoid and the media don't seem to care much about.
Gen. Tommy Franks, who oversaw the U.S. invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, famously said: "We don't do body counts."
His words now headline the website of Iraq Body Count, the U.K.-based non-profit group that does count the Iraqi dead.
Others do as well, albeit periodically. The latest is a British polling firm that puts the Iraqi dead at 1.22 million. That's roughly five times the number killed in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Opinion Research Business conducted face-to-face interviews last month with a representative sample of 1,461 Iraqis.
Nearly one in two said their households had suffered at least one death by violence. Many reported multiple deaths. Projecting the findings on to Iraq's 4 million households, ORB estimated the death toll at more than a million.
The methodology is not universally accepted, though variations of it have been used to measure mortality figures in the conflicts in Congo, Kosovo, Sudan, etc
.
Questions were also raised last year about a study by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, done in partnership with Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.
Surveyors knocked on 1,849 doors asking if the household had suffered a death by violence. Projecting the responses nationally, the study put the toll at 654,965.
About a third of the deaths were attributed to coalition forces. Responsibility for 45 per cent of the deaths couldn't be determined.
The Iraq Body Count count, updated daily, stood yesterday at "between 72,596 and 79,187."
The group, run by academics and peace activists, insists on corroborating every death from two reliable sources – police, hospital and mortuary records, media and NGO reports.
The estimate is "irrefutable," says John Sloboda, professor of psychology at Keele University, and a co-founder of IBC. "Nobody can say that fewer people have died. There are many deaths that go unrecorded – kidnappings, assassinations, disappearances, etc.
"The death toll could be twice our number, but it could not possibly be 10 times higher," he told me, referring to the other studies.
His group, in turn, has been attacked for underestimating the casualties. But he insists: "We should not exaggerate. We ought not to debase the currency of death.
"If it becomes part of the public record that there have been 1 million deaths and it later turns out that it was only 100,000, then people will say, `Fine, it wasn't all that bad.'
"But 100,000 dead is still a great tragedy, and the Iraq adventure has been an utter and complete disaster at every level."
How many injured Iraqis?
At least 125,000. That's "quite firmly established," says Hamit Dardagan, another IBC co-founder. "It's not an estimate, but a tally or compilation of known injuries."
As for Iraqi refugees, it is well established by United Nations agencies that more than 4 million have been displaced: 1.2 million in Syria, 800,000 in Jordan and the rest internally – and barely surviving.
James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, which monitors policy making at the United Nations, says: "Considering the number of the dead and displaced, this is probably the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world."
You wouldn't know that listening to the politicians in North America or following the media.
http://www.thestar.com/article/258511
Counting the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan TheStar.com - columnists - Counting the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
September 23, 2007
Haroon Siddiqui
As if proving a widely held view that Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be trigger happy, Blackwater USA, a private security firm, is embroiled in a controversy over its involvement in a roadside shootout in Baghdad that killed eight Iraqis.
It turns out that the 30,000 American private security personnel in Iraq are among those immune from local prosecution.
That reminded me of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In October 1964, in the early stages of his anti-Shah agitation, he gave a colourful speech attacking the legal immunity enjoyed by Americans in Iran.
"If an American's servant or cook assassinates your marja (religious leader), the Iranian police do not have the right to apprehend him.
"But if someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he'd be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he'd be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, no one would have the right to interfere with him."
Khomeini's words spread like wildfire. Within a month, he was exiled. He returned 15 years later, triumphant, having engineered a revolution that toppled the Shah and ended America's hold on Iran.
The ayatollah remains a reviled figure in the West. But his point is relevant to Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its allies do not even count the local dead.
"Imagine the U.S. not investigating who died on Sept, 11, 2001 – it's unthinkable," says John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, the U.K.-based group that tracks the Iraqi death toll, which as of Friday stood at between 73,390 and 79,999.
Last week, a British polling firm, ORB, estimated the toll at a staggering 1.2 million. Last fall, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health pegged it at 654,965.
In the case of Afghanistan, Marc Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, has been tracking casualties since 2001 and posting them on a website. In fact, it was his Afghan Victim Memorial Project that inspired Sloboda's.
Herold's "most conservative estimate" of Afghan civilian deaths resulting from American/NATO operations is between 5,700 and 6,500.
"This is the absolute minimum," he said over the phone. "It's probably a vast underestimate," because it does not include:
The dead among the tens of thousands displaced during the initial military operation in 2001-2002 and who ended up in refugee camps or elsewhere, with little or no supplies for long periods.
The victims of bombing in mountainous areas, which have few or no communications links or which the U.S./NATO forces "cordon off as part of news management."
Herold's figures also do not include the victims of the Taliban. Those are "significantly smaller," even though they are the ones highly publicized.
"If one were to believe the numbers of Taliban killed as reported, I dare say Afghanistan would have been depopulated!"
As in Iraq, there are conflicting estimates in Afghanistan. Reuters news agency, for example, reports that more than 7,000 have been killed in the last 19 months alone.
As for the number of Afghans injured, Herold says it's at least double the death toll. That would make it between 11,400 and 13,000.
How many displaced? Between 19,000 and 42,000, at a minimum.
The range of these estimates illustrates the difficulty of working in the official blackout. But Sloboda, Herold and others keep up their heroic efforts on shoestring budgets.
"It's a means of holding our governments accountable," says Sloboda, an internationally renowned professor of psychology at Keele University.
"As citizens, we bear watchdog responsibility. We are doing this so that at some later date, we can hand it over to some international tribunal or those undertaking truth and reconciliation and reparations work."
Herold adds that the more our governments hide the Afghan and Iraqi casualties, the more important it is to expose the grim details of what they have unleashed.
http://www.thestar.com/article/259269
