Darfur death toll. Inflated or not?
By Savo Heleta
The crisis and human suffering in Darfur is for a long time one of the prime news around the world. Other conflicts come and go, but Darfur is constantly in the news since the late 2004 and the American proclamation that genocide was being committed in the region.
The Western media keep pointing out that more than 200,000 people had been killed in Darfur since 2003. Some organizations, such as the “Save Darfur Coalition,” even claimed that 400,000 people had been killed. This number was also used by the UN and other aid organizations on many occasions.
Interestingly, no one is trying to explain where the numbers are coming from. These are estimates from the aid agencies working on the ground, they say.
How did they come up with these estimates? Who did the counting? Why are these numbers taken for granted? Could these numbers be inflated? Would the aid agencies purposely inflate the death toll?
They exaggerated numbers of war victims on so many occasions before. It wouldn’t be such a surprise if they are doing it in Darfur too.
For example, during and after the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the international aid agencies, the UN, and the Western diplomats had claimed that the war took between 200,000 and 300,000 lives. The widely accepted figure that almost no one questioned was at least 200,000 dead.
The international community and Bosnian politicians had used these numbers for their own purposes all the way until early 2007, when an independent Research and Documentation Center from Bosnia, after three years of extensive and nonpartisan work, revealed that 100,000 people, civilians and soldiers, had died in the war. They collected over twenty different facts about each victim, such as people’s names, nationality, time and place of birth and death, and circumstances of death.
The Bosnian research center did not consider the dead as mere numbers suitable for propaganda and campaigning purposes. They wanted to prevent this.
The Bosnian death toll of 100,000 people is an enormous tragedy, but still it is not the same as the widely accepted figure of 200,000.
The aid agencies that came up with the inflated numbers in Bosnia never publicly commented on their “exaggeration.” The Western media kept quiet or only briefly reported about the new findings. No one apologized for the (purposefully?) overstated numbers used for about 15 years.
People in Darfur need help. Their suffering and misery should not be used for political campaigning around the world. Numbers currently used to portray the death toll in Darfur may be correct. Yet, knowing the record of the international aid agencies and the Western media, it will probably turn out that the number of 200,000 dead was exaggerated for who knows what reasons.
* The author a postgraduate student in Conflict Transformation and Management at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He is the author of Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia. The book will be published in the United States by AMACOM, New York, in March ’08. More about the book on www.savoheleta.com