Darfur violence is “demographic catastrophe”: study
PARIS, Oct 1 (AFP) — The only detailed study into the toll from the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region says fleeing families continued to suffer grievous losses after they arrived in displacement camps, and the bloodshed amounts to “a demographic catastrophe.”
The research established there were extremely high death rates among families who had fled their homes in West Darfur — and the mortality remained very high after they had arrived in displacement camps, leaving many households bereft of adult males.
Before displacement, the death rate was between six and 9.5 per day per 10,000 people, it found.
Violence accounted for between 68-93 percent of deaths, with males aged over 15 the biggest number of casualties. They were between 29 and 117 times likelier to be killed than women or children.
After displacement, the death rates remained extremely high, being between three and 10 times higher than the comparative rate elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the study found.
The highest known death rate in the four sites where the research was carried out was in the region of El Geneina, with 5.6 deaths per day per 10,000 people.
According to the United Nations, some 50,000 people have been killed and 1.4 million driven from their homes in the 19-month conflict that began when rebels rose up against Khartoum to demand an end to alleged marginalization of their region — populated mainly by black Africans.
Sudanese army troops and a pro-government Arab militia, the Janjaweed, have led an anti-rebel offensive. They have been blamed by villagers for carrying out murder, rape, kidnapping, looting and burning.
The European Parliament, German Defence Minister Peter Struck and US Secretary of State Colin Powell, among others, have described these attacks as genocide.
“Our findings do not in themselves substantiate claims that events in Darfur amount to genocide, not least because this would require demonstration of such an intent on the part of the perpetrators, which is clearly beyond the scope of an epidemiological survey,” the study says.
“Nevertheless, we believe that, in the four sites we surveyed, high mortality and family separations amount to a demographic catastrophe.”
The study, published online on Thursday by the British journal The Lancet, was led by Evelyn Depoortere of the French medical survey group Epicentre, and include experts from the humanitarian group Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders).
It comprised interviews that were carried out between April and June 2004 among 3,175 sampled families.
These families were among 215,000 internally displaced people at four sites in West Darfur — Zalingei, Murnei, Niertiti and El Geneina.
Respondents were asked to detail family losses, giving the age of the person who had died, the location and date when it had occurred and the cause of death.
It is almost unique for a study like this to be carried out in a combat zone — the authors discreetly say it was “done in a difficult setting” — and the data is precious because it is scientific rather than anecdotal or skewed by conflict loyalties.
That can be vital for bringing killers to justice, US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) refugee specialists Bradley Woodruff and Reinhard Kaiser said.
“Rigorous epidemiological methods can be provide essential data to document potential violations of international humanitarian law,” they said in a commentary also published by The Lancet.