PROFILE-Ailing professor fights for Darfur’s dead
Smith’s Reeves demands truth on toll in Sudan
By Farah Stockman, The Boston Globe
NORTHAMPTON, April 24, 2005 — It’s morning, and Eric Reeves is gripping his mug of coffee, preparing for his daily battle with two life-or-death foes. His first fight is against leukemia, so he opens a bottle of pills. The second is against mass killings in Sudan, so he spreads his recent research out on a table.
Reeves, a tall man in Harry Potter spectacles, has devoted his life to calculating the rising death toll in Darfur, a remote western province. Reeves’s calculations, which now estimate 400,000 dead from attacks, starvation, and disease, have helped push the United Nations to dramatically increase its own death toll estimate and have pressured governments to do more to address the crisis. His work has won praise from human rights advocates and governments, as well as the ire of Sudanese officials.
Reeves is not an epidemiologist. He’s a literature professor at Smith College, waging a lonely battle from his laptop, with no formal training in estimating mortality rates. He has made his share of enemies, as his words have bludgeoned the world into greater candor about Darfur. But the only enemy he worries about is time.
”People always ask me, ‘How can you keep doing this work on Darfur when you have got leukemia?’ and I say: ‘It’s such a blessing. I can’t imagine getting up in the morning facing this disease and having to go out and grade papers or sell used cars.’ ”
Reeves’s transformation from an authority on Shakespeare to a specialist on death in Darfur began in 1998, when he had a conversation with an official from Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian group that he supported with regular donations. That talk persuaded him to become a champion for Sudan.
Since then, he has written opinion articles and Internet postings railing against the Arab government in northern Sudan that has been blamed for spurring a seemingly endless war with rebels in the mostly African, Christian, and animist south. The work became all-consuming. Reeves took two sabbaticals and three unpaid leaves to do it full time.
In 2003, he traveled to Sudan as a peace deal was being hammered out. He returned home exhilarated, but one month later, his world fell apart. A minor sickness he contracted in Sudan led to a checkup that detected leukemia.
Meanwhile, rebels in Darfur in western Sudan, left out of the north-south peace accord, began fighting for their own deal with the government. In response, the government bombed villages, and armed militias wiped out African tribes seen as rebel sympathizers. Militiamen on horseback known as janjaweed routinely raped survivors and forced them into camps, where most remain and where uncounted numbers have died of starvation and disease, according to a State Department report that called the attacks genocide.
Reeves tracked the reports of killings as meticulously as he monitored the spread of his own disease. Two numbers obsessed him: his white blood cell count and the number of the dying in Darfur.
”There was not much information out there, but he was so relentless,” said Samantha Power, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. ”It’s ironic that this English professor is filling this void, but on Darfur, he really is.”
Aid groups have been reluctant to estimate a death toll, for fear of error and of angering the Sudanese government, which could retaliate against aid workers.
But Reeves does not mince words.
In the belief that quantifying the catastrophe was essential to pushing the international community to intervene, he began to do what almost no one had attempted: systematically combine studies to come up with a death toll.
In July 2004, when the UN was still estimating just 10,000 dead, Reeves calculated that more than 120,000 had perished. He based his figure, in part, on data from Doctors Without Borders that suggested that one in 20 people had died in scorched-earth attacks among a population of 1.3 million. He added in deaths from malnutrition and disease extrapolated from USAID data.
”It got people’s attention,” said a UN official who works with Jan Egeland, undersecretary for humanitarian affairs. ”It did result in a lot more calls from the press [asking], ‘What’s your number?’ ”
A few weeks later, Egeland announced that deaths in Darfur ”could be as high as 50,000.”
Reeves did not let up. He began posting his tally of the dead on his website, www.sudanreeves.org.
In August, he raised his estimate to at least 150,000, based in part on a new study from USAID suggesting that 2,500 people could be dying daily.
By October, Reeves’s estimate had climbed to nearly 300,000, partly based on data from a State Department-commissioned study that found 61 percent of all refugees interviewed reported that they had seen a family member die.
”I can’t recall any other independent voice that has so influenced the dynamic around Darfur,” said Roger Winter, a former head of USAID’s Sudan task force.
Reeves’s conclusions have been questioned by some who say the data was not designed to be extrapolated. Stefanie Frease of the Coalition for International Justice, which conducted the State Department study, said there was a risk of overcounting deaths because different relatives could report the same death more than once to interviewers. Frease’s group commissioned two academics to conduct a more thorough study of the data, carefully weeding out double-counting.
Their conclusion, released Thursday, was 390,000 dead.
Reeves has attacked nearly everyone involved in Sudan for failing to stop the killings. He calls the United Nations ”incompetent,” the president of the African Union a ”shameful” liar, and the press ”irresponsible.”
”He’s attacked all of us in some way,” said Power. ”Eric is in your face. When you are presenting relentlessly a message that no one wants to hear, that we are allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die, you are not going to be the person that people want around.”
”Look at the data!” Reeves said, his hands trembling with passion. ”It’s not as if we don’t have data.”
Dr. David Nabarro, a spokesman for the World Health Organization who has traded anguished, late-night phone calls with Reeves, said it is impossible to accurately calculate the death toll unless the Sudanese government allows more access to the region.
”We just can’t do it,” Nabarro said. ”No human being can do it. There is no scientific means for doing it.”
Nabarro acknowledged that even his conservative estimate of 70,000 dead issued in October, meant to offer a limited snapshot, is still commonly cited in press reports as the death toll in Darfur, when it is clearly now outdated.
But Reeves keeps trying, and his calculations have been gaining acceptance. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote in a recent column that ”no one really knows how many people have died in Darfur since the conflict began, but some analysts estimate it could be 300,000 or more.” A recent report by members of the British Parliament, for which Reeves worked as a consultant, concluded that deaths exceed 300,000.
The medications, meanwhile, have begun to take a toll on Reeves’s memory. He can’t rattle off the statistics as he once could. Months ago, his health plummeted. When the rebel leader John Garang called him after a milestone in the peace process, Reeves could barely hold the phone. It took five blood transfusions to get his strength back up.
But that didn’t stop him from putting out a new mortality estimate in January: Deaths, he said, ”now exceed 400,000.”