New estimate says 100s of thousands dead in Darfur
Sept 15, 2006 (WASHINGTON) — A new estimate of the number of people killed in Sudan’s Darfur conflict puts the toll at 200,000 or more — much more than some reports, according to a study published on Friday.
A demographer and sociologist at Chicago’s Northwestern University said journalists, some governments and aid agencies have underestimated the number of people killed in Darfur.
“We conclude that the death toll in Darfur is conservatively estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands of people,” John Hagan and Alberto Palloni write in their report, published in the journal Science.
“There is no census data, there is no counting of the bodies and so we use surveys to try and set our foundation of the knowledge,” Hagan said in a telephone interview.
The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003 when non-Arab rebels took up arms against the government. The government mobilized Arab militias known as Janjaweed, who have conducted a campaign of murder, rape and looting.
In the past few months, rebel groups and bandits have committed similar atrocities, and more than 2 million people are now living in squalid refugee camps, where disease and hunger adds to the toll of misery and death.
Various media outlets, including Reuters, have used death estimates ranging from “tens of thousands” to 200,000.
Early in 2005 a United Nations humanitarian coordinator reported that 180,000 had died during an 18-month period.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has suggested 300,000 have died.
Hagan and demographer Alberto Palloni said it is important to come up with an accurate death count.
He said organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and WHO base their numbers on surveys in which they randomly interview displaced people and ask them how many family members have died in recent months.
“What we have done is to take seven of these surveys, five of them done by the Medecins Sans Frontieres … two done by the World Health Organization,” Hagan said.
“By spreading them out, initially you can get very good information on one of the three (affected) states, West Darfur, for the 19-month period.
“So that’s the foundation of our initial estimate. And then we build out from that to 31 months by using additional survey information from last or most recent WHO surveys.”
Hagan said in West Darfur, 1 million displaced people represented about 65,000 deaths. “We figure out a ratio of displacement to death, we apply that to three states and that gets us to the estimate of about 200,000 who have died in 31 months across the three states,” he said.
“A similar process is occurring in each of the three states.”
Western leaders, some African presidents and humanitarian groups are pressing for the United Nations to send peacekeeping troops to the region.
(Reuters)