Darfur Mortality: Shoddy Journalism at the New York Times

By Eric Reeves

August 13, 2007 — A recent op/ed on human mortality in Darfur, which appeared in the New
York Times (“An Atrocity That Needs No Exaggeration,” Sunday, August
12, 2007), has garnered considerable attention, indeed notoriety. The
piece is by Sam Dealey, Time Magazine’s Africa correspondent—someone
who gives no evidence of previous engagement with the complex issues
attending any assessment of human mortality in Darfur. Nor does he
demonstrate real familiarity with the relevant research and reports, or
with whole reams of relevant data.

I will be writing at length about this truly disgraceful and
destructive piece of shoddy work, with includes some of the most
egregious errors I’ve seen in almost nine years of assessing journalists
reporting on Sudan. But since Dealey has, apparently effortlessly and
without qualms, produced what is to date demonstrably the most
inaccurate and misleading account of Darfur mortality, some preliminary
reckoning is called for.

In the most spectacular example of ignorance on display, Dealey reveals
that he is unaware of the September 2006 article on Darfur mortality
that appeared in the distinguished journal Science (“Death in
Darfur,” Science, 15 September 2006, Vol. 313. no. 5793, pp. 1578 –
1579). As any close historical reading of Darfur news reporting will
reveal, this article is the true basis for the common news estimate of
200,000 deaths in Darfur. Astonishingly, Dealey declares that June 2005
was the last time a credible new report on mortality was published
(“[no] responsible outlet has released a tabulation of the death
toll after June 2005,” Dealey erroneously declares; New York Times,
August 12, 2007). Such a claim makes of Science—one of the most
distinguished journals in the world, and certainly one of the most
carefully fact-checked—something other than a “responsible outlet.”
There could not be a more egregious or revealing error on Dealey’s
part.

In my own view, there are immense problems with the exclusion of key
data concerning violent mortality in the Science study by John Hagan and
his colleague, Alberto Palloni, a demographer at the University of
Wisconsin (data that Hagan had used in a previous study with another
co-author; see below). These will be reviewed in a later analysis.
Even so, here is what Hagan said—ironically, to the New York
Times—on the occasion of the publication of his article in Science:

“two researchers [Hagan and Palloni] based in the United States
estimated that as many as 255,000 people have died, though they believe
the actual number may be much higher.”

“‘We could easily be talking about 400,000 deaths,’ said John
Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University and an author of the
article, along with Alberto Palloni, a demographer at the University of
Wisconsin.” (New York Times, September 15, 2006)

This key assertion—“We could easily be talking about 400,000
deaths”—of course appears nowhere in Dealey’s scandalously
ill-informed op/ed, which is perversely bent on ridiculing and
excoriating the commonly cited figure of 400,000 deaths in Darfur and
eastern Chad—from all causes, since the outbreak of major insurgency
warfare in February 2003. Perversely, Dealey presumes to establish, on
the basis of a couple of sentences of data assessment, a figure of
200,000 by a new method of calculation. This is utterly astonishing,
the more so since as I note above Hagan and Palloni’s publication in
Science (September 2006) is the real provenance for what over the past
eleven months has been the commonly cited figure of 200,000 human deaths
in Darfur.

Instead of doing the research that would have revealed this, Dealey
presumes to compute his own figure of 200,000 using a completely
unsubstantiated mortality rate. He simply asserts that humanitarian
efficacy has improved so much since the “last half of 2006, [that]
civilian deaths [have] averaged 200 per month.” But of course there
has been no global morality data-gathering or global excess Crude
Mortality Rate promulgated since 2005, by the UN or any other
organization. The data have been analyzed more recently, but have not
been accumulated in globally relevant fashion. This mortality figure of
“200 per month” is sheer contrivance.

There is a reason for this dearth of data and new global mortality
assessments. Following the UN morality rate survey and report of 2005,
a senior UN official declared to this writer, in emphatic terms, that
there would be no further global mortality studies done because of
insecurity and severe harassment by Khartoum. The regime had determined
upon a policy of making global mortality assessments impossible. And
even the 2005 UN data and excess morality-rate study excluded most of
South Darfur state because of insecurity; South Darfur has approximately
half the population of Darfur as a whole. There is simply no way to
establish, beyond extrapolation from past global data, what the current
global excess mortality rate might be.

To gain a sense of what Dealey so confidently excludes from any
possible estimation, consider the implications of monthly excess
mortality simply among the population within Darfur that has no access
to humanitarian aid. This number has fluctuated, but over the past year
and more has been between 500,000 and 1 million—and many more if we
include eastern Chad. But if, for a month, a population of 1 million
people beyond humanitarian access experiences a minimal rise in the
excess Crude Mortality Rate (0.1), 300 excess deaths can be expected, a
figure that by itself—representing only inaccessible populations and a
minimal rise in CMR—is 50% greater than Dealey’s absurd suggestion
of 200 deaths per month (for calculation and brief explanation of terms,
see below; for a full explanation, see my extended mortality assessment
of April/May 2006, cited below).

Of course in the absence of humanitarian access to vulnerable
populations, the excess Crude Mortality Rate (CMR) is extremely likely
to rise by much more than 0.1, especially in children under five (see
Appendix below).

There may be another issue worth noting, since Dealey seems so intent
on defining various mortality assessments as not “responsible.”
While Dealey fastens hard on the expertise of a panel assembled last
year by the General Accounting Office (GAO) (whose report mentions the
September 2006 Science article by Hagan and Palloni more than once), he
might have looked more widely at what one member of this panel of
experts has publicly asserted of my own mortality assessments, the most
recent of which (in two parts) appeared in April/May 2006 (at

http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article102.html
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article104.html)

In this lengthy account, I synthesized the results of my 15 previous
mortality assessments, ranging back to January 2004, when the official
UN figure for total mortality in Darfur was 3,000 human beings—almost
a year into the most violent phase of the genocide. My conclusion in
April 2006 was that,

“Currently extant data, in aggregate, strongly suggest that total
excess mortality in Darfur, over the course of more than three years of
deadly conflict, now significantly exceeds 450,000.”

What to make of this claim, which has been cited by the Washington Post
and other news organizations as a legitimate high-end figure?

Francesco Checchi (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) was
one of the epidemiologists included by the GAO on its panel of experts.
Checchi has the most extensive experience working in Darfur of anyone on
this panel, including involvement with humanitarian efforts in the
region. Significantly, Checchi is also author of a compelling and
important primer on mortality data/assessments. The report, co-authored
with Les Roberts, is entitled “Interpreting and using mortality data
in humanitarian emergencies: A primer for non-epidemiologists”
(Humanitarian Practice Network, Network Paper No. 52, September 2005).

Checchi and his co-author believe, quite rightly as we have seen in
Darfur, that in the midst of a conflict, professional methods and
appropriate statistical sampling by epidemiology experts may not be
fully possible for a variety of reasons. In light of this reality,
Checchi encourages responsible efforts by non-professionals to assess
mortality in places like Darfur. He and his co-author have as their
“focus” in this study,

“enabling readers to critically interpret mortality study reports,
and to understand how these are used (or misused) to formulate policy.
The intended audience therefore is all humanitarian actors,
policy-makers, the media, and members of affected communities who may be
called upon to comment or make use of mortality studies, regardless of
their technical background.” (From the Introduction, “Interpreting
and using mortality data in humanitarian emergencies: A primer for
non-epidemiologists,” Francesco Checchi and Les Roberts, Humanitarian
Practice Network, Network Paper No. 52, September 2005)

This is the context in which to understand what Checchi has said about
my own mortality work in an article from the Christian Science Monitor,
August 31, 2006, after my most recent full-dress mortality assessment
(April/May 2006):

“Controversy remains over the issue [of mortality studies]: Many
humanitarian groups (fellow travelers of Reeves’s) dispute both his math
and genocide assertions, worried that this will harden the stance of the
Sudanese government. But Francesco Checchi, a London epidemiologist who
has worked in Sudan for humanitarian groups, says that Reeves has an
activist agenda but ‘he knows Darfur well.’ What he’s done is
‘mathematically correct’ and ‘sufficiently legitimate’ to
establish a high-end count.”

“To those who think his focus on counting every last death may be
diplomatically deleterious, Reeves says, with a tremble of anger in his
voice: ‘If we want to understand how many people are going to die,
[we] better understand how many people have already died.’”
(Christian Science Monitor, August 31, 2006)

Dealey completely dismisses my work, as well as the work of Dutch
physician/epidemiologist Jan Coebergh—whose mortality work roughly
corroborates my own—and that of Professor John Hagan (Northwestern
University) in his first co-authored study (with Patricia Parker of the
University of Toronto), which found (in spring 2005) that 400,000 people
had died from all causes in Darfur.

[Peculiarly, Dealey gives some slight evidence of understanding that
Hagan is author of two reports on Darfur mortality, but alludes only in
the most oblique fashion to the Science study published in September
2006, speaking parenthetically of “Hagan revis[ing] his estimate
sharply downward.” But again, the (differently co-authored) Science
study was published in September 2006, and was of an entirely different
nature from Hagan’s first study, excluding crucial data on violent
mortality that he had previously included in his work; and again, Dealey
baldly declares in his New York Times piece that “[no] responsible
outlet has released a tabulation of the death toll after June 2005.”
This is crucially and revealingly false.]

In this cheap and poorly researched polemic on the critical question of
human mortality in Darfur, Dealey is a disgrace to journalism, and to
the New York Times opinion pages in particular. That this is put in
service of an attack on Darfur advocacy, and Dealey’s own preposterous
assessment of the genocidal Khartoum regime, only adds to the disgrace.

* Eric Reeves is a professor at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and has published extensively on Sudan. He can be reached at [email protected]; website : www.sudanreeves.org

APPENDIX:

Key terms:

Crude Mortality Rate (CMR), deaths per day per 10,000 of population;
this is the primary figure in mortality assessments;

Excess Crude Mortality Rate: the rate of mortality in excess of what
would normally be found within a population—in Darfur, this is the
rate of morality due to violence, as well as mortality from disease and
malnutrition caused by violence or the threat of violence;

Crude Mortality Rate for Darfur (the “normal” Darfur CMR): 0.3,
according to UNICEF;

Current “conflict-affected population” in the greater humanitarian
theater of Darfur and eastern Chad, according to the most recent figures
from UN agencies: 4.7 million;

Calculation of hypothetical monthly mortality rate for a
conflict-affected population of 1 million in Darfur beyond humanitarian
reach and (necessarily) assessment:

0.1 (excess CMR) x 1,000,000 divided by 10,000 x 30 days = 300 excess
deaths per month within this population

A large spike in excess CMR within these acutely vulnerable and
inaccessible populations—for example, to 1.0—would yield a figure of
3,000 excess deaths per month. We have seen many such spikes in the
past. For example, the UN reported in its June 2005 (World Health
Organization-overseen) mortality study that in camps for displaced
persons in South Darfur the CMR for children under five was 2.6—well
above the “crisis level.”

Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) recently
reported from eastern Chad, which continues to suffer from a drastic
under-reporting, despite being a clear and massive extension of
Darfur’s ethnic violence:

“[MSF’s] survey revealed that one child in five was suffering from
acute malnutrition and that the mortality rates from March 30 to May 20,
2007, were catastrophic.” (Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans
Frontieres (MSF),“While attention is focused on Darfur, an emergency
situation is unfolding in eastern Chad,” June 8, 2007)

Needless to say, there is no discussion of “catastrophic mortality
rates” by Dealey, even as these have been reported at various times by
MSF and other humanitarian organizations going back to 2004, and
continuing to the present. Dealey has read little and understood less.