Conflict Death Tolls

It is one thing to say that the world’s deadliest conflicts are being ignored, it is another to convincingly show it. It is necessary to first put the scale of the world’s conflicts in perspective – to find out how deadly they actually are. This is more easily said than done, for a number of reasons. Firstly, often no one is counting. Secondly, if someone is counting, they may have a vested interest in the outcome of the ‘count’ – a party to the conflict may want to show how low the damage is from their belligerence, while those considering themselves as being on the side of the victims (or aid organization trying to attract large donations) may want to show how high the death toll is. Finally, there is not necessarily a consensus as to which deaths count as conflict-related deaths – do only battle deaths (from the bullets and bombs) count, or should conflict-related deaths from starvation and disease also be counted? On this final question, considering the nature of conflict and its affect on society as a whole, it seems obvious that nonviolent deaths need to be taken into account. These problems aside, the table below is a tentative compilation of the approximate death tolls of conflicts since the end of the Cold War, drawn from a wide variety of sources.

 

 

Conflict	Death Toll
Democratic Republic of Congo	5,400,000
Southern Sudan	1,200,000
Angola	800,000
Rwanda	800,000
Afghanistan	500,000
Somalia	400,000
Iraq	400,000
Burundi	300,000
Darfur	300,000
Zaire	300,000
Liberia	200,000
Algeria	150,000
Ethiopia-Eritrea	100,000
Chechnya	100,000
Uganda	100,000
Sierra Leone	50,000
Kashmir	50,000
Colombia	50,000
Sri Lanka	50,000
Bosnia-Herzegovina	50,000
Philippines	20,000
Turkey	20,000
Nigeria	20,000
Gulf War	20,000
Azerbaijan	20,000
Bougainville	20,000
Cote d’Ivoire	10,000
Congo, Republic of	10,000
Peru	10,000
Aceh	10,000
Myanmar	10,000
Nepal	10,000
Croatia	10,000
Kosovo	10,000
Kurdish Iraq	10,000
Southern Iraq	10,000
Senegal	< 10,000
Guinea	< 10,000
Chad	< 10,000
Mali	< 10,000
Niger	< 10,000
Central African Republic	< 10,000
Haiti	< 10,000
Mexico	< 10,000
Israel-Palestine	< 10,000
Israel-Lebanon	< 10,000
Yemen	< 10,000
Andrha Pradesh	< 10,000
Gujurat	< 10,000
Northeast India	< 10,000
East Timor	< 10,000
Irian Jaya	< 10,000
Kalimantan	< 10,000
Molucca Islands	< 10,000
Sulawesi	< 10,000
Georgia	< 10,000
Moldova	< 10,000
Northern Ireland	< 10,000
Spain	< 10,000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the lack of reliability of death toll figures, the above compilation can give us a good overview of the relative state of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Many of the figures may actually be much higher than seen here – in many cases no one knows. Some of the figures are compromises – a midway point between two very different (and sometimes hotly contested) estimates. Most are rounded off approximations. Many include nonviolent deaths, while others do not (data simply does not exist). The important point here is not to debate whether the death toll figure for a particular conflict has been underestimated or overestimated by 10,000 or even 100,000 or more (although more accurate counts are always important) – with such a huge gap between the scale of the world’s deadliest conflicts and much smaller conflicts, the accuracy issue seems to lose some of its relevance.

 

The primary purpose here is to get an idea of the relative size of conflicts that seem to get the attention and humanitarian concern of the outside world and those that do not. It quickly becomes obvious that conflicts that have dominated the agendas of actors in a position to respond (policymakers, the media, the public and academia) are often relatively small in scale compared to many of those that have consistently failed to attract attention. The next challenge will be to find out why this is the case.