Death toll debate (with Andrew Mack)

I recently had the pleasure of receiving correspondence from Professor Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The Project produces the Human Security Report, the most recent one being the “Shrinking Costs of War”. This report has generated quite a debate over its claim that the death toll in the DRC is not nearly as high as the 5.4 million estimated by the International Rescue Committee.

 I had commented elsewhere on the issue, and Professor Mack invited me to take a look at the Overview of the Debate that the Project had put up on their website. The following exchange followed. The main text is what I wrote, and the sections in CAPS are the responses from Professor Mack.

VH: “Although not able to comment on the methodology of either the IRC methodology or that of the Human Security Report, I see the points you are making, and can understand the huge difference that a small change in baseline assumptions can make in the final tally.

 From my perspective, I had a problem with the “paradox of mortality rates that decline in wartime”. I can certainly understand that advances in child health are being made despite the presence of conflict in a part of a country, and that the means of waging war are less destructive than they have been in the past, but I don’t think that this situation is a paradox, and found the notion a bit misleading.

AM: PRESENTED WITH THE STATS MANY PEOPLE DO THINK ITS A PARADOX — LARGELY BECAUSE THEY DON’T REALISE WHAT A HUGE DECLINE THERE HAS BEEN IN CHILD MORTALITY IN PEACETIME AND THAT TODAY YOU NEED A VERY BIG WAR TO REVERSE THE TREND..WE ACTUALLY SAY IT ISN’T REALLY A PARADOX.

VH: I think it’s somewhat unfair to compare national statistics on mortality and then use those results to say that “mortality rates decline in wartime”. The units of analysis are quite different. As noted in the report itself, the area of conflict and the national borders are not the same thing and can be quite different – the DRC, with a total square area the size of Western Europe, but with a conflict zone largely limited to the Kivus and Ituri, is a case in point.

AM:  THIS IS ONE OF THE POINTS WE MAKE — WARS ARE NOT ONLY SMALLER BUT ALSO MORE LOCALIZED…  BUT OUR POINT––THAT NATIONWIDE WAR TOLLS HAVE DECLINED DRAMATICALLY IS AN IMPORTANT AND LITTLE RECOGNISED ONE.

 IT IS OF COURSE TRUE THAT MORTALITY RATES IN  WAR ZONES ARE INVARIABLY MANY TIMES HIGHER THAN THE NATIONWIDE RATES — AS WE POINT OUT.  WE THINK THAT THESE RATES ARE THE ONES THAT SHOULD BE USED BY NGOS FOR ADVOCACY — INDEED NGOS HAVE TRADITIONALLY DONE THIS — WITH REFERENCE TO MORTALITY IN PARTICULAR AREAS BEING — SAY ‘FOUR TIMES THE EMERGENCY THRESHOLD”.

VH: And even the wording, “mortality rates decline in wartime” almost sounds (if one doesn’t read on) as though mortality rates decline ‘because of’ wartime, rather than the intended ‘in spite of’ wartime. A careful reading of the report resolves most of these issues, but I still find the notion and the comparison of national statistics and conflict zones misleading. 

 I see that the final section of your overview deals with the importance of getting the tolls right, partly because of the risk that aid (and other forms of attention I assume) will not be allocated according to need. A valid point, but in reality, aid is very rarely (if ever?) allocated according to need to begin with

AM: WE AGREE — AND SAY SO.  POLITICS AND THE CNN EFFECT ARE THE CRITICAL FACTORS A LOT OF THE TIME…

VH: – which is probably why NGOs tend to inflate need assessments and arbitrary death toll estimations, to try to get allocations more in line with needs. Conflict scale (death toll) has next to no recognizable relationship with aid, media, and other forms attention to conflict.

 This is what really disturbs me, and where my research is directed. The results of your report notwithstanding, the point is that people who knew (policymakers, media, NGOs, a very small part of the public, academia), believed/thought that each death toll the IRC produced was the best estimate, up to the 5.4 million mark. It was, after all, unchallenged until your report, and the numbers were reported each time fleetingly in the newspapers. The general public did not know (the media hardly touched the conflict), but those in a position to do something certainly did, and yet nothing happened. People/institutions were told 5.4 million people had died, had no reason to disbelieve, and yet serious responses (or even indignation) did not arise. 

AM: ACTUALLY US AID INCREASED DRAMATICALLY AFTER THE FIRST REPORT’S RESULT WAS PUBLISHED, AND THE PEACEKEEPING OPERATION IS NOW THE BIGGEST IN THE WORLD

VH: I go through what I think are the reasons for this in my book, but I continue to scratch my head regarding what can be done to try to change this situation. 

AM: AGREE THAT THIS A HUGELY DIFFICULT PROBLEM — BEYOND THE SCOPE OF OUR REPORT.”

I followed up with this response:

VH: “Thank you for the responses to each of my points.

The points of US aid increasing after the IRC death toll figures were released and the peacekeeping operation now being the largest in the world are duly noted.

By the same token, whether the death toll figures announced were 500,000 or 2,000,000, I think they probably would have resulted in a similar response. Much was made, for example, of the death toll figures on Darfur in 2004 (30,000, 50,000 and so on), and then in 2006 (400,000). The figures were met with great concern and mobilized resources, but few seemed to realize that the ‘known’ death toll for the DRC at the time was some 80 times greater. The DRC figures may have prompted an increase in aid from the USA, but I am skeptical as to whether there would have been much of a difference had the figures been considerably lower. Whether a conflict is a stealth or chosen one is a much greater factor, and the death toll figures are used to add weight to the attention that a conflict already gets.

This is not to take away from your point (with which I agree) that death tolls should be as accurate as possible – the 400,000 figure for Darfur damaged the credibility of the attempt to raise attention when they were found to be inflated.

In terms of the size of the peacekeeping operation, MONUC, I am skeptical on how much this had to do with the announced death toll figures. When the DRC conflict officially ended, there were still only about 4,000 troops there, and yet the ‘known’ death toll was already 2.5 million. The increase to its current levels was a very gradual process over a number of years (perhaps more to do with the sheer size of territory to be covered combined with mission creep?). Furthermore, although it may be the largest peacekeeping mission in the world, at some 20,000 or so, it is roughly one-third of the size of the NATO force that was deployed to tiny Kosovo, which in square area is about 200 times smaller than the DRC.

While I agree that much care needs to be taken in producing accurate death toll figures, and that death toll figures should not be inflated to attract attention where there is apathy, whether the death toll for the DRC is found to be 500,000 or 5.4 million, I think it can be safely said that neither aid nor peacekeeping levels are commensurate with the levels of need.”

This is Professor Mack’s response:

AM: “Agreed that Darfur got far more coverage — and celebrities — than the DRC…

On Monuc remember — I worked for nearly three years in Annan’s office — that the UN moves at a glacial pace …  This was also true of PKO in Darfur.

Kosovo demonstrates the inconsistency of major power responses better than any other case.”

 

So that was the discussion. I’m sure the debate will go on…

Which gets more coverage?

 

Why Israel-Palestine?

Israel-Palestine is used here because of the sheer levels of disproportion (conflict death tolls versus media coverage). Each time there is conflagration of any kind in Israel-Palestine – huge quantities of media coverage inevitably follow. With the exception of Afghanistan and Iraq (and recently, perhaps Pakistan), no other conflict in the world even comes close in terms of coverage levels (and certainly in terms of disproportion).

In 2009, Afghanistan stood far above all other conflicts in levels of media coverage in the USA and coverage of Iraq, while still very high, had begun to decline – all very much in line with US policy interest. Afghanistan and Iraq are not used here because their death tolls are much larger than Israel-Palestine (in the hundreds of thousands, rather than thousands), and because coverage is more easily explained away considering the direct involvement of the USA as a belligerent in these conflicts.

That said, the problem is not necessarily that there is too much coverage on Israel-Palestine (please do not use this graphic as evidence of Israel being unjustly picked on by the media). Organized violence that results in thousands of deaths is not something that should be downplayed or justified anywhere and for any reason. The problem is that there is not enough coverage of the rest of the world’s cases of organized violence. And when this violence is resulting in millions of deaths, its marginalization by the media should result in red flags, flashing lights, alarms and all manner of questioning on the performance of the media in fulfilling its social responsibilities.

Evidence:

The bold statement in the graphic is based on a number of studies. In this study on media coverage of conflict for the year 2000, the media coverage of the conflict in Israel-Palestine was greater than that for all of Africa’s conflicts combined for all sources studies – BBC, CNN, Le Monde, the New York Times and the Yomiuri newspaper.

A study of the Australian newspaper for the year 2007 yielded similar results. In this case, not only was coverage of conflict greater, but coverage of all subjects/topics associated with Israel-Palestine was greater than that for all of Africa’s 53 countries combined.

Another study on coverage of conflict in US media sources for the year 2009 (the New York Times, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC – the results have yet to be published) again shows (surprise, surprise) that conflict in Israel-Palestine gets far greater coverage than all of Africa’s conflicts combined.

A few pre-emptive strikes on answers:

The graphic asks if there is any valid reason that can justify this state of affairs. Based on past experience (particularly in such havens for anonymous comment), I suspect the following three justifications may come up, so here are a few brief pre-emptive strikes.

“Violence in Africa is barbaric”

How is firing a missile from an Apache helicopter into a house that shreds the flesh and bone of any man, woman or child within any less barbaric than shooting someone with an AK47 or cutting someone with a machete?

“Violence in Africa is chaotic”

It is not. Nor is it irrational. Just like any other conflict in the rest of the world, it is complex. Calling a conflict chaotic simply indicates a lack of understanding (or worse, a failure to even attempt to understand) – see this post for more. In fact, lumping all of the various conflicts on the African continent together and trying to somehow do a mass group analysis is over simplification in the highest degree and cannot be taken seriously.

“Violence in Africa never seems to end”

Lumping all of African conflicts together will of course produce the effect of continual conflict, so before getting into this, why not use individual examples of conflict? And by the way, couldn’t we just as easily say “violence in the Middle East never seems to end”?

Still the deadliest

Don’t let the media’s silence fool you. Conflict and insecurity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remain at horrifying levels.

When Laurent Nkunda’s CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People) stepped up its offensives in eastern DRC in late 2008, positioning itself to take the city of Goma, and making grandiose statements about heading for Kinshasa to take over the running of the entire country, the Western media paid some attention – not much, but at least a few murmurs that could be distinguished from the usual silence. This all came to an end when Rwanda did an aboutface, making a secret deal with its enemy in Kinshasa that saw the arrest of Nkunda and the ambiguous adoption of the CNDP by the armed forces of the DRC. For the Western media, the show was now over and it was time to go home. Besides, much more ‘important’ things were happening in Gaza.

The official international phase of the conflict (the nine-nation continental war) had ended in 2003, and now with the largest remaining rebel group having been dismantled (and Rwanda being ‘friendly’ with the DRC), one could almost be forgiven for thinking that the violence in the DRC was at last coming to an end.

But alas, this was not to be. In spite of military campaigns against remnants of the FDLR (the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda – a group including, but certainly not limited to, some of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide) and Uganda’s LRA, these groups have not been reigned in, and revenge attacks (for being hounded) on the local civilian population remain rife (international boundaries don’t seem to matter all that much in this conflict). As many other observers have noted, in the absence of serious political measures, a military solution simply does not exist. Several other armed groups have continued to be active in eastern DRC, and the actions of some sections of the armed forces of the DRC mean that they remain seen by many as a threat to the security of the civilian population.

Recently released figures are reflective of just how damaging this conflict still is. More than 1 million people have been driven from their homes in 2009 (see here). I doubt there is another conflict in the world that produced such a high number of freshly displaced persons in 2009. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has recently estimated that more than 8,000 women were raped by warring factions in eastern DRC in the same year. While these figures are undoubtedly conservative, as they are they should be seen as a serious reason for concern. More recently, in one series of attacks by the LRA on 13 January this year alone, 100 people were reportedly massacred.

Speaking of figures, the Human Security Report has attacked the death toll figures (5.4 million by the latest count in 2007) for the conflict in the DRC produced by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), declaring that they have been considerably overestimated. I am in no position to verify which figures are closer to the reality (see this analysis), but given the highly misleading presentation of some of the Human Security Report’s conclusions (the apparent ‘paradox’ that “nationwide morality rates actually decline during periods of warfare” (p.17) – simply explained by long-term decreases in mortality rates due to general improvements in health), I find their motives somewhat suspect. I get the impression that they are determined to prove that the damage from conflict throughout the world is decreasing, and the IRC’s death toll figures for the conflict in the DRC were proving to be a major challenge to this notion.

Nicholas Kristof (the New York Times’ chief salesman of humanitarian indignation) has also recently made his own contribution, taking the liberty of using his calculator to update the IRC’s death toll in the DRC, putting the current toll at 6.9 million.

Unfortunately, we will never know the real death toll from the conflict in the DRC. But whichever figures we choose to use, I think it is probably safe to say that this conflict remains the deadliest of our times, and is still very worthy of our attention and concern.

And yet the Western media are, as usual,  missing in action. The conflict in the DRC remains the ‘greatest’ stealth conflict of all time.

‘We cannot stand by’

The media barrage on the conflict in Israel-Palestine is unrelenting. Consumers of media products around the world continue to be subjected to article after article, front-page headline after front-page headline, hour after hour of coverage on this conflict, all demanding our attention. At times it seems not only that the world at this point revolves around Israel-Palestine, but almost as if Israel-Palestine is the only place in the world (apart from the country we happen to live in) worthy of our attention at all.

 

This is what a ‘chosen’ conflict looks like. It is admittedly not as chosen as some conflicts, like Iraq in 2003, or Afghanistan in 2001, or Kosovo in 1999. For a conflict to be chosen in this way – to the point that coverage of that conflict seriously interrupts regular programming – generally requires that US troops are directly involved, bombing or invading the country in question. When Iraq was invaded, the 24-hour news channels ended up casting to the wind whatever was happening in the rest of world at the time (like the overthrow of the democratically elected government in the Central African Republic), broadcasting instead hour after hour of live footage (from embedded journalists) of tanks in Iraq doing little more than driving north.

 

So this conflict is not quite that chosen, but it does dominate the news wherever you turn. A look at the main homepage for the New York Times website on January 11, for example, revealed 10 links to different articles on the conflict, including ‘Multimedia on Gaza’ (interactive graphics), a timeline of Israel, the Gaza Strip and Hamas, and a video analysis of the Gaza conflict. And that is just the main homepage. Click on the Middle East page and a multitude of additional articles reveal themselves, along with links to blogs on the conflict.

 

On the BBC homepage on the same day, a click on the Middle East link will lead you to a choice of 28 items on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including feature articles on ‘Lost innocents’ and ‘Gaza aid’, Mideast papers on Gaza, a Gaza conflict map, and ‘Rallies for Gaza’ in pictures. On the CNN homepage, there were more than 150 videos posted on the conflict in just two weeks (since 24 December 2008). In Japan, the editorial for the Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) for 8 January was titled ‘The Gaza tragedy: for how long will we leave it be?’

 

All this saturation coverage appears to have had a significant impact on the general public. The internet is buzzing with copious quantities of all manner of comment and chatter, and thousands have gone out onto the streets, from London to Indonesia (and even to Osaka) to demonstrate about the situation. Both sides are highly emotionally charged, with the majority seeming to be outraged by the high loss of innocent life (primarily on the Palestinian side), and others (much fewer in number) insistent that the Palestinians brought it on themselves, and that Israel should have the right to defend itself. What needs to be noted is that, regardless of which side they take, there are so many people talking about the conflict. As Bernard Cohen famously said, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about”.

 

Whether it is the media obsessing over the conflict or the members of the public lending their voices to the issue, the tone of so much of the discussion is of the humanitarian variety. There is so much concern about the loss of innocent life. Words like ‘horror’, ‘tragedy’, ‘carnage’ and ‘humanitarian crisis’ are being used in abundance, and the media corporations present the humanitarian toll in great detail, finding individuals with harrowing stories to tell, and helping us to know them and feel their pain. Variants of the phrase ‘we cannot stand by and watch this happen’ (or ‘the world cannot stand by’, or ‘the international community cannot stand by’ – whatever ‘the international community’ is supposed to mean) are also being used in abundance.

Outpouring of public outrage and sympathy in London (Photo: Mattsays)

 

 

 

But the sad reality is that that is exactly what we tend to do. We do stand by and do nothing about the vast majority of conflict-related suffering in the world. We are perfectly capable of ignoring humanitarian suffering in most of the world’s conflicts most of the time. This is to a large degree unavoidable – there is so much conflict-related humanitarian suffering that we have to be selective. There are 20 or 30 conflicts ongoing in varying degrees in the world at any point in time (depending on one’s definition of conflict).

 

But almost all of the deadliest conflicts in the world are happening in Africa (with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan), and it is these conflicts that we ignore the most. Roughly 500 people (estimates seem to have increased) were killed in a series of Christmas massacres in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after a multinational offensive against the Ugandan LRA. But there has been no outpouring of sympathy or outrage (or of anything except apathy) for these people and their families, and what has happened in the course of the offensive since then may as well be altogether unknown. The New York Times has shed no ink at all for the conflict since it reported on the Christmas massacres in a single article, sparing just 748 words for the conflict since mid-December. Compare that to the 44,480 words it lavished on Israel-Palestine in just two weeks after fighting began to intensify. And compare CNN’s 150 videos on Israel-Palestine on their website in the same two weeks to the zero videos on the offensive against the LRA. The lack of any semblance of proportionality is staggering.

 

Why are we so absorbed with the humanitarian consequences of conflict in one particular case (Israel-Palestine), that we have not a drop of sympathy remaining for all the rest – especially those that are much worse? There is no stopping to even question why this conflict is so much more important than the others, why others should be erased from the possible media agenda altogether (if they were ever there to begin with). Why have all the media corporations and the general public all jumped on the same humanitarian bandwagon?

 

However we choose to justify the exclusive saturation coverage of Israel-Palestine, we run into some inescapable contradictions. If it is about humanitarianism, why are those in Israel-Palestine more ‘human’ than others – why is far greater human suffering elsewhere almost completely ignored? If it is about religion, why is the persecution of people based on faith elsewhere given so little attention? If it is about the effect of the conflict on the price of oil, why don’t we care about conflict in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (a major player in the oil business), where conflict is directly responsible for a reduction of one-quarter of its oil exports? If it is about terrorism, why does the terrorism practiced by warlords in any other of the world’s conflicts go unnoticed?

 

None of these reasons seem to hold up. About the only excuses that seem to remain are that the politicians are all talking about it (and they always have), our reporters are on the scene anyway, and the other media corporations seem to believe so much in its importance (follow-the-leader and pack journalism). The ‘important’ players in world affairs believe it is important, and therefore it must be. And because they have believed it is so important for so many years, then the whole process becomes self-sustaining and automatic.

 

But with the levels of disproportion in attention so extreme, the question begs to be asked: how does this situation go unchallenged? Are the victims of conflict in the DRC not human enough to qualify for our ‘humanitarian’ concern? Or is it because the media’s high-beam spotlight on the Israel-Palestine conflict is so intense and its blackout over the conflict in the DRC so dark? And why are we the public just going along with it, swallowing whole what we are fed? Is it a case of out of sight, out of mind? Is it that the conflict in the DRC doesn’t bother us because the newspapers and TV stations are not constantly waving it in our face?

 

Whatever the reasons, it is clear that so much of the world is suffering from an acute case of selective indignation, and worse still, no one even seems to notice…

What’s death got to do with it?

There is a newsroom truism in the USA that “one dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans”. Sounds pretty bad. But the reality is much much worse. For a start, from the perspective of the news media in the West, 500 Africans have nowhere near that kind of value. The death toll from conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is literally one thousand times greater than that in Israel-Palestine, yet it is the latter that is the object of far greater media coverage, if that is any indication of the news value of the two conflicts. The numbers of victims from conflict in Israel-Palestine are counted down to the last digit, and the intricacies and nuances of the conflict, political situation and peace process are almost obsessively analysed and presented. Death tolls from most African conflicts (if anyone bothers to count) are usually rounded off to the nearest one hundred thousand (at times the nearest million), and the conflicts are frequently brushed off and dismissed as being chaotic, or worthy of some vague pity or humanitarian concern, but rarely of any in-depth political analysis.

 

But news editors do not line up conflict death tolls and do division and multiplication to adjust the figures according to the region and skin colour of the victims when deciding which conflicts to cover and which to ignore. The reality is that the scale of a conflict has very little at all to do with whether a conflict gets the attention of the media or not. Other factors (like the political interest of key policymakers at home, skin colour, simplicity and sensationalism) appear to be the key determinants. Once a conflict is ‘chosen’, it becomes the centre of attention, at the expense of all other conflicts – however destructive they may be.

 

A conflict that had caused 2,000 deaths by late 1998 in Kosovo, for example, became seen as a humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions that simply could not be ignored. Doing something about it was widely accepted as a moral responsibility – a pure case of ‘humanitarianism’. And yet at the same time, millions of human lives were being lost in Africa – the multinational invasion of the DRC was in full swing, brutal rebellions were wreaking havoc in Angola and Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia and Eritrea were engaged in heavy fighting over their border. Each of these conflicts alone was far worse than that in Kosovo. But humanitarian principles simply did not appear to apply to these humans.

 

This does not mean that conflict in Africa is ignored across the board. But even within Africa, the death toll has little to do with the levels of coverage. Darfur made a rare appearance on the radar of Western concern in 2004, rising to a relatively high position on the media agenda. This happened at a time when the known death toll from conflict there was still 80 times smaller than that in the DRC. Similarly, political violence in early 2007 in Zimbabwe resulting in one death and a number of arrests and beatings of political leaders became the object of relatively high levels of attention and indignation in the Western media. At almost exactly the same time, political protest in Guinea was put down by government forces that fired indiscriminately into crowds of protesters resulting in a total of 130 deaths and numerous arrests. Also at the same time, street battles between government and opposition forces in the capital of the DRC resulted in between 400 and 600 deaths, and resulted in the exile of the opposition leader. Yet this violence in Guinea and the DRC was virtually ignored by the Western media.

 

Could Zimbabwe’s ‘popularity’ (as the representative African bad guy) have something to do with Mugabe being a thorn in the side of powerful Western governments because of his railings (in fluent English mind you) against them? And could Guinea’s absence from the media radar have something to do with the fact that the government there is Western-friendly, and that Guinea is the world’s largest producer of bauxite (much of which is mined by Western multinational corporations)?

 

But why should supposedly ‘free’ media in powerful Western countries align themselves and their news values so closely with the governments of the countries in which they are based? Were they not supposed to be the watchdogs of the policymakers? Stay tuned…

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.