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PARIS: Wars around the globe killed three times more
people during the second half of the 20th century than previously
estimated, according to a study released Friday.
Some 5.4 million deaths caused by
armed conflicts occurred between 1955 and 2003 in 13 nations
surveyed, ranging from a low of 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of
Congo to 3.8 million killed in Vietnam.
Previous research, based on media
reports or before-and-after census figures, have tended to severely
underestimate war-related fatalities among both combatants and
civilians, the new study argues.
These so-called “passive”
reports “are typically the only ones available during ongoing
conflicts, and represent the most commonly cited sources for
government and other estimates of war casualties, as in the current
war in Iraq,” notes the study, published in the British Medical
Journal.
The number of civilian casualties
in Iraq remains sharply contested, with some studies estimating the
death toll at 10 times the figure given by the US military.
In a new approach, a team of
scientists from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at
the University of Washington in Seattle, led by Ziad Obermeyer, used
health survey data collected in 2002 and 2003.
The World Health Organization
surveys queried a single respondent for each household about sibling
deaths, including whether a death was related to war.
Even the new figures may
under-count the number of conflict fatalities, notes Richard
Garfield, a professor at Columbia University in New York.
“The study only includes
violent deaths,” he wrote in a commentary, also published in the
BMJ. “In the poorest countries, where most conflicts now occur, a
rise in deaths from infectious disease often dwarfs the number of
violent deaths during a conflict.”
This is likely true, for example,
for the ongoing conflict in Darfur and the 1998-to-2003 civil war
that devastated the Democratic Republic of Congo.
While it is probable that the
number of soldiers dying is lower than at anytime in the last 100
years, “most excess deaths in areas of conflict in developing
countries occur in non-combatants, and these deaths are often not
counted,” noted Garfield.
Some countries included in the
study showed many times the number of violent war deaths counted in
another widely cited report of armed conflict fatalities, compiled
by Uppsala University in Sweden and the International Peace Research
Institute (PRIO) in Oslo.
During the 50 years covered by
the BMJ study, there were 269,000 such death in Bangladesh and
141,000 in Zimbabwe, for example, nearly five times more than in the
Uppsala/PRIO report.
The figure for Sri Lanka jumped
from 61,000 to 215,000, a 3.6-fold increase, while the violent death
toll in Vietnam nearly doubled to a staggering 3.8 million largely
due to its decades-long war with France and especially the United
States.
Conflicts in Bosnia, Georgia and
Laos were also more costly in lives than previously thought.
But in the other countries
examined—Burma, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Namibia and
Philippines—death tolls dropped compared to earlier assessments.
--AFP
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