Rev. Danny Fisher

In the right-hand column of this blog, under the section called “Causes,” there used to be a skyscraper-style banner ad for the Save Darfur Coalition. This ad offered all the same information as the button-style banner ad to the immediate right: “over 400,000 dead, more than 2.5 million displaced.” These are very grim statistics to be sure, and, as regular readers of this blog should know by now, I have quoted them often and with great concern. Furthermore, I have been an ardent supporter of the Save Darfur Coalition’s campaigns at this blog.

But is the shocking death toll offered by the Save Darfur Coalition correct? In a recent New York Times opinion piece sent to me by Buddhist meta-blogger par excellence Tom Armstrong, reporter Sam Dealey argues “no.”

[Last fall], in ads placed throughout the United States and Britain, [the Save Darfur Coalition] denounced the Sudanese government’s scorched-earth campaign against insurgents. “After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed,” the ads said.

That claim provoked a complaint to the British ad authority from the European Sudanese Public Affairs Council. After investigating, the authority found that Save Darfur’s campaign violated codes of objectivity and truthfulness, and it ordered the group to amend its ads to present the high death toll as opinion, not fact.

Serious estimates of the number of dead in Darfur are far lower than 400,000. Last November, the U.S. Government Accountability Office convened a panel of 12 experts to assess the credibility of six prominent mortality estimates for Darfur. Three of these came from the State Department, the World Health Organization and the W.H.O.-affiliated Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The other three were independent efforts by activists, including one by John Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University, for the defunct Coalition for International Justice. Hagan’s was the highest estimate and the one on which Save Darfur based its claim.

In category after category, the experts overwhelmingly found Hagan’s estimate of 400,000 deficient. Nine of the experts said that his source data was unsound and that he failed to disclose his study’s limitations. Ten found his assumptions “unreasonable,” and 11 called his extrapolations “inappropriate.”

In all, 11 experts held “low” or “very low” confidence in the study.

All this in mind, what does Dealey think is a reasonable estimate of the casualties in this genocide?

As the G.A.O. study notes, reliable numbers are hard to come by. But the estimate that won the most confidence was the one from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. From September 2003 until June 2005, the center estimated, there were 158,000 deaths in Darfur. Of those, 131,000 were deemed “excess”–more than normally would occur.

Neither the center nor any other responsible outlet has released a tabulation of the death toll after June 2005, but observations by the United Nations and relief groups register a sharp drop, if for no other reason than much of Darfur’s population now resides in the relative safety of aid camps. In 2005, the mortality rate fell below the level that is considered to be an emergency.

But now that the government has resumed bombings and the rebel groups are fighting among themselves as well as against the government, violence has increased. In the last half of 2006, civilian deaths averaged 200 per month.

Combining these estimates suggests Darfur’s death toll now hovers at 200,000, half of what Save Darfur claimed a year ago and still claims on its Web site.

Two days after Dealey’s piece appeared in the Times, the Save Darfur Coalition’s board chair, Steve Gutow, replied in a blog post at the group’s website:

[Dealey's] article misses a critical point in the debate over how many people have actually died. The real point is that, unfortunately, mortality estimates cannot be verified or updated because the Government of Sudan actively denies the international community–including diplomats, humanitarian workers, and epidemiology experts–real access to the Darfur region.

History reminds us that the full scope and scale of genocide is unknown until it has ended. Past perpetrators, most notably the Nazis, actively concealed their campaigns of mass murder from public scrutiny and accountability. When the scale of this genocide did become known, a shocked world cried out, “Never again.” The same was true in Cambodia and Rwanda.

The Save Darfur Coalition believes that as many as 400,000 Darfuris have been killed in this conflict because there is sound analysis to support that–analysis that is impossible to confirm only because of Sudan’s willful obstruction.

In addition, Dr. Eric Reeves, a Sudan researcher and analyst who suggested one of the six estimates that the G.A.O. evaluated, offered a scathing critique of the Dealey piece at his blog:

In the most spectacular example of ignorance on display, Dealey reveals that he is unaware of the September 2006 article on Darfur mortality [by John Hagan and Alberto Pelloni] 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”; 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.

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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 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.

Another response worth noting is one by Dr. Alex de Waal, which was posted to his blog at the Social Science Research Council website. (Incidentally, Hagan and Dealey argue points in the comments section of the post.)

There are two parts to the case. The first is that the figure of 400,000 deaths during the crisis is an upper-limit estimate not supported by the best studies, and therefore cannot be regarded as “fact” but rather as a disputed interpretation. This is the major concern of this posting.

The second is the implication that the deaths are wholly “slaughter” by the Sudan government and its militias, rather than predominantly due to hunger and disease. While such famine deaths may have their ultimate cause in the war, and especially the government’s conduct of the war during the extreme phase of 2003-04, there is an important difference between violent killing and death by these other causes. As Sam Dealey noted in his August 12 opinion column in the New York Times, different policy prescriptions follow: stopping massacres demands a different response to stopping hunger and disease. There is no disagreement on this: nobody claims that all, or even a majority, of the dead are killed in violence.

The authoritative overview of mortality in Darfur up to late 2005 is the evaluation by the U.S. General Accounting Office. This exercise asked a panel of experts to examine the different mortality surveys done. They did this task with a remarkable thoroughness and professionalism, requesting those who had undertaken the surveys for their data, and then replicating the methods to test the findings. They used a high standard of peer review criteria. The studies had to be replicable. All the studies involved making assumptions, and these assumptions were varied to explore the range of outcomes that came with varying each one, which in turn would assess the robustness of each study’s methods.

There is a great deal of science and statistics involved in the estimation of mortality. There is also good judgement based on experience, which is where selecting and examining assumptions becomes important.

I was asked to be a member of the evaluation panel, based on my history of conducting disaster demography, including in Darfur in the 1980s. I was not able to take up the invitation because I was tied down at the Abuja peace talks. But my assessment of the different studies does not differ from the consensus of the experts.

The most reliable study is the one conducted by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. The least reliable estimates were those provided by John Hagan and Eric Reeves.

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The CRED study is also towards the lower end of estimates. That is significant. On close reading of the CRED method–which is a survey of surveys rather than an original field study–it is clear that the authors were careful to make pessimistic assumptions at every stage. This is unusual–normally they would have made medium or marginally optimistic assumptions about mortality. The reason for the pessimism was that the figures for mortality in Darfur had become politicized, with many advocates speaking about extremely high death rates that were not, in fact, supported by systematic evidence. CRED’s researchers did not want to be accused of minimizing the crisis.

Personally, I would have preferred to have seen CRED stick to median assumptions, and therefore come with a slightly lower figure for estimated excess deaths. The reason for this is my own personal history on assessments of famine mortality, which goes back to my PhD research in the 1980s. The basic question I sought to address in my study, later published as Famine that Kills, was: why did outside experts predict such high death rates in Darfur in 1984-85 which then failed to materialize, despite lack of relief assistance? I compared the predictions for excess deaths in that famine, which ranged from 175,000 to 2 million (most erring on the upper side), with the best demographic and epidemiological estimate, which was 95,000, and sought to explain why the foreign experts had got it so badly wrong.

The basic reason: the people of Darfur were far hardier and more skilled at surviving food crisis than outsiders appreciated. The commonest fallacy of that time (often repeated now) was that people not reached by foreign aid were ipso facto worse off than people who were reached.

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This discussion has focused so far on those who have died from hunger and disease. What of deaths from violence? On this question, well-established epidemiological patterns are of less value. Methods for estimating violent deaths in a general population are much less refined than those for estimating deaths from disease and hunger. Jennifer Leaning of Physicians for Human Rights and I conducted a study of deaths in the Mogadishu war of 1992, in which we tried to develop some survey techniques. I also tried to do this in the Nuba Mountains a few years later. This is remarkably difficult, as the range of estimates for deaths in the Iraqi civil war attest. So more caution is in order than for the famine-type mortality estimates. But, once again, I would concur with the GAO’s panel that CRED estimate is the most reliable. An estimated 30% of the deaths during the period of intense war in 2003-04 are attributable to violence.

What of studies published after the GAO completed its assessment? John Hagan and Alberto Palloni published a paper in Science in September 2006. This is a broad review of the various published studies of mortality in Darfur which uses methods comparable to those of CRED to examine the data and extract estimates for mortality. Its final estimates are within the range 170,000-255,000. While the authors describe these estimates as “conservative”, it should be noted that this is a figure for total deaths, not excess deaths over what would normally be expected.

I’m not a Sudan expert. With all of the information and opinions before me, though, I’ve decided that I’m just not very comfortable working with an estimated death toll of 400,000.

I think de Waal ends his piece with a few good points that I will recycle here:

The estimation of mortality ought to be a purely scientific affair, free from moral coloring. But it never is.

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In my view, it is imprudent to use upper-end estimates. A long-term consideration is that inflating the estimates can cheapen the currency of suffering. After famines that are said to kill hundreds of thousands, a crisis with “only” 50,000 expected deaths might not meet the grade for our response. A medium-term concern is, what happens if a scientific survey finds out that (for example) “only” 100,000 people died instead of the 250,000 that were claimed. Does that mean that our effort was wasted? Or (in the case of killing) that the mass murderers are suddenly innocent of a lot of crimes? A mass murderer who is convicted of ten murders and acquitted of ten is no less a mass murderer. We should be able to detach ethics from statistics.

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In conclusion, the CRED study remains the best to date, though we must be prepared to revise our figures, upwards or downwards, as better data become available.

Let me repeat: there is no certainty in these figures. The reality could be different. But the pattern is both clear and familiar, and the best guess is approximately 200,000 excess deaths, plus or minus.

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And the death of an estimated 200,000 people in Darfur, from massacre and man-made humanitarian disaster, is a crime of the first order.

All this in mind, I have removed the skyscraper-style banner ad in the “Causes” section and replaced it with a more generic logo ad. I will continue to support the efforts of the Save Darfur Coalition at the blog because I believe their efforts are among the most significant contributing factors to such victories as the two Dealey mentions in his article: the House of Representatives passing the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act and the U.N. Security Council announcing that they will deploy as many 26,000 peacekeepers to Sudan by the end of the year. I just won’t use a number that cannot yet be verified.