Archive for February, 2011

A quarter-century of warfare

Posted on: February 27th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

Between July 30 and August 4 this year, fighters of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and elements of the Mai Mai, a local militia, entered Luvungi and surrounding villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and, in one extended weekend, raped 150 to 200 women and children, including a number of baby boys. They then looted the area and moved on.[i]

News of the assaults did not reach international media outlets until weeks later, and when the UN then investigated, it established that the number of rapes in the reported incidents was actually 242. However, investigators also learned of another 267 rapes in the district that had not been previously reported.[ii]

The context was the ongoing civil war in the DRC, but somehow the term “war” doesn’t come close to capturing the scale of horror of Luvungi. The rapes are beyond extreme by any measure, but as part of the chaos and fighting that have engulfed the DRC since 1990, the Luvungi victims represent but the tiniest fraction of the war’s human toll. Five million deaths in the DRC are directly attributable to the war. Hundreds of thousands have been raped; untold millions are internally displaced. According to UNICEF, there are more than four million orphaned children in the DRC.[iii]

Contemporary war is largely “unofficial” and often unacknowledged. It is rarely declared; flags and bugles don’t herald its approach. The march to war is replaced by the gradual (or sometimes rapid) disintegration of order in severely troubled societies and the inexorable descent into political and criminal public violence.

Indeed, “public violence” may well be the more apt, though still emotionally inadequate, term for many of today’s armed conflicts. Public violence is invariably linked to longstanding social and political grievances that remain chronically unaddressed and are allowed to fester and undermine confidence in public institutions and processes. In turn, widespread rejection of public institutions is transformed into lawlessness and armed violence when ignored grievances are joined by a ready access to small arms – the pre-eminent hardware of public violence.

When a state finds itself in that deadly combination of circumstances – pervasive grievance, loss of confidence in government, and abundant supplies of user-friendly small arms – it finds it difficult to avoid the descent into chaos and the public violence that must finally be recognized as war.

Counting the wars

Since 1987 Project Ploughshares[iv]  has been tracking global armed conflicts and issuing annually an Armed Conflicts Report. In 1987, there were 37 wars taking place on the territories of 34 states – Indonesia, the Philippines, and Iran were each the scene of two separate armed conflicts. Twenty-three years later, 2009 ended with a total of 28 wars on the territories of 24 countries – with the Philippines and Sudan both the scene of two separate wars, while Indian territory hosted three armed conflicts.

That is a welcome 25 per cent drop in the number of active armed conflicts, but it is a decline that masks a dynamic quarter-century of public violence and war in which many new wars began as others were ending.

In addition to the 37 conflicts under way in 1987, 44 new conflicts broke out in the ensuing 23 years, for a total of 81 separate wars during this period. Of those, 58 were resolved, but in 11 of those cases the peace didn’t last and war resumed (of the 11 resumed wars, six subsequently ended). All told, the planet thus hosted a total of 92 wars during the last quarter-century.

Not only do some conflicts reignite, but wars generally last a long time. Fully one-third of the conflicts under way in 1987 remain active today. Of the current 28 conflicts, only six are less than a decade old. Six have been under way for more than three decades, another seven more for more than two decades, and nine for more than one decade.

When public violence means war

While war is eminently recognizable, defining it is not so simple. Because contemporary wars are not declared and because, in most cases — especially civil/intrastate wars — they do not follow from a clear or official decision to go to war, it is often not at all obvious whether a country is “at war” or not. So, any effort to count wars must obviously include the application of some reasonably objective, measurable criteria for determining when a war begins and when it ends.

The tabulation of wars for the annual Ploughshares Armed Conflicts Report [v] is based on three basic characteristics:

  • It is a political conflict;
  • It involves armed combat by the armed forces of a state or the forces of one or more armed factions seeking a political end, such as gaining control of all or part of the state,
  • At least 1,000 people have been killed directly by the fighting during the course of the conflict.

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In many contemporary armed conflicts the fighting is intermittent and involves widely varying levels of intensity. Afghanistan and Iraq experience persistent and ongoing armed clashes and attacks. Rwanda went from political tension to unprecedented levels of violence and back down again in a relatively short period of time. The wars in the Philippines and Burundi are examples of ongoing but relatively low-level conflicts, with annual combat deaths now often as low as about 100 – but, of course, with political, economic, and social disruption well out of proportion to the intensity of action on actual battlefields.  

The definition of “political conflict” obviously cannot be technically precise. Nevertheless the distinction between political and criminal violence is significant and discernable. There are clear instances in which escalating violence that is clearly criminal becomes so extensive that it takes on significant political overtones and complications. The Mexican drug “war” is perhaps the most prominent case in point. The fundamental dispute is clearly not political – it is a matter of organized crime – but the impact on the country and on Mexico’s relations with its neighbours, including the US, is such that it engages government at the highest level, as well as the armed forces of Mexico.  

Still, criminal violence remains distinct from the armed conflict of war, and Mexico is not included in the Ploughshares count of current wars. Criminal organizations employ violence in the pursuit of profit, not in pursuit of a political program. And while groups engaged in politically driven combat often pursue criminal activities for economic gain, the more basic objective of such groups, and the basic point of the violence they practice, is still the pursuit of military and political goals[vi].

Types of war

A relatively simple typology of armed conflict relies on four basic categories: international or interstate war plus three overlapping types of intrastate war (state control, state formation, and state failure).

Interstate wars

An interstate war is a war between two or more states and, for purposes of Ploughshares reporting, must also meet the 1,000-combat-death criterion. Though rare, international wars are not yet banished from history. But the distinction between interstate and intrastate violence is often obscured. Interstate wars are frequently fought on the territory of just one of the states in the conflict –as in the 2001-2002 US-led attack on Afghanistan and the 2003 US-led attack on Iraq. On the other hand, it is obviously also the case that virtually all civil or intrastate wars include extensive international involvement.

Intrastate wars

There are three basic types of intra-state conflicts.

State control wars obviously centre on struggles for control of the governing apparatus of the state. State control struggles are typically driven by ideologically defined revolutionary movements or decolonization campaigns, or are simply the means by which power transfers from one set of elites to another. In some instances, communal and/or ethnic interests are central to the fight to transfer power; in other instances religion becomes a defining feature of the conflict; and in others the differences are more ideological.

State formation wars centre on the form or shape of the state itself and generally involve particular regions of a country fighting for a greater measure of autonomy or for outright secession. Communal ethnic or religious claims are frequently an element of such wars.

Failed state wars are conflicts that are neither about state control nor state formation, but are focused on more local issues and become violent in the absence of effective government control. The primary failure is in the lack of government capacity, or sometimes will, to provide minimal human security to groups of citizens. Pastoralist communities in East Africa, for example, usually live well beyond the reach of the state. There are virtually no state security services or institutions present and no political means of mediating disputes over cattle raiding or access to grazing lands and water. Communities come into conflict; with access to small arms, an escalation of violence is almost inevitable. While the violence is political, it is over local issues and none of the parties has state-control or state-formation objectives. Such conflicts are included in the Ploughshares count when the threshold of 1,000 combat deaths is reached.

Of the 81 wars that occurred during the last 23 years, 51 per cent included state control objectives, 35 per cent included state formation objectives, 25 per cent reflected failed state conditions, and 11 per cent included interstate dimensions.[vii]

How wars end

No fewer than 64 wars ended during the past 23 years. In five cases governments defeated rebels or insurgents. In four cases the insurgents prevailed on the battlefield and had their demands met.

Thirty-three conflicts (52 per cent) ended through negotiated settlements. This does not mean that what happened on the battlefield was not a significant factor in shaping the outcome. Military force certainly influenced or even determined the outcomes of negotiations. For example, in many cases rebel groups would never have gained a place at a negotiating table without an armed campaign. But negotiators took over and reached a political conclusion.

In the remaining 22 cases (34 per cent), the fighting essentially dissolved. While the conflicts were not resolved, the fighting gradually dissipated. In Guinea, for example, fighting by the Revolutionary United Front was supported by Liberia, but Guinea gradually persuaded both Liberia and Sierra Leone to end their support of the rebels, leading to a gradual decline in violence.

War prevention a collective responsibility

It is tempting to blame the current and still high levels of internal or intrastate wars on the inability of states to build conditions that serve the social, political, and economic welfare of their people. But those failures to achieve human security at the national level are heavily shaped by external factors, notably the creation of international economic and security conditions that shift benefits prominently toward dominant economic and military powers.

Thus war prevention, including the prevention of civil wars, is a collective international responsibility. And a world in which 28 wars still rage, and in which the rapes of Luvungi are not an isolated horror, is a world that is not close to meeting its responsibility.

(From the Winter 2010 Ploughshares Monitor.)

Notes

[i] Kaufman, Stephen. 2010. Clinton – Rape of civilians was ‘horrific attack’. AllAfrica.Com, August 26. http://allafrica.com/stories/201008270260.html.

[ii] The Globe and Mail. 2010. Prosecute to help stop rape in Congo. Editorial, September 4. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/prosecute-to-help-stop-rape-in-congo/article1700260/?cmpid=rss1.

[iii] More information about the number of rapes and orphans can be found on the UNICEF website: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/drcongo.html.

[iv] Armed Conflicts Report 2009. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-TitlePage.html.

[v] Defining armed conflict. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-DefinitionArmedConflict.htm.

[vi] Ballentine, Karen & Heiko Nitzschke. 2005. The Political Economy of Civil War and Conflict Transformation. Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management. 2005. http://www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/publications/dialogue3_ballentine_nitzschke.pdf.

[vii] The total is more than 100 per cent because 12 conflicts involved a combination of types.

An R2P Intervention in Libya?

Posted on: February 22nd, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

By all accounts a “mass atrocity event”[i] is unfolding in Libya. There is less certainty as to whether the international community will find the means to respond.

A group of NGOs under the leadership of UN Watch has issued an urgent appeal (see endnote for a link to full statement)[ii] to world leaders for international intervention in Libya: “We urge you to mobilize the United Nations and the international community to take immediate action to halt the mass atrocities now being perpetrated by the Libyan government against its own people. The inexcusable silence cannot continue.”

The NGOs describe a grim picture: “Snipers are shooting peaceful protesters. Artillery and helicopter gunships have been used against crowds of demonstrators. Thugs armed with hammers and swords attacked families in their homes. Hospital officials report numerous victims shot in the head and chest, and one struck on the head by an anti-aircraft missile. Tanks are reported to be on the streets and crushing innocent bystanders. Witnesses report that mercenaries are shooting indiscriminately from helicopters and from the top of roofs. Women and children were seen jumping off Giuliana Bridge in Benghazi to escape. Many of them were killed by the impact of hitting the water, while others were drowned.  The Libyan regime is seeking to hide all of these crimes by shutting off contact with the outside world. Foreign journalists have been refused entry. Internet and phone lines have been cut or disrupted.”

They describe conditions and events that they say are “systematic violations” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as “crimes against humanity” as defined by the Explanatory Memorandum to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. They refer to the Responsibility to Protect commitment made by the World Summit in 2005: “Because the Libyan authorities are manifestly failing to protect their population from crimes against humanity, should peaceful means be inadequate, member states are obliged to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII.”

There have been several other calls for limited intervention to enforce a no-fly zone. Such a zone would be designed to end airborne attacks on civilians, and also to “prevent mercenaries and weapons from being shipped in.”[iii] The Libyan Ambassador, at least one of them, joined the call – referring to “genocide.”[iv] Enforcement forces mentioned include NATO and the Egyptian Air Force.

In his Foreign Affairs blog, Marc Lynch also calls for enforcement of a non-fly zone:[v] “This is not a peaceful democracy protest movement which the United States can best help by pressuring allied regimes from above, pushing for long-term and meaningful reform, and persuading the military to refrain from violence. It’s gone well beyond that already, and this time I find myself on the side of those demanding more forceful action before it’s too late.”

In a strong appeal issued before the current Libyan crisis, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called in general for “timely and decisive” responses. “How many children,” he asked, are in places of peril today and asking: “Is the world listening? Will help arrive in time? Who will be there for me and my family?”[vi]

Who, indeed?

Later on Feb 22, two additional statements were issued.

Francis Deng and Edward Luck, the UN Secretary-General’s advisers respectively on genocide the responsibility to protect, issued a statement which said in part: “We remind national authorities in Libya, as well as in other countries facing large-scale popular protests, that the heads of State and Government at the 2005 World Summit pledged to protect populations by preventing acts of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as their incitement. We join Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in urging all parties to exercise utmost restraint and to seek peaceful means of resolving their political differences.”[1]

The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, also called for an immediate end to the human rights violations in Libya and for an independent international investigation. “The callousness with which Libyan authorities and their hired guns are reportedly shooting live rounds of ammunition at peaceful protestors is unconscionable. I am extremely worried that lives are being lost even as I speak,” Pillay said. She referred to the reported use of machine guns, snipers and military planes against demonstrators, calling such acts brazen violations of international law. “The state has an obligation to protect the rights to life, liberty and security,” she said. “Protection of civilians should always be the paramount consideration in maintaining order and the rule of law.”[2]
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eregehr@uwaterloo.ca

Notes

[i] The term is used by Mark Leon Goldberg, “The Perils of a ‘No Fly Zone’ for Libya,” 21 February 2011. http://www.undispatch.com/the-perils-of-a-no-fly-zone-for-libya. A “mass atrocity” is usually defined as a minimum of 5,000 civilians killed intentionally. The Stanley Foundation, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent, appendices to, Alex J. Bellamy, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent,” Policy Analysis Brief, The Stanley Foundation, February 2011. http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/BellmayAppendices22011.pdf.

 [ii] UN Watch, 20 February 2011. http://blog.unwatch.org/index.php/2011/02/20/urgent-ngo-appeal-to-world-leaders-to-prevent-atrocities-in-libya/.

 [iii] “Calls for Libya ‘no-fly zone’,” AFROL News, 21 February 2011. http://www.afrol.com/articles/37390.

 [iv] “Libyan Envoy to Ask UN Security Council to Impose No-Fly Zone,” Bloomberg, 22 February 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-22/libyan-envoy-to-ask-un-security-council-to-impose-no-fly-zone.html.

 [v] Marc Lynch, “Intervening in the Libyan tragedy,” Foreign Policy, 21 February 2011. http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/21/the_libyan_horror.

 [vi] “Secretary-General sets out broad agenda for strengthening human protection,” UN News Centre, 2 February 2011. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37454&Cr=responsibility+to+protect&Cr1=#.

[1] Statement by the UN Secretary–General’s Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect on the situation in Libya, 22 February 2011. http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/UN_Secretary-General’s_Special_Advisers_on_the_Prevention_of_Genocide_and_the_Responsibility_to_Protect_on_the_Situation_in_Libya].pdf.

 [2] “Pillay calls for international inquiry into Libyan violence and justice for victims,” 22 February 2011, Office of the High Commissioner of Human rights. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/Media.aspx?IsMediaPage=true.

Is South Sudan ripe for armed conflict?

Posted on: February 14th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

It seems impertinent, so soon after the extraordinary unity displayed through the independence referendum, to ask whether South Sudan is likely to face renewed armed conflict. Unfortunately, the question is both appropriate and timely. The recent clashes in Jonglei point to conditions for war that are prominently present and to prevention strategies that are urgently needed.

The roots of war of are myriad and context specific. Last week’s fighting in Jonglei state involved a complex set of personal and public factors specific to that north-eastern area of South Sudan, but it also reflects a country structured for more of the same.

The renewal of ongoing armed conflict is certainly not inevitable, but a wealth of research data correlates armed conflict with certain structural realities in South Sudan. When the following conditions are present, war tends to follow:   

  • Intergroup competition and conflict;
  • Deeply felt political, economic, and social grievances;
  • The capacity to take up arms;
  • The absence of trusted mechanisms for national decision-making and mediating political conflict.[i]

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All of these conditions are present in abundance in South Sudan.

First, intergroup suspicion and conflict are definitely present now, as they have been historically.[ii] To say that ethnic conflict is present is, however, not to say that ethnic enmity is the reason. It is to recognize, rather, that ethnic and regional divisions (sometimes manifested in conflicts between tribal groups, sometimes within tribal groups and between clans) have become the focus of conflict even though the roots of conflict are elsewhere – for example, in scarce resources and the absence of public institutions to mediate disputes. There is a danger of conflating the symptom of tribal conflict with its external causes,[iii] but it is present[iv] and is one important predictor of armed conflict.

Relations between the Dinka and Nuer communities were deeply fractured, and led to a number of schisms, throughout the South’s decades-long war with Khartoum. And the same fracture is present in the clashes between a break-away militia led by George Athor, a former commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the SPLA itself in Jonglei, killing more than 100 people, more than a third of them civilians, over two days of fighting last week.

Second, that there are deeply felt political, economic, and social grievances in South Sudan is hardly news. In the most immediate sense South Sudan faces a humanitarian crisis, as was confirmed in the most recent report of the UN Secretary-General on the situation there: “While good harvests are expected in 6 of the 10 States of South Sudan, food security remains precarious, especially in the greater Bahr El Ghazal region and Jonglei State, where hundreds of thousands of people are at risk. In six States in South Sudan, malnutrition rates are above the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization.”[v]

Beyond that are the understandably high expectations among South Sudanese that independence, self-rule, access to oil revenue, and peace itself should yield immediate and tangible benefits – expectations that will transform into even more deeply felt grievances if change isn’t soon demonstrated.

Third, the capacity for dissident groups to take up arms is not in question. Five decades of almost uninterrupted warfare have left a legacy of small arms and well established supply chains for ammunition. Furthermore, that same half century of conflict has built a political culture of legitimacy for armed resistance to mistrusted authorities.

And fourth and finally, it should not be a surprise that the absence of trusted public institutions for mediating disputes and promoting economic equity defines South Sudan. A decade ago the the OECD Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development Cooperation reflected the findings of peacebuilding research when it concluded that “sustainable development must …be underpinned by institutions capable of managing socio-political tensions and avoiding their escalation into violence.”[vi] South Sudan is building public institutions from scratch. It won’t happen quickly, and the danger is that it might not happen soon enough.

War prevention obviously involves attention to all four categories of conditions that are conducive to war. The need for attention to inter-group confidence building, tobasic grievances, and to small arms control is obviously recognized and relevant efforts are underway, but those are generations-long projects. To have confidence in the future South Sudanese need to see evidence of such effort, and that in turn will help with addressing what is really the most urgent requirement – that is, addressing the fourth condition by building the institutions or mechanisms capable of managing socio-political tensions and expectations.

In other words, for a real change, the people of South Sudan need a credible alternative to fighting for change.

eregehr@uwaterloo.ca

Notes

[i] Alex J. Bellamy, “Mass Atrocities and Armed Conflict: Links, Distinctions, and Implications for the Responsibility to Prevent,” Policy Analysis Brief, The Stanley Foundation, February 2011. http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/pab/BellamyPAB22011.pdf.

[ii] Jaimie Grant, “Sub-Ethnic Division is Being Embedded into the DNA of South Sudan’s Emerging State,” Think Africa Press, 11 January 2011. http://thinkafricapress.com/article/sub-ethnic-division-being-embedded-dna-south-sudan%E2%80%99s-emerging-state.

[iii] Mareike Schomerus and Tim Allen, research team leaders, South Sudan at odds with itself: Dynamics of conflict and predicaments of peace, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics, 2010, p. 8.  http://www2.lse.ac.uk/businessAndConsultancy/LSEConsulting/pdf/SouthSudan.pdf.

[iv] International Crisis Group, Jonglei’s Tribal Conflicts: Countering Insecurity in South Sudan, Africa Report No. 154, 23 December 2009. http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/africa/horn-of-africa/sudan/154-jongleis-tribal-conflicts-countering-insecurity-in-south-sudan.aspx.

[v] Report of the Secretary-General on the Sudan, United Nations Security Council, 31 December (2010S/2010/681).  http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/708/16/PDF/N1070816.pdf?OpenElement

[vi] DAC Guidelines on Conflict, Peace and Development Co-Operation, The Development Assistance Committee of the OECD, Paris, 1997 (p. 9). http://www.fas.org/asmp/campaigns/smallarms/eguide.pdf.

Counting the War Dead

Posted on: February 7th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

A sharp increase in war deaths in Afghanistan during 2010 again confirms the incalculable human cost of war. It’s also an occasion to acknowledge a debt to those who try to count the victims – in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the more than two dozen other wars – and to offer at least some minimal public recognition of loss.

The Kabul based Afghanistan Rights Monitor has just issued a new report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan, showing 2010 to have been the deadliest year yet, with at least 2,421 Afghan civilians killed.[i]

That trend was confirmed by the UN late last year. “Civilians continued to bear the brunt of intensified armed conflict,” according to the Secretary-General in his most recent report. There were 2,412 civilian deaths recorded by the UN in the first 10 months of 2010, a 20 percent increase over the same period in 2009.[ii]

On average, civilian deaths make up almost 50 percent of all Afghan combat deaths, according to numbers collated from multiple sources at Unknown News.[iii] In Iraq the numbers cover a much wider range, from about 100,000 violent deaths recorded at Iraq Body Count[iv] to the 800,000 range in a widely quoted, and debated, study reported in the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006.[v]

The broad variation in numbers obviously indicates that counting war deaths is an imprecise enterprise. Most studies of direct combat or violent deaths rely on public reports of violent incidents, but such reports are far from systematic. In the 2009 reports on casualties in the fighting that climaxed in Sri Lanka ranged from 7,000 to 40,000 combat deaths that year. And it is at least intuitively obvious that many clashes and deaths that occur in remote places are never reported.

Epidemiological surveys do not count individual deaths through incident reports but measure excess deaths in war by comparing pre-conflict mortality rates with mortality rates during and after conflict as well as population surveys in order to estimate direct deaths by combat and indirect deaths due to war.  

However difficult it is to measure war deaths, the victims are owed at least that much. After September 11, 2001, the New York Times ran photographs and personal accounts of all the victims, at least momentarily rescuing all those who had died from anonymity, putting a face on the statistic and giving public acknowledgment to loss. To similarly honour all those who die due to current wars (direct deaths by violence and indirect deaths due to the deprivations of war) would require upwards of 1,000 photos and brief biographies each and every day.

Most victims of contemporary wars will never be featured in the New York Times. Their loss will be felt by those closest to them, but they should also be publicly acknowledged, counted, in the name of public recognition and accountability.

The 2008 report on the Global Burden of Armed Violence (GBAV)[vi] tried to do just that and put the average annual death toll from armed combat, actual combat deaths (combatants and civilians), at 52,000, or 1,000 per week. That figure is roughly confirmed by the informal count maintained by Project Ploughshares[vii] (Ploughshares does not publish combat death figures due to the fact that it is impossible to be comprehensive, nevertheless it maintains tabulations from public sources in order to give a broad assessment of the severity of each conflict). Ploughshares’ unpublished figures from 2006 through 2009 also indicated about 45,000 to 50,000 direct war deaths per year.

These are no doubt conservative estimates.  The GBAV report, in reviewing epidemiological surveys done in the DRC, concludes that combat deaths there alone could be averaging 50,000 per year. If extraordinary events like the genocide in Rwanda and the invasion of Iraq are taken into annual averages, the numbers are much, much higher.

It is therefore likely that the global estimate of an average of 1,000 war combat deaths per week is a low estimate, but even at that it is only about one-quarter of the total annual death toll due to war. That estimate is also at the conservative end of the scale inasmuch as the GBAV report, while indicating that some 200,000 people die annually due to the extraordinarily harsh conditions of war, also notes that surveys in the DRC, where people in the fighting zones are subjected to the most heinous of conditions, estimate that it is more likely that about 400,000 people have died each year in recent years due to war.

The Canadian Human Security Report disputes the latter figures. It doesn’t dispute the high mortality rates in the DRC, [viii]  but it says that the pre-conflict mortality rate was already high so that it is not possible to say that the current abnormally high mortality rate is war-related.[ix]

What of course is widely agreed is that wars are extraordinarily costly, and that the human cost of war is not found in deaths alone. To them must be added the consequences for the survivors. There are the injured, many of whom suffer lifelong physical disabilities and psychological scars. War displaces people from their homes – in southern Sudan the majority of the population was internally displaced. Indeed, prior to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with southern Sudan it was the deliberate strategy of the government of Sudan to bomb villages and IDP camps for the purpose of inducing people to flee – to keep the population unhinged and dependent on international assistance.

The relatively low level of direct combat deaths (compared with the high levels of indirect deaths) reflects the nature of most contemporary wars. The objective, with the obvious and tragic exception of Rwanda, is not to maximize the number of deaths but to maximize the level of terror and social upheaval. That is accomplished even by relatively low levels of combat deaths, as well as through the forced displacement of people. The UN reports that at the end of 2009 there were 43.3 million people that had been forcibly displaced, as refugees and internally displaced, due to conflict – the highest number since the 1990s. More than a million people were newly displaced during the course of 2009.[x] The top source countries are the scenes of the world’s most prominent wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, DRC, Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. For example, in late October, fierce factional fighting in Somalia near the border with Kenya forced an estimated 60,000 people from their homes in a matter of a few days.[xi]

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eregehr@uwaterloo.ca

Notes

[i] ARM Annual Report: Civilian Casualties of War, January-December 2010. Afghanistan Rights Monitor, Kabul, Afghanistan. February 2011. http://www.arm.org.af/.

[ii] “The situation in Afghanistan and its implications for international peace and security: Report of the Secretary-General, UN Security Council, 10 December 2010 (A/65/612–S/2010/630), para 55. http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/667/78/PDF/N1066778.pdf?OpenElement.

[iii] http://www.unknownnews.org/casualties.html.

[iv] http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.

[v] Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey.” www.thelancet.com Published online October 11, 2006 DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9. http://www.brussellstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf.

[vi] Global Burden of Armed Violence, a detailed study of armed violence in all its form, is a 2008 publication of  the “Geneva Declaration.” The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development is a diplomatic initiative by more than 100 countries aimed at addressing the interrelations between armed violence and development. http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf.

[vii] Armed Conflicts Report 2010. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/ACRText/ACR-TitlePage.html.

[viii] The Canadian Human Security Report undertakes a detailed analysis of war death toll estimates in the DRC and questions the reliability of the data and methodology used in some studies. Accordingly the Human Security Report concludes that the number of deaths attributed to war have been significantly overstated. That the death toll in the DRC is extraordinarily high is not disputed; rather the point is that the pre-war death rate was already much higher than the African average, so it is not appropriate to describe the current high rate of death as being a consequence of war. Human Security Report 2009, “Shrinking Costs of War,” The Human Security Report Project (an independent centre at Simon Fraser University), Chapter 3: The Death Toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2009/2009HumanSecurityReport_Pt2_3_DeathTollDemocraticRepublicCongo.pdf

[ix] The Canadian Human Security Report says of the GBAV estimates: “More recently, the wide-ranging Global Burden of Armed Violence report published by the Geneva Declaration Secretariat estimated that for every person who died violently in wars around the world between 2004 and 2007, another four died from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition. 4The report did not claim there was a consistent ratio between the two, simply that on average, the indirect-to-direct war death ratio was 4:1. This ratio is certainly not implausible, but the evidence base used to calculate it is far too narrow and uncertain to place any confidence in its accuracy.” Human Security Report 2009, “Shrinking Costs of War,” The Human Security Report Project (an independent centre at Simon Fraser University), Chapter 1, “Deadly Connections: Wartime Violence and Indirect Deaths.” http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2009/2009HumanSecurityReport_Pt2_1_DeadlyConnectionsWartimeViolenceIndirectDeaths.pdf

[x] “2009 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons,” UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency), 15 June 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/4c11f0be9.html.

[xi] “Tens of thousands displaced by clashes in Somalia,” UNHCR news release, 26 October 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/print/4cc6f6d29.html.