Civilians: you've never had it so good
Blogged by: Nina Brenjo
Palestinian boys look at the body of 10-year-old Salman during his funeral in the northern Gaza strip
Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
Judging by the events in Iraq, Darfur or Sri Lanka, the number of civilian deaths in conflicts worldwide must have been rising rapidly since the Cold War. Right? Wrong.
It's commonly said that around 90 percent of today's war casualties are civilians compared with 50 percent in the Second World War -- but there's no evidence to support the first statistic, Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, writes in Canada's Globe and Mail.
He quotes the Conflict Data Program at Sweden's Uppsala University which claims 30 to 60 per cent of conflict deaths are civilians.
Certainly some figures are singled out for criticism by those who claim they are too high -- such as the civilian death toll in Iraq -- put at 34,452 by the United Nations, which is disputed by the Iraqi government.
But surely civilian deaths are sky-rocketing as a result of the increase in international terrorism over the last few years? Wrong again, says Mack.
Deaths from this cause have recently started to increase, but terrorism causes only a tiny number of civilian deaths. Most happen as a result of war crimes in high-intensity armed conflicts and genocides.
And even when those are considered, the situation is not as bleak as we think, according to Mack. He quotes another study, this time by Barbara Harff of the U.S. Naval Academy. This found that genocides and other forms of mass violence against civilians plunged in incidence by 90 percent between 1989 and 2005, after rising through the previous three decades. And high-intensity armed conflict fell by 80 percent in the same period.
According to Mack, the fact that such conflicts have slowed up so dramatically is "powerful indirect evidence that the civilian death toll today is far lower than it was during the Cold War".
This is indeed good news, but these statistics don't mean much to people who are dying in droves in Iraq or in Darfur. Mack points, they should help us understand what is behind such drastic drops and apply the lessons to current and future conflicts.
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4 responses to “Civilians: you've never had it so good”
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18 Jan 2007 17:49:52 GMT
This headline although sarcastic I thought most appropriate.
The pervasive trend to describe human beings as numbers is depersonalizing and dehumanizing. Each number represents a face, a life story. Whether it is 90, 60 or 30 people harmed or killed of every hundred humans, is neither here nor there, because one [not meaning one%] still remains as too many. Statistics without testimony catapult us into a cold and abstract state of mind. Our ability to think critically, empathically can be dulled, sometimes disabled and we might walk away prematurely concluding that one thought, 'that's good news'. I also question, is it for each civilian casualty? As for "future conflicts", if we must suffer them as Mr. Mack sees for our shared future then put those who desire to manipulate a weapon or desire to manipulate those who carry them onto a battlefield away from other living entities and they can all fight it out amongst themselves. I think this a much more expedient way to eradicate harm to civilians than delayed statistical understanding.19 Jan 2007 12:55:55 GMT
A very simple and powerful piece.
I wonder how this could be contextualised with qualitative data. Civilian death tolls may be falling but instances of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes seem to be becoming more regular occurences. Does this mean that we have moved from the prevalence of widespread civilian death towards the spread of 'dehumanisation'?19 Jan 2007 14:04:04 GMT
Brenda, Thanks for your comments. As you rightly point out, the title of this blog was meant to be sarcastic. Precisely because of the fact that there has been much less regard for the civilian population in wars fought since World War Two, there has been the general perception that civilian death tolls are much higher than when the wars were mainly fought on the battlefield. Mack's thesis is that this is not true, which surely is good news.
I agree with you that even a single casualty is one too many, but, as Mack points out, looking at the statistics may help us understand what's behind the drop in casualties, in order to minimise them further.