Dangerous Statistics in Iraq
In Science News, Julie Rehmeyer writes a short piece on Humanitarian Statistics, with a focus on the “controversial” Iraq war studies carried in the Lancet. I haven’t posted about the Lancet studies before; I recognise that the Lancet studies have an important role to play in tallying the cost of the Iraq war, but anything I could add to the debate would be largely redundant, since it’s been driven by political rather than humanitarian interests.
Although Deltoid characterises the article as being “about the Lancet studies” – and fair enough, that is his particular interest – it is thankfully wider than that, noting the increase in the use of statistics in the human rights (and to a lesser extent, humanitarian) sector while also being aware of the limitations:
But humanitarian crises pose huge challenges. Little information may be available—even from before a crisis—about how many people live where. Even if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated. Areas within continuing war zones can be unsafe for survey workers.
Examples from Sierra Leone and East Timor are referenced in the article. The latter case is particularly interesting because it wasn’t just based on a straight survey – which is what we generally think of when we think of statistics – but on pulling together separate and incomplete datasets to build a bigger picture, which is the norm in humanitarian crises, particularly in developing countries.
In the comments section at Deltoid, commenter Jeff Harvey laments
I can only shake my head in disbelief. Who will do the survey? The US and British governments, who are responsible for an illegal invasion that has turned Iraq into a country of wreck and ruin? This is the bitter irony. Aggressing nations do not tally the numbers of their victims. Ian Gould summed it up in the thread below this: because the real death toll of civilians conflicts with the well-cultivated myth of US benevolence, western crimes are not a part of history because they are never allowed to become a part of history. They thus get sent straight down the memory hole.
Jeff misses the point that (I think) Julie was trying to make. Although he gives many examples of past victims of war who have been lost to history, we don’t live there any more. There are more people working on these issues than ever before, and we have a better idea of how to approach these problems. However it’s this attitude – that information gathering and analysis should be a political project – that is likely to prove the biggest obstacle to moving forward.
The only way to do justice to the victims and to persuade belligerent parties to accept the results is to treat these issues as impartially as possible – and to do so with the perspective that our work is at the service of the beneficiaries, rather than of our own political interests.
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Of course, the stance that ‘our work is at the service of the beneficiaries, rather than of our own political interests’ is, by and of itself, a political one, as the beneficiaries’ interests are political interests; in fact, the moment you start talking about interest you talk about politics. Let’s not be hypocritical about it: almost everything we do is political. ‘Political’ on the one hand and ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’ on the other are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, I would say that often political action is necessary to be ‘impartial’, as organisations like MSF have shown time after time.
Michael
2 Apr 08 at 23:11
Michael – that’s a fair point, but that definition of political is so wide as to be meaningless. In the case of humanitarian assistance, it simply means that (in the words of the Code of Conduct), aid will not be used to further a particular political or religious viewpoint.
Obviously this can’t be an absolute principle, because there are so many other factors at play – including those of the beneficiaries themselves. However if we start from a position such as Jeff’s, we are unlikely to secure the co-operation that we need in order to do our work.
Paul Currion
3 Apr 08 at 6:58
I understand what you are saying, Paul. In fact, I agree with you that Jeff Harvey’s comments are less than useful. However, I might not have made sufficiently clear what I was trying to get across: that we almost always implicitly pick a political position in whatever we do. Specifically, when we are talking about gathering and analysing information, both the selection of which information to gather and the way in which it is analysed are highly politically charged. Just deciding to concentrate on e.g. population health status in Iraq is by itself a political act, let alone the myriad ways in which the information can be interpreted.
As to the Code of Conduct: I fully support it as a whole, but always felt that that element was worded rather unfortunately. The humanitarian viewpoint is a highly political one (I have had long discussions with people who felt that it was unacceptable to ‘aid and abet insurrectionists’ or even their families, whatever their needs), and I strongly feel that we should further that particular viewpoint. In fact, outside the context of that viewpoint, the whole Code of Conduct is meaningless.
Michael
4 Apr 08 at 1:06