April 1, 2008
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if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated.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.
Filed under Academic, Civil-Military, Conflict, Data Collection, Iraq by Paul Currion
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