[R-G] "Save Darfur Coalition" Exaggerates Darfur Death Toll

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12dealey.html>
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/12/opinion/eddealy.php>
August 12, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
An Atrocity That Needs No Exaggeration
By SAM DEALEY

Washington

JUST last month, the House of Representatives passed the Darfur
Accountability and Divestment Act and the United Nations Security
Council decided to deploy up to 26,000 peacekeepers to Sudan. Both
actions were due in no small way to the work of the Save Darfur
Coalition. Through aggressive advertising campaigns, this group has
done more than any other to focus world attention on the conflict in
the Sudanese region.

But with a ruling Wednesday from Britain's Advertising Standards
Authority, Save Darfur now finds itself in the spotlight. Siding with
a business group allied with the Sudanese government in Khartoum, the
authority ruled that the high death tolls Save Darfur cites in its
advertisements breached standards of truthfulness.

The ruling is more than just a minor public relations victory for
Khartoum; it exposes a glaring problem in Save Darfur's strategy.
While the coalition has done an admirable job of raising awareness, it
has also hampered aid-delivery groups, discredited American policy
makers and diplomats and harmed efforts to respond to future
humanitarian crises.

The trouble began last fall when, in ads placed throughout the United
States and Britain, Save Darfur 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 ad campaign violated codes of
objectivity, 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 American 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
American 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. Dr. Hagan's was
the highest estimate and the one on which Save Darfur based its claim.

In category after category, the experts overwhelmingly found Dr.
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.

So how many are dead in Darfur? As the G.A.O. study notes, reliable
numbers are hard to come by. But the estimate that garnered the
highest 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's 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 — just half of what Save Darfur
claimed a year ago in its ad and still claims on its Web site.

Of course, whether 200,000 or 400,000 have died, the need to resolve
the conflict in Darfur is the same. But Save Darfur's inflated
estimate — used even after Dr. Hagan revised his estimate sharply
downward — only frustrates peace efforts.

During debate on the House floor last month, for example,
Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee claimed that "an estimated 400,000
people have been killed by the government of Sudan and its janjaweed
allies." Ms. Jackson-Lee is hardly alone in making that allegation,
and catering to the Sudanese government's sensitivities may not seem
important. But the repeated error only hardens Khartoum against
constructive dialogue. If diplomacy, not war, is the ultimate goal for
resolving the conflict in Darfur, the United States must maintain its
credibility as an honest broker.

Inaccurate data can also lead to prescriptive blunders. During the
worst period of violence, for example, the Center for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disaster estimated that nearly 70 percent of Darfur's
excess deaths were due not to violence but to disease and
malnutrition. This suggests that policy makers should look for ways to
bolster and protect relief groups — by continuing to demand that the
Sudanese government not hamper the delivery of aid, to be sure, but
also by putting vigorous public pressure, so far lacking, on the dozen
rebel groups that routinely raid convoys.

Exaggerated death tolls also make it difficult for relief
organizations to deliver their services. Khartoum considers the
inflated numbers to be evidence that all groups that deliver aid to
Darfur are actually adjuncts of the activist groups that the regime
considers its enemies, and thus finds justification for delaying
visas, refusing to allow shipments of supplies and otherwise putting
obstacles in the way of aid delivery.

Lastly, mortality one-upmanship by advocacy groups threatens to inure
the public to both current and future catastrophes. If 400,000 becomes
the de facto benchmark for action, other bloody conflicts around the
globe — in Sri Lanka, Colombia, Somalia — seem to pale in comparison.
Ultimately, the inflated claims fuel a death race in which aid and
action are based not on facts but on which advocacy group yells the
loudest.

Two-hundred thousand dead in Darfur is egregious enough. No matter how
noble their intentions, there's no need for activists to kill more
Darfuris than the conflict itself already has.

Sam Dealey reports on Africa for Time magazine.
--
Yoshie