The number of people killed in Sudan's Darfur conflict has reached into the hundreds of thousands -- not tens of thousands as has often been reported, according to an article which appeared yesterday in the journal Science.
By using scientific sampling techniques and data from camps for displaced persons, two researchers based in the US estimated that as many as 255,000 people have died, though they said they believed the actual number may be much higher.
"We could easily be talking about 400,000 deaths," said John Hagan, a sociologist at Northwestern University and an author of the article, along with Alberto Palloni, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin. "And when you're talking about genocide, it's essential to properly identify the scale of death," Hagan said in a telephone interview.
In the past, US and UN officials have used a range of estimates, from 60,000 to 300,000, to quantify the killing in Darfur, which sank into chaos in 2003. The war started as an uprising of African tribes against Sudan's Arab rulers but soon degenerated into a conflict with many warring parties and civilians bearing the brunt of the fighting.
The Sudanese government has not released comprehensive casualty figures, but health organizations working in Darfur have surveyed survivors at random about family members who were killed.
In their article, "Death in Darfur," Hagan and Palloni used seven of these surveys to build projections of the death toll, which ranged from 10,000 deaths a month in 2004 to around 5,000 a month more recently. These estimates include natural deaths, though Hagan said that number was only 10 percent to 15 percent of the total. He said part of his research was based on a rough ratio of one death for every 14 people living in a camp.
"It's an extremely challenging research environment," he said. "But ultimately, you've got to come up with numbers."
Hagan attributed underreporting to the obvious difficulties of physically counting victims in a conflict as inaccessible as Darfur's, as well as a general tendency by the news media to use conservative estimates about unverifiable casualty claims.
Also, some news organizations continued to use an outdated estimate of 70,000 deaths, made once by the WHO.
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