Darfur: How Many Have Died and Why?

Thanks to the work of a pair of policy statisticians, the world has been put on notice that the death toll in Darfur is staggering, In a September 2006 article in the journal Science, John Hagan and Alberto Palloni set forth a conclusive argument that deaths in the conflict were in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of thousands, as had been previously reported. After past genocides against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, and Rwandans, many claimed ignorance. This time, with scientifically defensible numbers adding weight to reporters’ eyewitness accounts, there is no denying the scope of the tragedy as it still unfolds.

Hagan and Palloni have been collaborating across their respective campuses for decades. Both are sociologists but with very different approaches. John Hagan is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern and senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, headquartered in Chicago. With a background in law, crime and politics, he has taught at Northwestern for eight years. Alberto Palloni, who will join Northwestern’s faculty in the fall, brings an international reputation in population, demography, and health science research. They are part of a growing powerhouse of policy statisticians at Northwestern, one that places the University at the forefront of this dynamic interdisciplinary field.

We spoke recently with Hagan about his work with Palloni—how they arrived at such different numbers than everyone else, what they hope their work will accomplish, and how their field has changed so much that they can now collect and analyze data with such powerful results.

How did the Science article come about?
Alberto Palloni and I were interested in combining our different approaches to a particular problem, as we had often done in the past. The media coverage of Darfur had settled into a pattern we found very disturbing. The State Department had made the lowest estimate of any organization in about April of 2005, that somewhere between 60,000 and 140,000 people had died. That had the effect of letting the media do a kind of one-sentence statement that it was tens of thousands who had died. We knew rather conclusively when we started that the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. The challenge was to scientifically and persuasively make the case [for the higher number], and then frame the issue in a way that would attract the attention of the media.

We now have conclusive evidence that what we were trying to do worked out. We looked at the news articles in major reporting services before and after the Science article appeared. What we see with both Reuters and the BBC is that prior to the appearance of our article the tens-of-thousands figure is used, and after, they shifted and started reporting in the hundreds of thousands.

Why is it so difficult to get an accurate count of the dead in Darfur and other regions of conflict? How is it different from counting deaths in a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina?
In developed countries, we have a solid knowledge of the population because of ongoing census data. We also have access to the area; we can go in and survey the survivors without any restrictions. We can obtain data from hospitals and coroners; we have a lot of information we can put together in a straightforward way.

But the Sudanese government is restrictive about allowing people in and it monitors aid workers. The janjaweed militia, responsible for most of the murder of non-Arab black Sudanese farmers, is, by all evidence, trained by and acting on behalf of the government. We don’t have information on the general population. We are restricted in where can go and what we can ask.

When the UN was making an earlier estimate—a widely quoted figure of 70,000 deaths—its representatives were asking about deaths resulting from malnutrition and illness, which is a huge part of what happens in those kinds of events. But they weren’t capturing the part of the mortality that results from violence, which is of great interest for someone like me who studies laws and crime and genocide. We wanted to get the whole picture.

How did you get the raw data that you used for your count?
Fortunately, the French organization Doctors Without Borders, [Médicins Sans Frontières or MSF], was doing work essential to what we do. They had done a survey in four camps in west Darfur at different times in 2005. We built on their data. Their sampling was very well regarded and defensible. They were unique among organizations in that they asked about violence which occurred before people reached the camps as well as mortality in the camps. So their data allowed us to look at both aspects.

But they weren’t trying to put together the bigger picture and they weren’t generalizing to a larger area of Darfur. We made an argument about the ratio of deaths to the number of persons displaced. We knew that approximately a million people were displaced from west Darfur at that time and knew that a certain number of deaths occurred. Using that ratio we generalized to the three states of Darfur—north, south and west—and came up with a comprehensive estimate.

How do you actually arrive at the numbers?
Alberto Palloni is known for his work with the kinds of data available for less developed countries and in using statistical techniques and logic to find ways of making the best estimates we can. When you try to estimate deaths in a humanitarian emergency, whether a natural or manmade disaster, you calculate the crude mortality rate. You look at the number of deaths and the number of people in the camp and you try to come up with a rate that you then extrapolate to the larger population. Demographers will typically calculate these crude mortality rates for both the full age distribution and for the under-age-five population. Theoretically, you should be able to come to the same number with both because with the under-five number you use what are called life tables to extrapolate to the whole age distribution. In this instance that was not the case and this is what intrigued Alberto.

The conclusion we reached is that when you ask African families, where you might have more than one wife and families clustered in clans, about members who died, they report broadly. When you ask them about their own children under five, they may be more restrictive, reporting only on their own nuclear family. In addition, infants are often not given names until some time after birth and this may lead to them being under- counted. Another problem is that if an entire family has been wiped out, they are not going to be able to report on their infants, while extended family members may report about nuclear and extended family members.

So Alberto worked between the two numbers to obtain a middle-range estimate. That is one of the major reasons we regard our estimate of 200,000 for the three states as being a floor estimate. We don’t think there is any way it could be lower than this. We do think it could be substantially higher, as high as 400,000, partly because we have only about 20 months in our estimate and the conflict has been going on for almost four years now.

Did you physically go to Darfur?
No. My connection came from work I did for a book on the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the Milosevic trial [Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in The Hague Tribunal (University of Chicago Press, 2003)]. A person very central to my research at the tribunal left for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Washington, the Coalition for International Justice. She became involved in supervising a large survey that was done for the State Department in the refugee camps in Chad [for those fleeing Darfur]. We are continuing to use that survey to write a book about Darfur. That’s how I got interested in this, when we talked to her and other interviewers who were involved in Chad. But neither Palloni nor I have been able to actually go to Sudan or Chad. It’s highly unlikely now that we will ever go, at least until the government changes.

You are the ones saying the conflict is bigger. I’m sure you would not be welcome.
The President of Sudan, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, has said many times that no more than 9,000 people have died there in the conflict. When you see what happens to the aid workers, it might not be a good idea for us to go.

What have you learned from this work on Darfur that you will carry forward?
For one thing, the fundamental social-science survey techniques—ones that underlie predicting elections and that have been developing for the last nearly half century—now have reached a point where they are having a really important application in humanitarian emergencies. Especially in the last 10 years, this work has really taken off; you now see it published in journals like Science and Lancet. The opportunity to develop a social-science factual foundation that is the starting point for much of the legal and enforcement work that follows, I find very exciting.

What has happened in the last 10 or 20 years which makes your work possible?
There are different answers to that: I’ll give you three. One is that you often think of this work as starting with the Nuremberg trials [of Nazi leaders]. But not a lot happened from Nuremberg in the 1950s until 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the four countries involved in Nuremberg. The U.S. had become very anxious, in the aftermath of the expansion of the Soviet Union, about how we could develop an international criminal law given that the other major superpower was doing show trials and not interested in pursuing criminal law in the way we think of it.

Another part is the evolution of the U.S. experience with the Civil Rights movement and other rights movements: we moved from seeing our own domestic problems with human rights on to international problems. Increasingly, not only law professors but social scientists and law students (another key group in this) have become interested in taking human rights law to an international level. It’s a very exciting field.

We also know how to conduct large surveys now. We have the interviewers and the computers. We take them out into the field. Because the State Department funded the survey we used from Chad, researchers had access to the geo-referencing, spatial technology that’s available to the government. They were able to plot very precisely where all the refugees came from. And now we are able to analyze the data in terms of what happened to them there and as they moved from one point to another. So that’s the implementation of the survey science. That’s my background and what I’m intrigued with.

What now?
The Science article focused on “the number.” It’s one thing to establish that a lot of people have been killed. It’s another to prove intent: that that these horrible actions are, in fact, a genocide. Can the courts be convinced that the actors responsible had a “specific racial intent” to destroy the group in whole or in part? The book I am writing, Darfur Dying: The Criminology of Genocide, focuses on explaining how this is a genocide, how it is occurring and its causes. The data from interviews show that about one third of the refugees in Chad understood that the Arab militias were yelling racial epithets as they attacked. This is more common when the Sudanese forces are involved in the attacks along with the militia. This reflects a now well-documented fact, in part through our work, that militia leaders are operating training camps in Darfur and that part of the training involves instilling the racial hostility and motivation that can lead to killing by playing on the competition for arable land in a period of desertification.

Recently, the prosecutor from the International Criminal Court filed an application to bring two individuals to the court, one militia leader and one middle-level government minister. But the prosecutor presents his case as “crimes against humanity” and not the higher crime of genocide. I hope that the numbers we suggested and the emphasis on the causes of the conflict and its racial dimensions will lead to the evolution of the case along genocidal lines. Genocide not only carries the likelihood of more severe punishment but also the prospect of more restorative compensation. I will certainly continue to be involved in the International Criminal Court as the case unfolds.