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Sudan and Numbers |
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This week two disputes are running simultaneously about population figures in Sudan: one for the living and one for the dead. For someone like me, who has little faith in statistics even for the US (quick question: how many people live in the US? Are you sure?), the idea of accurate measurements coming out of a warzone is even dicier.
First comes a census. Simple, right? They have 60,000 enumerators, 200 observers, and $100 million plus. What could go wrong? Well, in a move meant to “cement the 2005 peace deal” and “determine wealth and power-sharing,” distorted measurements could bring drastic consequences for religious and racial minorities in the country. Recognizing this, southerners and westerners are already speaking out:
The underdeveloped south has refused to be bound by the results of the census.
Fighters in the country’s western Darfur region are also boycotting the count, accusing the Arab north of manipulating the census to maximise its control and marginalise the African majority.
International observers have raised concerns that significant parts of Darfur, a region the size of France, will be excluded from the count owing to fierce opposition from rebel groups.
“Before peace there is no census,” Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, the strongest military group in Darfur, said. “My people are not there at home, many of them crossed borders. They’re in Chad and concentrated in IDP camps, under trees here and there, in mountains and villages, so what they’re doing is meaningless,” he added.
The authorities claim that only three per cent of Darfur will be left out of the census but international observers believe that far more will be excluded.
Mohamed Ali Al Mardi, a former Sudanese justice minister, told Al Jazeera that the fact a census was being held was proof that the security situation in the war-torn region was improving. And he said that UN figures on the death toll in Darfur due to violence, starvation and malnutrition wre inflated.
“The number of victims in Darfur has been exaggerated very much. A fortnight ago the number stood at 200,000 people. Now we hear of 300,000 people. This is a report that lacks credibility.”
“The number as we know it from the local authorities and the tribal chiefs and the inhabitants of the villages stand at between 10,000 and 12,000 people. Not more than that.“
Good one, Mardi. I guess if you’ve talked to “local authorities” and “tribal chiefs,” we should believe your government - the same one that, incidentally, murdered a large number of people (the extent of which we can’t quite agree on, eh?) in Darfur and southern Sudan.
Meanwhile, the figure Mardi disparaged does indeed set the death toll at three hundred thousand people. The number is, of course, an extremely broad estimate. As the UN head of humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, says, they merely took the WHO’s 2006 estimate of 200,000 and increased it by 50% to reflect the passage of time and new information. Yet others say that’s not high enough. Author Eric Reeves told the BBC the real number may be as high as half a million dead.
Governments everywhere manipulate numbers to justify different types of policies. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Sudanese case, where soon a racist and genocidal government that only admits 10-12,000 deaths in one of the most horrendous mass murders of our time will produce an “official” statistic on how many people live in its country. Unless the Sudanese government manifests an uncharacteristic degree of openness, the Excel spreadsheet will act as a weapon even deadlier than the militiaman’s gun. Who needs to kill when you can simply say that your victims never existed?
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