Huge Iraq death toll found
WORKERS, NOV 2006 ISSUE
The medical journal Lancet has published research by a team from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, in the US, which shows that far more Iraqis have been killed since the invasion than Bush or Blair acknowledge (Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, by Professor Gilbert Burnham, Professor Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy and Les Roberts).
In international law, occupying forces are responsible for the protection of all civilians and for recording any deaths. The US and British forces have failed to carry out these duties, and the Bush and Blair governments are reduced to lying about the extent of the catastrophe that they have inflicted on the Iraqi people.
The authors judge that 654,965 people have been killed since March 2003, about 2.5 per cent of the population. Iraq's mortality rate was 5.5 per 1,000 people per year before the invasion; since then, it has been 13.3. The actual number of violent deaths, including those that resulted from coalition forces, has increased every year since 2003. The authors estimate that 200,000 violent deaths are directly attributable to the US and British forces.
Survey teams asked for death certificates for the 545 reported deaths in the sample they studied, and these were provided in 501 cases. The pattern of deaths in households without death certificates was no different from those with certificates. The fact that such a high proportion of certificates was available shows that the study is based on reality, not on the fantasies of Bush and Blair.
The authors write, "Our estimate of excess deaths is far higher than those reported in Iraq through passive surveillance measures. This discrepancy is not unexpected. Data from passive surveillance are rarely complete, even in stable circumstances, and are even less complete during conflict, when access is restricted and fatal events could be intentionally hidden. Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20 per cent of the deaths measured by population-based methods."
Four independent experts provided detailed comments and all recommended publication with minor revisions. One noted, "this is an important piece of research which should be published because it is possibly the only non-government funded scientific study to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths since the US invasion." She stressed the "powerful strength" of the research methods, a view supported by other reviewers. Indeed, this study adds substantially to the new field of conflict epidemiology, which has been evolving rapidly in recent years. Yet Bush says, "I don't consider it a credible report."