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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
IRAQ: Calls for greater transparency on civilian deaths
ANKARA, 30 October 2003 (IRIN) - Following the recent publication of a report on deaths during the war in Iraq, Amnesty International (AI) has renewed calls on the US government to take more responsibility in providing more information on civilian casualties in the volatile nation.
About 13,000 Iraqis, including 4,300 noncombatants, were killed during the war, according to a report published by the US-based research group. These are the first such statistics, as Washington has refrained from publishing estimates of numbers of Iraqis killed during the war.
"It is up to the occupying powers to keep track of statistics, but they seem to be only following what is happening to the troops. It is certainly their obligation to let us know about civilian deaths," AI's Middle East press officer, Nicole Choueiry, told IRIN from London on Thursday.
AI representatives had been planning to visit Iraq before the 19 August bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, but this has since been postponed. "We are still in touch with doctors, and we have been told that there are many civilian casualties and many more which have not been accounted for," Choueiry said.
She observed that AI was in a very difficult position, but was persevering with its work from outside of Iraq. "It's incredibly frustrating and there is a dire need for more information on civilian deaths, but we too are bound by security," she explained.
The latest data was put together by the Project on Defence Alternatives, and was collected by reviewing US combat data, press reports and Iraqi hospital reports between 19 March and the end of April. Some 500 reports were collated and, according to the author, there was a lot of information available on casualties.
"The most important thing is that we recognise that this is an important cost of war and it cannot be ignored, and nations need to take account of this cost when they go to war," the director of the Project on Defence Alternatives, Carl Conetta, told IRIN from Washington. "It is not intelligent policy-making to ignore these costs, and it's the first basic step towards responsible behaviour," he added.
The document revealed that the number Iraqi noncombatants who died during the war to be much higher than in in the first Gulf War in 1991, despite advanced precision weaponry. The study estimated that 3,500 Iraqi civilians and up to 26,000 military personnel had been killed during the 1991 war.
"One premise of the 'new warfare' hypothesis is that precision technologies and new war fighting techniques now allow the United States to wage war while incurring dramatically fewer casualties - especially civilian causalities. Although Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to exemplify the new warfare, it provides no unambiguous support for the hypothesis regarding civilian casualties," the report said.
Meanwhile, the think-tank group is planning to make a presentation of the report on Capitol Hill in Washington. The US has maintained that there are casualties to be expected at times of war on both sides, but that all was being done to ensure that there were as few civilian casualties as possible.
Conetta said that the Iraqi war, as well as the Afghan war, had been fought as precision wars with supposedly low casualties, but that these numbers were comparable to a full range of wars over the past 30 years. He noted that these findings helped expose postwar problems in Iraq.
Theme(s): (IRIN) Conflict, (IRIN) Governance, (IRIN) Human Rights
[ENDS]
This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2003
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