Controversy Surrounds New Study Claiming Deaths in the Congo Have Been Overestimated

By Katherine Hubbard

The Canada-based Human Security Report Project has released a report entitled The Shrinking Costs of War which questions the widely accepted death toll of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  The accepted toll is around 5.4 million, a figure which was calculated by the aid agency International Rescue Committee (IRC).  The Human Security Report Project, however, says the real number may be half of this.  The report claims that the original figure set too low of a baseline mortality rate to accurately determine the figure.  They assert that many of the deaths that occurred between 1998 and 2008 were not actually a result of the conflict.  

Rick Brennan, one of the authors of the original IRC study, admitted that there were some statistical problems with their research, but said that their methods and figures have been widely reviewed and generally accepted as a fair estimate.  The Shrinking Costs of War report argues that the IRC assumed that the number of people dying in the DRC in peacetime would be similar to that of other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.  The IRC then analyzed the number of people that died in the DRC between 1998 and 2008, compared the two numbers, and attributed the difference to the war.  The problem with this, according to the new report, is that many of those people would have died without the conflict simply because living conditions are worse in the DRC than in other sub-Saharan African countries.  When the Human Security Report Project used a higher mortality rate to calculate the death toll, the number dropped to about 2.8 million.

The IRC is a New York-based private humanitarian organization with operations throughout the developing world and a long history of engagement with the DRC.  The new report acknowledges that the IRC’s “tireless and effective advocacy” has brought much-needed attention to a humanitarian crisis that had been neglected for far too long.  The IRC has taken a strong stance behind their original findings and criticized the Human Security Report’s argument as “undermined by inconsistencies, conflicting evidence and poor scholarship.”  They point out that their original reports were reviewed by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard, and Columbia University to ensure academic rigor.  They also argue that the baseline mortality rate they used was, in fact, a high estimate.

Flickr photo by Julien Harneis used under a Creative Commons license.