How Many Have Perished in Congo?

PHOTO: Congolese soldiers in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (NeonCobra)

For sometime now, the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) thorough investigation into the death toll in war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been used as the founding basis for extra peacekeeping deployments and a huge influx in relief aid. That some 5.4 million people had perished as a result of the war and it’s consequences in the DRC seemed beyond horrific. This single statistic though was enough to raise the call for intense military and humanitarian action to save the central African region.

Now, with millions of lives still on the line, the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada is questioning rather or not the data gathering the International Rescue Committee used to discover the death toll was accurate.

How Many Have Perished?

For now, the IRC has stated that it stands by it’s statistic, saying conflict epidemiology is an” inexact science,” and that the actual death toll could be as low as 3 million or as high as 7.6 million.

The two key issues the Human Security Report Project is claiming is that the interview-based sampling that the IRC carried out in the war torn region do not represent the reality of all regions of the nation and the figure the IRC used for the “normal mortality rate” (the average mortality rate for sub-Saharan Africa) in DRC may be wrong due to lack of reliable prewar  statistics.

If the Human Security Report Project is correct, the death toll in the DRC may be much less than the IRC estimate, perhaps even cutting it in half. Either way, there is no exact number on how many have perished due to the series of wars, rebellions, and human right’s atrocities that have been carried out in the DRC over the past several years.

Regardless of Correct Death Toll, Saving Congo Must Remain the Focus

With much of the international community now focused in on whether the IRC statistic is correct or not, the simple fact that at the very least over one million have already perished should continue to bring more focus towards solving the crisis. Statistics cannot continue to be the single reason why the world reacts to a conflict. Regardless of the death toll, all would agree that what is happening in the DRC is beyond tragic and that too many have already perished.

The international community must look at the humanitarian, social, political, and economic consequences of this war and find solutions to ending it. If the response to Congo begins to slack off now due to a new statistic that still has not been proven, the violence will continue and overtime will claim hundreds of thousands of more lives. Now, more than ever, is the time to step into Congo and end one of the world’s deadliest wars.