looking for documented studies of Iraqi civilian deaths under Saddam

This has proven to be unreasonably difficult. Most of the human rights organizations seem to put his murder rate at about 2-10000 annually, not counting singular incidents like the post-GW1 crackdown on rebelling Shi'ites and Kurds. In particular, I would like to find any reliable sources for an estimate that Saddam Hussein killed 70,000 people annually. Apparently, there is an estimate by a group working for the "interim regime" that is pushing this number and attributing it variously to organizations like the Human Rights Centre in Baghdad and Amnesty International, and it is being used in opinion pieces as a humanitarian justification for invading. If there is anyone who has a link to the actual sources of these estimates, I would very much like to see it.

I haven't seen this reported in the US CorpoMedia and may give you some more leads. Please post anything you find. I believe this has the makings of another scandal.


<snip>

"Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves."

<end>

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html

There was a very brief furor, and even here it dropped off the radar fairly quickly. I may have to go back and revisit some of those threads. It seems to be within a couple months of when the "new" data started showing up.

The 1999 survey only covers maternal and child mortality, but is informative.

Here's a nutshell:

UNICEF's 1999 child and maternal mortality survey revealed a dramatic increase in under-five mortality rates. The survey showed that had Iraq continued to invest in its social sector, between 1990 and 1998 500,000 more children would have survived beyond their fifth birthday.

Currently, one in eight Iraqi children die before the age of five - one of the world's worst child mortality rates.

http://www.unicef.org/media/media_9779.html

Assigning blame is difficult, of course contentious. In my view the people who were best equiped to save these children didn't really care. Saddam Hussein is at the top of that list.

The people turning to the humanitarian argument, they're not making good sense. The US is responsible for the current state of affairs, and they don't have much to show for their efforts to protect innocent life.

See the report from UNICEF today.


There's also the Lancet survey, you know the "100,000 excess deaths" study. They compared pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality. You can bet that study will be contested, so you might be circumspect in drawing conclusions, but there are some facts in that survey that don't support the notion that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian undertaking.



Found a pdf of the UNICEF study: http://www.childinfo.org/cmr/Irq/irqscont.pdf

Also this review by WHO experts of U5 mortality in Iraq, 1991-1998, which puts the number of excess deaths at 400,000 or 500,000, depending upon what assumptions are made about baseline mortality trends:

http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/cps/public/excess%20mortality%20in%20Iraq.pdf

I believe that Chlorine was forbidden as well as some other key chemicals needed for clean water. Sewage was a problem, too. I think. I have no doubts that Saddam did nothing to alleviate the situation as i think he was using the deaths to put pressure on the UN to lift the embargo.

The figures I want to see are the ones that are deaths caused by Saddam's direct orders. Iraq was a relatively progressive society in the 80s (by ME yardstick, anyway). I know he hated the Kurds and killed many of them, but i think that was payback for the uprising after DS1.

The entire "humanitarian mission" angle evaporates if the "excess deaths" report is accurate. Right now, from what I can tell, they're trying to inflate Saddam's brutality past the 12,000-annual mark just to make things work out with the lower estimates.

"If we hadn't invaded, 90000 more Iraqis would have been killed by Saddam in this time period!"

You're damn right they'll contest the Lancet survey.

You can agree that Saddam Hussein's government was brutal, but conditions for children are worse since the invasion. That's a fact, and they can't very well take one without the other.

http://www.unicef.org/emerg/iraq/index_24430.html

The whole thrust of this administration's justification rests on Saddam's relentless year over year slaughtering of Iraqis. Taking out the deaths of the Iran/Iraq War....I really would like to know what the numbers are. No doubt he was ruthless, but that is a relative term these days...

I spent a lot of time one night trying to get some independent confirmation of the numbers but I can only find AI's numbers as reference.

I've been slowly sifting and searching through all the AI reports on Iraq, but finding a concise statement of the estimate has been pretty fruitless so far. I'm tempted to send AI an e-mail on the topic, to see if they can point me in the right direction.

:kick: