Abstract
Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000 By Milton Leitenberg, Cornell University Peace Studies, Occasional Paper #29, 2003
War and environmental destruction are the two greatest self-inflicted wounds of mankind. Both are ultimately curable. Milton Leitenberg, probably the world's leading expert on the statistics of deaths from armed conflict, has a not-so-hidden agenda in his analysis of conflict deaths since the end of World War II: to identify some of the most egregious and bloody cases of deliberate refusal of effective involvement by the United Nations and the major powers on its Security Council. He is deeply troubled by the failure of the world community to mobilize its many resources to prevent mass killings and do what it could–and should–have done.
Leitenberg's survey is organized in a circuitous but informative way. He recounts the emergence of the analysis of war deaths at various locations, including at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), where he was one of the original researchers. Leitenberg goes on to discuss fatality counts, ranging from the narrowest definition–casualties among uniformed military personnel–to the broadest, which includes civilian deaths from disease and famine linked to war, plus deaths caused by deliberate political decisions, policies, and programs. Leitenberg adopts the broadest definition, which includes those who died as the result of political decisions by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators.
“I just thought he was on sabbatical.”
Using this definition, Leitenberg calculates a total of 216 million conflict deaths in the twentieth century–the bloodiest hundred years in human history. The figure includes nearly 90 million “political program” deaths, including 35 million in the Soviet Union and 45 million in China. Reading these tragic statistics, it is impossible to avoid reacting with deep melancholy mixed with rage at the political leaders who directed or permitted these killings.
In the second part of his study, Leitenberg circles back to the 1990s, beginning with four specific cases of large-scale killing where intervention was conspicuously absent or delayed: Somalia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Congo. This was a period that should have opened the way for effective international intervention to prevent or end conflict. The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union had collapsed, a treaty basis for intervention (the 1948 Genocide Convention) was in place, and U.N. programs for conflict prevention, arms control, and disarmament had greatly expanded potential U.N. peacekeeping capability.
But the Security Council stood on the sidelines for two years after the International Committee of the Red Cross drew attention to the tragedies in Somalia. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali pled in vain for international intervention. U.S. officials calculated an annual death rate of 500,000 people; when the United States finally decided to intervene in December 1992, the bloodshed in Somalia stopped abruptly.
In the case of Rwanda, 61 U.N. member governments, including 16 that had volunteered to undertake peacekeeping assignments, rejected Boutros-Ghali's appeals for peacekeeping troops. American obstruction, French machinations, and U.N. support for refugee camps in neighboring countries that provided a base for the killer groups led to 800,000 deaths by members of the genocidal organization Interhamwe. Brig. Romeo Dallaire of Canada, in charge of a U.N. force in Rwanda, later testified that he had warned the United Nations of the coming catastrophe–and that it could have been prevented with the 5,500 troops he commanded, if he had received orders to do so.
In Bosnia, American reluctance to become involved and pro-Serb Russian obstruction resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims. To cite Leitenberg's trenchant comment, the “heads of various governments, as well as U.N. peacekeeping officials, demonstrated that, instead of stopping Serbian aggression, they were concerned only with preventing the Bosnian population from starving while it was being killed.”
From 1998 to 2000, as many as 1.5 million died in the Congo, mainly from starvation and disease. Here, as well as in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast, the major powers again hung back.
The key result of Leitenberg's current research is a table of conflict deaths in more than 70 countries from 1945 to 2000, organized by region. The devastating total is more than 40 million men, women, and children dead worldwide from conflicts since 1945. Some of Leitenberg's individual figures are debatable. Because of the 2000 cutoff date, deaths in the Congo are low, as are deaths in Colombia. Deaths from the 9/11 terrorist attacks are not included because of the cutoff date; indeed, Leitenberg does not have a separate heading for terrorism deaths.
But Leitenberg's conclusion is irrefutable and should be placed prominently on the desks of world leaders: “Nations still have not taken the lesson that it is ‘in the national interest’ of every nation to construct a global security system that protects all nations and their peoples. The ‘national interest’ is international peace, without aggression, genocide, massacre, death camps, and tyranny. Aggression unopposed and unpunished anywhere will encourage aggression elsewhere, and the United Nations will not be able to mobilize its membership to oppose aggression if it does not do this on all occasions uniformly, and at the earliest moment, and not only ‘as a last resort.’ That holds as well for intrastate conflict.”
This paper is a service to the international community. With his searing statistics, Milton Leitenberg poses the central question of our time: When will the governments of the world transcend their own interests to act for the common good and establish an effective global security system to reduce the incidence of all types of armed conflict? This can be done now. The tragedy is that millions more will probably die before it happens.