Every Body Counts : An interview with John Sloboba

About John Sloboda John Sloboda is the Executive Director of the Oxford Research Group in the UK and Professor of Psychology at the University of Keele. John has been active in human security initiatives for two decades. He is a founding member of Keele's Alternative Globalisations Research Network and the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations (Naspir), In 1999-2000 he worked with the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, and researched effects on the civilian population of the NATO bombing campaign. The IBC Connection Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda developed the Iraq Body Count Project (IBC) jointly, drawing upon the earlier work of Marc Herold on the Afghanistan war of 2001 [Professor of Economics, International Relations, and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire]. Hamit Dardagan is principal researcher for IBC with responsibility for ongoing development of the method of analysis of media reports, and for the conceptual development of the website. He is the only member of the IBC team who devotes himself full-time to the project. Co-founder, John Sloboda has served as an associate researcher and as press and media spokesperson for the IBC team. The Iraq Body Count Project became a key source of information about civilian casualties for the media and non-governmental organizations worldwide during the Iraq war and its aftermath. Insider Perspective: Learn a little more about the life of John Sloboda from his self-portrait published by Theodore Zeldin's Oxford Muse project.

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Background
The Global Dialogue Center has watched, along with the rest of the world, as the US-led invasion of Iraq has inflicted mass casualties. The military deaths have been stunning. As of the first week in September, 2005, there have been 2,089 Iraq Coalition Deaths* (1893 US; 95 UK; other countries 6). What has been shocking are the estimates of up to 100,000 civilian casualties that continue to mount---casualties ignored without even the decency of acknowledgement by the US and UK leadership. Although, this isn’t a new phenomenon of war, it is a startling one, particularly when you take in the well-publicized flippant response to the human cost that General Tommy Franks gave, “We don’t do body counts.”

In May 2003, it was reported: “What Bush administration officials do say is that the U.S. operation in Iraq included unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian casualties.” Remember Bush’s speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, where “he saluted a U.S. military operation that he said went out of its way to protect Iraqi civilians. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent." (SF Chronicle) The Iraq Body Count Project has proven the fallacy in these claims.

About the Iraq Body Count Project
It is a human security project to establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military action by the USA and its allies in 2003. In the current occupation phase, the IBC database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation. Learn more... (rationale, methodology, database)

John Sloboda ... in his own words
There also have been many conflicting reports across the world and questions about the accuracy of tallies of those working to estimate and count the civilian deaths. The headlines show the doubt, "How many Iraqi’s died? We may never know." - "The tally of civilian deaths depends on who’s counting.”  In a recent interview with Andrew Lawless, John Sloboda helps us see that we’ve missed the point:
 
"The real issue is not whether The Lancet [respected UK Medical Journal] figures were right, or whether we were right. The real issue is why are the British and American governments not doing this themselves?", questions John Sloboda, one of the founders of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) Project. "Why are they leaving it to small under-funded studies, volunteers and academics? It's not the job of volunteers [laughs resignedly], it's the job of government, and we feel there must be some kind of change to international law, to make it a requirement on warring parties that they report on the civilian casualties that the conflict causes, to an international body such as the United Nations Security Council.

Indeed, many people are surprised and horrified to find that there is no requirement under international law for warring parties to estimate the people that they've killed. All there is a very vague statement that they must do all in their power to protect civilian life. Of course, like a mantra, the US and UK governments constantly repeat that they do all in their power, but in fact, the test of whether they have done all in their power remains in the numbers killed, and that is something that they refuse to engage with.

We felt that two years was a sufficient sample, which allowed month by month trends, year on year comparisons, to publish a cumulative report on everything we knew at this point in time," explains Sloboda of the timing of the report. "We've never claimed that our figures are the complete picture. They are, however, we believe, a representative picture, and the important thing is that these are absolutely certain figures. These are deaths we know have happened. We have very high grade information about the place, the time, often the identity of the victim, the weapons used, and who pulled the trigger, and it's on the basis of that information, statistically analysed, over nearly 25,000 deaths that we're able to produce this quite unique information about breakdowns, trends, proportions of males, women, children killed, of people killed by different weaponry which holds true regardless of whether this is a complete breakdown or not."

Read entire interview with Andrew Lawless. Three Monkeys Online, a current affairs/arts magazine bringing news across borders with writers in Ireland, Italy and Spain.

In 2005, the Iraq Body Count Project published their findings in an exceptional report, IRAQ BODY COUNT: A Dossier of Civilian Casualties 2003-2005. This dossier provides a unique insight into the human consequences of the US-led invasion of Iraq. It focuses in on the 67,365 civilians (most of them Iraqi citizen) who have been reported killed or wounded during the first two years of the ongoing conflict up to March 19, 2005. The data is compelling. The personal stories are moving. The report is exceptional in the interesting way they have put a human face on the statistics that speaks to IBC's intention to honor every life.We are honored to share it with you (see downloadable PDF at the top of this page.)

We invite you learn more about the story behind the IRAQ BODY COUNT Project----the passion and conviction of a group of global citizens and their outstanding contribution to the world in a personal interview with John Sloboda, co-founder of the project.

Learn more about IBC

Listen NPR Interview
with John Sloboda
July 2005

*Iraq Coalition Data Source (not affiliated with IBC)