American planes over Vietnam in 1966. In the second half of the 20th century, wars killed three times more people than was previously thought, with the worst toll of 3.8 million in Vietnam, a new study reveals.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

Related articles

• First death from bird flu in China occured in 2003
• So you want to live longer? Get married
• The nature of war
• Warming doubles number of hurricanes
• Rhino poaching tied to organised crime

PARIS: Wars around the globe killed three times more people during the second half of the 20th century than previously estimated, according to a study released today.

Some 5.4 million deaths caused by armed conflicts occurred between 1955 and 2003 in 13 nations surveyed, ranging from a low of 7,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million killed in Vietnam.

Previous research based on media reports or before-and-after census figures, have tended to severely underestimate war-related fatalities among both combatants and civilians, according to the study, published in the British Medical Journal.

These so-called "passive" reports "are typically the only ones available during ongoing conflicts, and represent the most commonly cited sources for government and other estimates of war casualties, as in the current war in Iraq," write the authors.

The number of civilian casualties in Iraq remains sharply contested, with some studies estimating the death toll at 10 times the figure given by the U.S. military.

Sibling survey

In a new approach, a team of scientists led by Ziad Obermeyer from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, used health survey data collected in 2002 and 2003.

The World Health Organisation surveys queried a single respondent for each household about sibling deaths, including whether a death was related to war.

Even the new figures may undercount the number of conflict fatalities, said Richard Garfield, a professor at Columbia University in New York. "The study only includes violent deaths," he wrote in a commentary, also published in the British Medical Journal.

"In the poorest countries, where most conflicts now occur, a rise in deaths from infectious disease often dwarfs the number of violent deaths during a conflict," he said.

This is likely true, for example, for the ongoing conflict in Darfur and the 1998-to-2003 civil war that devastated the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Civilians uncounted

While it is probable that the number of soldiers dying is lower than at any time in the last 100 years, "most excess deaths in areas of conflict in developing countries occur in non-combatants, and these deaths are often not counted," said Garfield.

Some countries included in the study showed many times the number of violent war deaths counted in another widely-cited report of armed conflict fatalities, compiled by Uppsala University in Sweden and the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo.

During the 50 years covered by Obermeyer's study, there were 269,000 such deaths in Bangladesh and 141,000 in Zimbabwe, for example, nearly five times more than in the Uppsala/PRIO report. The figure for Sri Lanka jumped from 61,000 to 215,000, a 3.6-fold increase.

The violent death toll in Vietnam nearly doubled, to a staggering 3.8 million, largely due to its decades-long war with France and especially the United States. Conflicts in Bosnia, Georgia and Laos also cost more lives than was previously thought.

But in the other countries examined – Burma, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Namibia and The Philippines – death tolls dropped compared to earlier assessments.

Among all the war victims reported, 58 per cent were aged 15 to 34, and 81 per cent were male.

The time period showing the highest war deaths was 1965-74, with an average 205,000 fatalities per year.