For the institutions that claim to represent 'the international community' - the Western press, international NGOs and UN agencies - the armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a paradigm of senseless violence. The number of casualties is indeed staggering. In 2001, the New-York-based International Rescue Committee started providing estimates of war-related deaths since the conflict began in 1998: they rose from 1.7 million in 2001 to 5.4 million in January 2008. If correct, these figures account for about 8 per cent of the current population of the country. They were called into question in 2008, however, when two Belgian demographers concluded that the excess death toll between 1998 and 2004 was in the order of 200,000 - one-twentieth of the IRC's estimate for the same period, but still a shocking number of victims.

LRB 20 January 2011 | PDF Download