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Iraq Aims to Limit Mortality Data
Health Ministry Told Not to Release Civilian Death Toll to U.N.
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 20, 2006; A16
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 19 -- Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki's office has instructed the country's health ministry
to stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations,
jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of
civilian war dead in Iraq, according to a U.N. document.
A confidential cable from the United Nations' top official in
Baghdad, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi of Pakistan, said the Iraqi prime
minister is seeking to exercise greater control over the release
of the country's politically sensitive death toll. U.N.
officials expressed concern that the move threatens to
politicize the process of counting Iraq's dead and muddy
international efforts to gain a clear snapshot of the scale of
killing in Iraq.
Qazi warned in the cable that the development "may affect" the
United Nations' ability to adequately record the number of
civilians killed or wounded in the Iraq war as it endures a
bloody new phase of sectarian violence. He said U.N. human
rights workers would have "no guaranteed means to corroborate"
figures provided by the government.
Iraq's acting U.N. ambassador, Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, said he
was unaware of his government's decision, "so I don't know what
the rationale for it is. It has not reached our mission."
The ongoing debate over the Iraqi death toll was reignited this
month after a team of Iraqi and American epidemiologists
estimated that 650,000 more people have died in Iraq since the
U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 than would have died if the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime had not occurred.
Those figures, published in the British medical journal the
Lancet, were dismissed by the United States and Britain as
inflated. President Bush said in a speech last December that
30,000 civilians have died as a result of the war; the group
Iraq Body Count yesterday posted an estimate of between 43,937
and 48,783 civilian deaths.
The Iraqi government has long resisted efforts by U.N. officials
and human rights workers to obtain reliable government figures
on mortality. But since July 2005, the Medico-Legal Institute in
Baghdad, which is controlled by the Iraqi health ministry, has
supplied U.N. investigators with raw figures from morgues on
civilians who have died violently. The health ministry's
department of operation has provided the United Nations with
similar figures from the country's hospitals.
Those numbers attracted relatively little attention until June,
when the U.N. human rights office in Baghdad estimated that more
than 100 people a day were dying in Iraq. In August, the office
recorded the largest spike of violence since the invasion, with
more than 6,600 people killed in Iraq in July and August.
A spokesman for the prime minister subsequently voiced suspicion
to the United Nations that the health ministry, which is
controlled by officials linked to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
was overstating the numbers, according to Qazi.
Qazi said the prime minister's office sent a letter to the Iraqi
health minister instructing him to "no longer release data on
mortality." The prime minister's communications director, the
letter stated, would be responsible for "centralizing and
disseminating such information in the future," Qazi wrote.
Iraq's health minister appealed to the prime minister to allow
his agency to continue providing the United Nations and the
U.S.-led military coalition with "data on the dead and wounded,"
according to Qazi. That request was denied.
Qazi sought to defend the U.N. efforts, noting that Maliki
confirmed that 100 civilians were dying each day. He also noted
that the Washington-based Brookings Institution characterized
the U.N. estimates as "perhaps the most accurate estimate of the
number of civilians killed and wounded in Iraq."
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling in Washington contributed to
this report.
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