By recording each reported civilian death in the current conflict, the volunteers who run www.iraqbodycount.org are carrying out a fundamental human duty, says John Sloboda

Thursday March 27, 2003

Our aim is simple and limited. We aim to record each reported civilian death in Iraq caused by military forces within the US-led coalition. Civilian deaths are the most unacceptable costs of war. They are certainly not the only costs: injury, trauma, hunger, displacement, disease are all matters of grave concern. Deaths of military personnel are also a tragedy.
But deaths of innocents have a terrible finality, which makes them the ultimate cost: a cost we do not pay. Our project is one contribution to a wider "human security" agenda, which recognises that national interests are never overriding. They must always be set against the interests of individuals.

Recording and honouring the dead is a fundamental human duty, one which is often neglected, especially when the dead are seen as part of the "enemy". The neglect is all the greater when those killed are poor and disadvantaged.

The project is run by a group of volunteers, mostly offering their spare time, at evenings and weekends. We live in the USA and the UK, and are connected to one another through personal or professional links. Many of us work in universities.

We were inspired by the similar work of Professor Marc W Herold during the Afghanistan conflict. Herold's compilation strongly suggests that more civilians were killed in the 2001-02 Afghan conflict than were killed on September 11.

Our project compiles an ever-growing database in the form of a table which records, date, time, place, target, weapon, and number killed. For each incident, we record both a minimum and a maximum number of dead, based on the range of estimates in published reports. Where personal details become available, we try to include them.

Our sources are the sources available to anyone with an internet connection. They include news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press, major newspapers in a range of countries, and media websites ranging from CNN, through the BBC to al-Jazeera. We wait till two independent sources carry a report before publishing it.

Already our work has attracted an extraordinary level of interest. This is, in part, a result of an innovative "web counter" which can be downloaded onto any website, and provides an instantly updated total of civilian deaths, at multiple locations all round the word.

Interest in this project is also high because of the very widespread concerns about the legitimacy of the current campaign. Civilian deaths have become, for many, the litmus test of whether this war is to be judged acceptable.

Our project hopes to construct the world's most comprehensive record of this grim statistic, day by day. It is already beginning to be cited around the world as the authoritative source of data on civilian deaths.

We desperately hope that our work will be over before too many more weeks have passed.

· John Sloboda is an associate researcher for Iraq Body Count