As Hagan and Polloni recently write: extrapolating from limited samples to an entire population at risk is problematic. It is therefore troublesome that they failed to include the approximately (estimated) 200,000 people in Eastern Chad who fled Western Darfur—the area that the writers concentrated on. This is not an insignificant amount of people, considering the estimated total population of West Darfur of 1,660,000.
In July and August 2004 1,136 Darfuri who fled to Chad were interviewed, and 61% reported seeing a family member killed, as Hagan himself recorded in a report for the now defunct Coalition for International Justice and the U.S. State Department. A significant part of this violent death probably took place before the November 2003 start date of this study.
A Danish NGO called Bloodhound gathered witness testimonies and reports of attacks on villages in Darfur, Sudan, from a variety of media, human rights organizations and United Nations sources. The search produced a sample of 178 detailed accounts covering attacks on 372 villages during the period January 2001 to September 2005. An analysis of these demonstrated that 69% of attacks took place in the period beginning April 2003 to late March 2004.
Graphs produced by Bloodhound show that many of these attacks were done before November 2003. Also, those who know the situation in Western Darfur remember widespread, perhaps thousands, violent killings and displacement of tens of thousands of Massalit in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Therefore it is likely that Hagan and Polloni underestimated the mortality in Western Darfur by assuming normal mortality in February 2003 and linking this to deaths detected in month 9 of the conflict (they do admit this uncertainty).
The question also remains whether figures from Western Darfur can be extrapolated to the whole of Darfur just by multiplying by three (about one million people are similarly displaced in each of the adjoining states of North and South Darfur (see supporting online material)). This very rough calculation is not supported by the UN Humanitarian Profile of July 2006 that suggests a total affected population of 3,600,000 in Darfur. It is also very uncertain how the interplay of malnutrition, drought, disease, violence, and accessibility in Western Darfur extrapolates to wider Darfur.
Hagan and Polloni have made an important contribution towards approaching mortality during conflict in a scientific way, but they also show us the complexities by these omissions.
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