On Wars by Michael Mann

Author:Michael Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300266818
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2023-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Civilian versus Military Fatalities

Civilian casualties were high in many historical cases, caused by “exemplary repression” of peoples who resisted as well as by armies “living off the land” of their enemies. In chapter 8 I discussed the seventeenth-century Thirty Years’ War and its massive civilian casualties. How many Russian civilians died as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 is unknown, but the number must be large. In general, though, civilian casualties increased during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, first in interstate wars, then in civil wars. Air forces bomb civilian areas, and most civil wars are “asymmetric,” pitting the heavy weapons of state armies and air forces against guerillas wielding light weapons but hiding among the people (sometimes using them as human shields) or fighting in regions with difficult ecologies. Bombing them has increased civilian casualties. Marshall says the proportion of civilian fatalities has steadily increased since 1954, preponderating from about 1990.77

Ratios of military to civilian casualties in recent wars have also varied. In the 2003 war in Iraq, official Iraqi estimates put deaths at up to 460,000, whereas unofficial estimates are higher still. Official estimates undercount because of difficulties in conducting surveys in wartime conditions, morgue officials saying they receive more bodies than the authorities record, and Muslim families often burying their dead immediately, without notifying the authorities. The most plausible range of fatalities in Iraq seems 500,000–600,000, civilians contributing 80 percent of them—a ratio of four civilian to one military death. Yet which deaths do we count? Studies finding civilian-military death ratios of less than one or even one to one, as in Bosnia in the 1990s, are of direct combat deaths only.78 According to the Watson Institute, as of January 2015 about 92,000 people had been killed in the Afghan War, of which only just over 26,000 were civilians. This yields a civilian-to-combatant ratio of only 0.4:1, but this is a count of those killed directly by enemy action. Crawford adds deaths through indirect causes related to the war, such as famine and disease outbreaks.79 These add another 360,000 Afghans, pushing up the ratio enormously to about 8:1.

African civilian casualties through civil wars have been much worse. Most of these ten civil wars occurred in poor states with few records, so fatality figures cannot be exact. Guesses have to be made of prewar mortality rates and these compared with the postwar rates. In the deadliest case, in the Eastern Congo between 1988 and 2008, two very different estimates have been given by international organizations, one of 5.4 million killed, the other just under half that figure. The higher figure seems biased by an underestimate of prewar mortality rates.80 So I have preferred 2.5 million, following Bethany Lacina and Nils Gleditsch, who estimate that over 90 percent of them were civilians, as also in the conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia.81 Civilian casualties in Mozambique, Somalia, and Ethiopia-Eritrea were probably in excess of 75 percent, a ratio of 3–4:1, and this may also be so of the 2021 war in Tigray province of Ethiopia.

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