A lot has been written in the press about Sri Lankan war casualties. Much of it though appears to be based on uninformed speculation. You have no doubt seen estimates of 7,000 to 10,000 to 20,000 and even 100,000 war dead.

This article is an attempt to assess the number of civilian deaths in the final phase of the war, based on a real factual observation, one that seems to have been ignored by everyone including the UN and the Sri Lankan government.

The  UN ocha  is the United Nations body that helps with humanitarian assistance when emergencies occur around the world. The UN OCHA was on the ground in Sri Lanka during the final stages of the war in 2009 and helped to coordinate the hospitals and camps to which civilians displaced by the war were taken. Throughout the final stages of the war the OCHA published a regular report of the conditions in the camps, starting on the 27^th April 2009 and finishing on the 2^nd July 2009 – a period which includes the 18^th May which is the date on which the war ended.  Velupillai Prabhakaran the leader of the LTTE died on that day. President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka delivered his end-of-war address to parliament the next day.

One of the things that the UN OCHA did during that critical period was to diligently count the number of civilians (also known as IDPs – Internally Displaced People) that came streaming out of the war zone. The IDPs were accommodated in various camps, primarily in the Vavuniya district of Sri Lanka. The final OCHA report dated the 2^nd July 2009 reported a total of 283,537 civilians that had arrived at the camps.

The UN OCHA counted one other thing that is of importance to us here. They counted the total number of injured civilians that were hospitalised during that period. The chart below shows the way the civilian count and the injured count changed over the reporting period from the 27^th April to the 2^nd July 2009.

As you can see from the chart above, the surge after the 19^th May was of the civilians that were freed at the end of the war. This shows that around 90,000 civilians were caught up in the final few days of the war, while the total number of civilians that arrived at the camp over the final phase of war was around 300,000.

Now, cast your eye over the following chart. It shows the count of injured civilians that had to be hospitalised during the same period.

As you can see from the chart, the final few days of war created a surge of 2,550 injured civilians that ended-up in hospitals across the country – all of them monitored by the UN OCHA.

This is a crucial number. 2,550 is the number of civilians that were injured during the final few days of war. So what does that say about the number of civilians that were killed during that same period? In fact it says a great deal. Historical war statistics are very clear on this point. It is just not possible to have 2,550 war injured and 10,000 war dead. The ratio of injured/dead in war is around 3 to 1. In other words our estimate of the civilian deaths in the final few days of the Sri Lankan war is 2550/3, which is 850.

Where is the evidence of the ratio of deaths to injuries? Check these out:

• Iraq body count . The website concludes: In our view, the more “typical” estimate is given by the median. This would suggest that, on average, in a typical incident in this war, there were about 3 injuries for every death.
• Comparison of US military deaths and injuries in Iraq and in Vietnam. The ratio in Iraq was 9.4 to 1 and in Vietnam it was 3.2 to 1.
• Sri Lanka military deaths and injuries in its civil war were reported  as 6,261 killed and 29,551 wounded – a ratio of 4.7 to 1.

This shows a range of deaths/injuries rates from a 1/9^th to 1/3^rd. In the US military case above it would be reasonable to assume that death rates were low at 1/9^th in Iraq due to the high quality of medical care available to the troops. For Sri Lankan civilians a rate of 1/3^rd is likely to be the best estimate as it compares the civilian experience in the two wars.

Background material

You can find the UN OCHA emergency reports here . But for your convenience, I have gathered them together and provided links directly to each report below:

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