For immediate release. Launching of Darfur Body Count website

For immediate release. Launching of Darfur Body Count website

London, 4 August 2007 – An interdisciplinary experts team has decided to start a new human security project, Darfur Body Count (DBC).

The figures currently used by world leaders, United Nations and mainstream media are taken from epidemiological studies that, in the team’s view, are quite problematic and there is considerable cause for scepticism regarding those estimates.

DBC will maintain and update the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Darfur.

Following the extraordinary successful example of Iraq Body Count, DBC’s team is composed of an Ornithology researcher, two Astrology and Horoscopes practitioners, a trumpeter, three lecturers in Pop and Rock music and a retired Chef and father of two.

The position of Executive Director is currently open. The candidate must be trained as a research psychologist with knowledge in popular English Middle Age music.

As followers of Iraq Body Count’s methodology, DBC will shortly make available a new generation of web counters people may easily incorporate on their websites and blogs. As corporate media interest wanes and the issue of civilian deaths is pushed further off the mainstream agenda, people’s website will be able to continue headlining the human cost in Darfur.

It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war.

DBC hopes to repeat the successes of its inspiration, Iraq Body Count, and to find the same hospitality granted to IBC by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, BBC, Channel 4, ITN, SKY, Independent, Guardian, Times, etc.

Our website will be soon available. Meanwhile we are available for interviews, comments and TV shows and welcome journalists and media professionals’ interest at any time.

Pro tempore Darfur Body Count’s Executive Director
Gaius Lucilius

References:

- Exchange of letters with Iraq Body Count on Johns Hopkins study estimating 650,000 Iraqi war dead

- Media Lens’ exchange with a reader

- The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor’s Problem? She’s still her boss’ lawyer

- Once upon a time in Iraq… Money makes the world go around