Grandstand. The time is still staggering more than a week after the start of the war in Ukraine, and an avalanche of figures and indicators are already describing the contours of a major humanitarian crisis.
Several thousand injured, hundreds of civilian and military deaths that are probably underestimated, and nearly 2 million refugees, not to mention the many internally displaced persons, who have already crossed the borders to neighboring countries, mainly in Poland.
Dramaturgical levers
Echoing the tragedy experienced by the Ukrainians, there are political announcements of a humanitarian nature, the principles and feasibility of which are debated. Indeed, international humanitarian law, the main objective of which is to protect civilians and aid workers in a perilous attempt to humanise war, struggles to be respected in many conflicts.
The interest of health figures delivered daily during a crisis raises questions, whether it is secondary to an armed conflict or not, beyond the classic determinants necessary for the planning of humanitarian interventions and the issues of data viability. It is a question of illustrating the inhumanity of the conflict and of objectifying the dramatic living conditions of civilians by pointing out the responsibility of the belligerents.
According to the points of view and the dynamics of propaganda, we will count the deaths caused by the adversary, highlighting its weaknesses by also quantifying those of its own ranks. The figures can thus activate the dramaturgical levers to capture the indignation and, thereby, the solidarity and support of external actors.
However, the exercise of regular accounting of the dead as it was carried out in the Syrian conflict did not have a flagrant impact on the course of the war and the attenuation of its deleterious consequences. Caregivers and places of care were deliberate targets in a strategy of total war on terror, where respect for international humanitarian law took second place. In fact, knowing the number of daily deaths in a conflict is not necessarily beneficial to the population and its victims. It will probably be the same in Ukraine.
Compassionate mechanics
In the Yemeni conflict, official speeches recorded for several years the same number of civilian deaths, around 10,000, whereas it is now recognized that this figure was underestimated.
This indicator of violent deaths does not take into account deaths following the loss of chances of treatment following the collapse of a health system, nor the accentuation of precariousness linked to the situation of war. However, in this case too, knowing the number of victims had no real impact on the course of the war and its atrocities and did not improve the lot of the survivors.
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