(Page 3 of 39) - Violent Death After Communism authored by Treyger, Elina.

Actual incidence of violent deaths in peacetime is not perfectly observable. There are
however, reasonably good comparative indicators of the underlying magnitude of the
violent death problem. This paper makes use of the exhaustive mortality statistics
collected and systematized by the World Health Organization’s (WHO): WHO’s figures
of purposefully-caused deaths are used as the indicator of the violent death problem. A
death is recorded as a purposeful death, if the underlying cause is an “injury inflicted by
another person with intent to injure or kill, by any means.”

In international studies of

criminality, homicide is generally considered to be the only category of crime suitable for
comparative analysis: whereas all other crimes depend heavily on their legal definitions
and their rates of detection, which vary greatly across jurisdictions, homicide has a fairly
stable legal meaning and a higher and consistent detection rate.

Comparative

criminologists are fond of observing that it is far easier to hide a money trail than it is a
dead body: official registration of the dead body as an event of homicide however, is not
as certain as its discovery, and vulnerable to manipulation by the authorities. The
WHO’s mortality data represents more reliably the underlying levels of violent deaths:
although the WHO also relies on official records, these are deaths caused as classified by
hospitals as purposeful and externally-caused, which may very well not have appeared on
the books of the police authorities.

The violent death problem as conceived here is specifically defined in terms of peacetime
violent deaths. Thus, casualties of the war with Chechnya, the Tajik civil war, the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia’s conflict with
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Moldova’s fight with Transdniestr, are not included in
estimating the magnitude of the violent death problems.

Including war deaths would

foreclose consideration of the possibility that states weakened by armed conflicts may
still be faced with less acute violent death problems post-conflict, than states without
such conflicts. .

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Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, its former territory has become a parade for organized
and disorganized violence: garden-variety murders, contract killings, terrorist attacks and

Coding information available on WHO’s statistics website, at http://www.who.int/classifications/en/.

See for example, Shaw, Mark, et. al. “Determining Trends in Global Crime and Justice: An Overview of

Results from the United Nations Surveys of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems.” In
Forum on Crime and Society, vol.3, Nos. 1 and 2, December 2003 pp.39-40; Howard, Gregory J. et.al..
2000. Measurement and Analysis of Crime and Justice. Criminal Justice, Vol.4.

The WHO’s data is based on “deaths registered in national vital registration systems, with underlying

cause of death as coded by the relevant national authority, as the disease or injury which initiated the train
of morbid events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced
the fatal injury"” in accordance with the rules of the International Classification of Diseases. See

http://www.who.int/healthinfo/morttables/en/index.html

Crucially, while no state-provided homicide

statistics are likely to include state-perpetrated extralegal deaths, vital registration organs will record such
deaths as deaths, and hospitals will report these to be caused by injury. WHO’s statistics explicitly include
deaths caused by “maltreatment syndromes, including: mental cruelty, physical abuse, sexual abuse,
torture” by, among others, “official authorities.”

While it seems difficult to distinguish those from “ordinary” deaths, the WHO’s data also attempts to set

them apart, by separating deaths resulting from, in part “legal intervention and operations of war.”