(Press-News.org) The death toll in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was most likely between 1.2 million and 2.8 million -- or between 13 percent and 30 percent of the country's population at the time -- according to a forthcoming article by a UCLA demographer.
April 17 is the 40th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's capture of the capital of Cambodia -- beginning a four-year period that many consider to be a genocide. For decades, researchers have sought to pinpoint the death toll from political executions, disease, starvation and forced labor inflicted under the Khmer Rouge.
Conventional wisdom has placed the count between 1 million and 2 million, but estimates over the years have widely diverged, casting doubt on their validity.
"Most people who write about the Pol Pot regime deaths will come across a few numbers that range between a couple of round numbers -- such as 1 million to 2 million -- and they'll report the range without reflecting the uncertainty attached to it," said Patrick Heuveline, a professor of sociology at UCLA who is affiliated with the California Population Research Center at UCLA and UCLA's International Institute. "I wanted to provide a sense of how confident we can be that the actual death toll is within a particular range."
The research is aimed at determining a certain degree of confidence in the death toll figures, much like political pollsters do when they provide a margin of error in predicting election outcomes.
The magnitude of death toll has taken on renewed importance because of an ongoing tribunal, backed by the United Nations, of three Khmer Rouge leaders on broad charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Last summer two of the leaders were sentenced to life in prison in separate proceeding, on charges they masterminded mass evacuations of Cambodians from their homes.
For the past 20 years, Heuveline has conducted research on the demographic consequences of Pol Pot's regime and its aftermath.
Writing for Populations Studies, Europe's leading demographic journal, Heuveline evaluated the methodology behind the 12 most cited estimates of the death toll. His efforts uncovered what he called "striking" methodological errors in two of the estimates, which happened to be the highest (3.3 million) and lowest (700,000) ones. He concluded that the remaining 10 estimates were plausible but that each was based on a limited series of inputs among equally acceptable alternatives, meaning that none is any more credible than the other.
Like his predecessors, Heuveline set out to take into account factors that would have determined the Cambodia's post-war population had the Pol Pot regime not occurred, including pre-war census figures for fertility rates and the ages of Cambodia's citizens. Also like them, he took into account factors other than Pol Pot's reign of terror that could reasonably have diminished Cambodia's population. By subtracting the country's population count as derived from the first post-war census from what the population might have been expected to be had the war not occurred, he reasoned he could arrive at the toll that could be attributed to the conflict.
"It's like putting together a puzzle," said Heuveline, whose UCLA research is focused on demography and population dynamics. "Once you get all but a single piece into place, you can see the shape of that final piece."
But where Heuveline's predecessors ultimately took into account no more than five variables, he incorporated 47 of them, including a range of possible permutations of migration in and out of the country, deaths by non-political causes and factors that might have affected the fertility rate, such as the adoption of birth control.
In all, Heuveline took into account 10,000 combinations of the 47 variables, and ran them through computer simulations, which revealed that there is a 95 percent chance that the death toll was between 1.2 and 2.8 million. (The frequency with which the simulations produced a specific death toll increased the probability that the number was correct.)
The simulations also revealed that a range of 1.5 million to 2.25 million has nearly a 70 percent chance of containing the actual death toll, he found. The probability that the figure was less than 1.5 million is about 15 percent, and the probability that it was more than 2.25 million is also about 15 percent, he found.
"If the death toll appears untrustworthy, people are more likely to question the extent of the evil that occurred," said Heuveline, who devoted six years off and on to the project. "The trustworthiness of the scale is important because the scale was so massive."
INFORMATION:
When the stakes are high, people in positions of low power may perform better by using self-affirmations to boost their confidence, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
"Most people have experienced a time in their lives when they aren't performing up to their potential. They take a test or have a performance review at work, but something holds them back," says lead researcher Sonia Kang, Ph.D. "Performance in these situations is closely related to how we are expected to behave."
The researchers conducted three experiments ...
Geneva, Switzerland, 17 April 2015 -- Many people still dangerously underestimate the health risks associated with smoking even a few cigarettes a day, despite decades of public health campaigning, French researchers have reported at the European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.
The results demonstrate powerfully that the war against smoking is far from over, says oncologist Dr Laurent Greillier from Hopital Nord in Marseille, France, who presented the results at the conference.
Greillier and colleagues analysed data from a representative survey ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- When a hospital patient's heart stops, the drama starts, as doctors and nurses work furiously at resuscitation. And at many hospitals, that's the cue for someone to pull a curtain and hurry the patient's loved ones out of the room.
But some hospitals allow those family members to stay, and watch the cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and other attempts to save the patient's life that the medical team makes.
Now, a study has shown for the first time on a national scale that patients do just as well after a cardiac arrest at those hospitals, compared ...
PITTSBURGH, April 17, 2015 - A technique that removes blood clots from large brain blood vessels reduced disability after stroke in a trial conducted in Catalonia, Spain, and co-led by an expert from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. The findings will be announced today at the annual meeting of the European Stroke Organisation in Glasgow, Scotland, and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The results of the trial, known as REVASCAT, echo findings from other recent large studies that were stopped early when the technique, called endovascular ...
Los Angeles, CA (April 17, 2015) Though it is widely believed that the media objectifies women, women further diminish themselves by constantly comparing their bodies to others'. Regardless of how much time young women devote to viewing television, music videos and using the internet, they will compare their appearances more frequently to photos in magazines and on Facebook, finds a new paper published today in Psychology of Women Quarterly.
"Our research shows that spending more time reading magazines and on Facebook is associated with greater self-objectification among ...
Stroke is the leading cause of severe long-term disability in the United States, and less than 40 percent of patients who experience the most severe form of stroke regain functional independence if they receive the standard drug intervention alone. Now a study by an international group of stroke physician-researchers has found that removal of the clot causing a severe stroke, in combination with the standard medication, improves the restoration of blood flow to the brain and may result in better long term outcomes.
The findings of the Swift Prime trial (Solitaire With ...
A research paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) today confirms earlier findings that a procedure called endovascular therapy (ET) for ischemic stroke is the best treatment option for many patients by reducing the incidents of disability. This is the fourth research paper published this year that confirms the efficacy of the treatment.
"Endovascular treatment using stent retrievers will become the standard of care for patients with acute ischemic stroke" says Dr. Mayank Goyal, University of Calgary, Cumming School of Medicine, Hotchkiss Brain Institute ...
Geneva, Switzerland, 17 April 2015 -- A subset of lung cancer patients can derive important clinical benefits from drugs that are more commonly used to treat melanoma, the authors of a new academic clinical trial in Europe have reported at the European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Dr. Oliver Gautschi, a medical oncologist from Lucern Cantonal Hospital in Switzerland, presented the results of the retrospective EURAF cohort study, which included lung cancer patients whose tumours carried specific mutations in the BRAF gene. The study was conducted ...
Many professional golfers live a lonely isolated life in the midst of intense rivalries and on a meagre income, new research shows.
Dr John Fry told the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Glasgow today [Friday 17 April] that he interviewed 20 professionals, including Ryder Cup players and a former world number one, to reveal the "particular stresses" behind the glamour of the game.
Dr Fry, of Myerscough College, said that the number of tournaments held abroad had increased over recent years. "The impact of the increasingly global nature of professional ...
Demand for natural rubber fuelled by the tyre industry is threatening protected parts of Southeast Asia - according to research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
A new study published today predicts that up to 8.5 million hectares of additional rubber plantations will be required to meet demand by 2024.
But expansion on this scale will have 'catastrophic' biodiversity impacts, with globally threatened unique species and ecosystems all put under threat.
Researchers say that the extent of the problem is comparable to oil palm and that it is closely linked ...
