The death toll in wars reached an all-time high: 238,000 people lost their lives in fighting in 2022. Almost half of them died in Ethiopia.
London/Vienna. To this day, it is unknown how many people died in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda – most estimates are between 800,000 and one million. Since then, never in one year have so many people died in conflicts around the world as then. But according to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think tank, last year ranks just behind the year of the 1994 genocide in war death statistics, as seen in the IEP’s Global Peace Index, presented in London on Wednesday. .
According to the Index, 2022 killed 238,000 people worldwide in hostilities. Researchers at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program reached a similar conclusion in early June. With a 96 percent increase, that’s almost double the number of war deaths compared to the previous year.
In the ethnically-sharp conflict in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia alone, where rebels fought a government army backed by militias and Eritrean soldiers, an estimated 100,000 people lost their lives in combat operations – by far the deadliest war of the year. past.
UN stopped aid packages
At least twice that number died in Tigray from disease and malnutrition, according to the report. The war has officially ended with an agreement since November, but the peace is fragile, the humanitarian situation on the ground remains catastrophic – and just a few weeks ago, the UN World Food Program (WFP) suspended food aid because relief supplies would have been diverted.
The second deadliest conflict of 2022: the struggle for Ukraine. The IEP puts the death toll from Russia’s war of aggression at at least 82,000 as of February 24, 2022. Around a third of the Ukrainian population has also lost their homes and fled the fighting – within the country or abroad.
More international conflicts
Overall, violence increased in 79 countries last year, including Ethiopia and Ukraine in Burma, Israel and South Africa, IEP experts write in their report. This is the ninth consecutive time that the world has taken steps backwards in terms of peace. Furthermore, armed conflicts are increasingly international: 91 countries were involved in cross-border conflicts in 2022, compared to 58 in 2008.
At the same time, the index also lists the most peaceful countries in the world. At the top: Iceland, Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand. Austria follows behind them in fifth place, Germany is in 15th. At the bottom of the 163-nation table: Afghanistan. (