By Sue Pleming WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (Reuters) - The State Department likely underestimated the number of people killed in the first two years of fighting in Darfur, said a U.S. government watchdog report on Monday, which doubted the accuracy of most death toll estimates in the conflict. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said six Darfur death toll estimates it examined from February 2003 to August 2005 had "methodological strengths and shortcomings" but none appeared very accurate. "The experts GAO consulted did not consistently rate any Darfur death estimate as having a high level of accuracy," said the report. The report did not provide its own estimate of the death toll in Darfur, where conflict flared in 2003 when rebels took up arms against the government, charging it with neglect. But the GAO said it was obvious "many thousands" had died. In March 2005, the State Department said in a fact sheet that 98,000 to 181,000 people had died over two years in the conflict-affected area of Darfur and eastern Chad. "Many experts believed State's lower-end estimate was too low," said the GAO in its report. "The published documents describing State's estimate lacked sufficient information about its data and methods to allow it to be replicated and verified by external parties," it added. Death toll statistics in Darfur vary widely, ranging from 70,000 to the nearly 400,000 estimated by the group Coalition for International Justice over a 26-month period. The GAO report had most confidence in Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which said about 134,000 people died in Darfur and eastern Chad from September 2003 to January 2005. The State Department did not provide any updated death tolls for Darfur but U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last September "hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been murdered" in the conflict. "The United States has called this tragedy by the only name that captures its meaning, the only name it deserves -- genocide," said Rice in a speech to the Africa Society. A study published last September in the journal Science also said the U.S. State Department's Darfur death toll underestimated the count by "hundreds of thousands" of lives. That study by Northwestern University in Illinois, which was not examined by the GAO report, put the toll at 200,000 or more. Estimating death tolls in hostile environments is a difficult and dangerous job and the GAO said there were numerous challenges in Darfur, including lack of access. Limitations in estimates of Darfur's population before and during the crisis may also have led to over or underestimates of the death toll, the report said. Another problem was the varying use of baseline mortality rates -- the rate of deaths that would have occurred without the crisis -- may have led to overly high or low estimates. "To safeguard the U.S. government's credibility as a source of reliable death estimates, GAO recommends ensuring greater transparency regarding the data and methods used for such estimates," it said.
