NAIROBI — The many ways people have died during South Sudan’s two-year civil war are well-documented, but the number killed is unknown.Men, women and children have been shot, speared, burnt, castrated, hanged, drowned, run over, suffocated, starved and blown up, their corpses abandoned where they fell, bulldozed into mass graves or, in at least one case, eaten in ritual cannibalism.But the United Nations (UN) has stuck to a guesstimate of 10,000 dead since the early months of the war, even as the killing escalated and spread across the country.A year into the war, in November 2014, the International Crisis Group (ICG), which has closely tracked the fighting, said at least 50,000 had died.This month, the UN finally caught up, quoting the same figure but over a two-year span.Sudan expert Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in the US, said failure to count the dead was a failure of morality."If we give up on establishing mortality estimates we are, in one way or another, saying t...
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