by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

British anti-war activist John Sloboda isn't one to rest on his many laurels. Co-founder of the Iraq Body Count Project (IBC) and recently appointed executive director of the Oxford Research Group, Sloboda has been campaigning for peace and human security for two decades. "I gave up a comfortable job in academia to work as near full-time as I can on bringing the West to its senses," Sloboda says over the phone from England.

With that lofty goal in mind, Sloboda, a professor of psychology at the University of Keele, will be in Montreal this week to meet with local activists and discuss the state of the anti-war movement.

"Tony Blair and George Bush, both in their different ways, said they would do everything they could to minimize civilian casualties," says Sloboda, explaining the motivation for IBC. "Well, the only way you minimize civilian casualties is not going to war. If you go to war, innocent people are going to die. We are really just holding our leaders to account, and putting into the public domain on a daily basis the fruits of our policies in terms of deaths."

According to their Web site (www.iraqbodycount.net), Sloboda and colleague Hamit Dardagan created IBC in early 2003 to "establish an independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from military action by the USA and its allies." IBC tabulates its figures based on media reports and eyewitness accounts, requiring figures from at least two "independent agencies" before the numbers are added to the total. Since the number of casualties reported for the same incident often differ, IBC lists a minimum and maximum figure. As of presstime, the IBC death toll ranged from 11,252 to 13,213.

Sloboda says the IBC has "had an enormous impact, it still continues to. During the war itself, we got something like 100,000 hits per day. We knew we were having a negative - or positive - impact, depending on which way you look at it, because we were absolutely flooded with the most vitriolic and vicious hate mail, most of it arriving from the USA."

He says IBC's figures have been used and cited by mainstream news organizations, British politicians in Parliament and even Tony Blair. "More recently, our data - rather than us being branded as some kind of anti-war, pro-Islam, communist exaggerators - has entered the mainstream," he says. "Our figures are now taken by most responsible media as the best data there is, in fact the only data there is on civilian casualties in Iraq."

Sloboda believes that Iraq will be "worse than Vietnam" and that the violence may continue for decades. As for the future of IBC, he says its mission will continue "as long as people are dying in Iraq because of what we started.

"This body count will be going on long after I'm dead," he adds, glumly.

John Sloboda will meet with local activists on Monday, Aug. 2, at Café Perk (4872 Parc). The meeting will begin at 7pm and is open to the public