Doing a Number on Violators
Patrick Ball has pioneered the use of databases to expose atrocities. At tribunal, he blames Milosevic
for Kosovo ‘ethnic cleansing.’
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ, [LOS ANGELES] TIMES STAFF WRITER,
14 March 2002
BOSTON -- As Patrick Ball scrawled
equations across a conference-room white board,
his talk was of regression analysis, matching
methodologies and capture probabilities.
His numbers were the equivalent of blood
spatters at a crime scene
For three years, Ball traveled back and forth
to Kosovo, systematically culling data on
civilian
deaths
from
refugee
reports,
exhumations and witness accounts. Building on
that evidence, he and his colleagues compiled a
database documenting the ebb and flow of
“ethnic cleansing” of ethnic Albanians during the
spring of 1999 in Kosovo, a province of Serbia,
Yugoslavia’s main republic. The statistical
portrait of the displaced, missing and killed
reveals the timing and ferocity of fatal blows that
fell across an entire province. This numerical
pattern of death and panic exonerates some
people; it points toward others.
Now, the statistics that Ball calculated on a
Boston white board have become evidence in a
war crimes trial. On Wednesday, in an
international courtroom in The Hague, Ball
confronted the man he believes is responsible for
the deaths--former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.
The evidence Ball laid out as an expert
witness for the prosecution represents the newest
infusion of technical expertise into the human
rights movement--an effort to harness
information science to track the beatings, rapes,
killings and mass executions of systematic
political violence.
Milosevic has argued strenuously in his own
defense that NATO airstrikes or the ethnic
Albanian guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation
Army, or KLA, could have been responsible for
the estimated 11,000 civilians killed between
March and June 1999. The statistical analysis,
Ball testified, demonstrates that neither is
possible.
The numbers, he said, establish a clear
pattern: The culprit was an organized campaign
of “ethnic cleansing” by Yugoslav military and
paramilitary forces under the command of
Milosevic.
“When we looked systematically and really
carefully at the killing data, I found this pattern,”
Ball said during an interview before his
testimony. “My jaw dropped through the floor. It
blew me away.”
Negotiating a Minefield of Unreliable Data
Ball, the deputy director of the science and
human rights program at the American Assn. for
the Advancement of Science in Washington, has
spent a decade perfecting the use of computer
technology in the service of human rights.
To arrive at their conclusions about Kosovo,
he and his team had to negotiate a minefield of
technical uncertainties and unreliable data.
In all, more than 800,000 ethnic Albanians
fled Kosovo in 1999, in the largest mass
expulsion of people in Europe since the 1940s.
No one knows exactly how many died.
International prosecutors and human rights
activists allege that as many as 11,000 men,
women and children were killed in a campaign
of terror by the Yugoslav government designed
to trigger panic and cause people to flee their
homes. Atrocities in more than 500 towns and
villages have been documented.
The worst of the killing took place during
the 11 weeks of NATO airstrikes in Yugoslavia,
from March into June 1999, when there were few
outside observers in Kosovo who could
independently
document
human
rights
violations.
To complicate any subsequent investigation,
military and paramilitary forces routinely
confiscated identity papers from the fleeing
refugees. Sensitive government records were
purged. Houses were burned and belongings
scattered. Mass graves were obliterated. Bodies
disappeared.
Beginning with a knapsack full of registries
he rescued from the rubble of an Albanian border
crossing, Ball gathered as much information as
possible about the number of people leaving
Kosovo, where they came from and when they
reached the border. The one knapsack contained
files on 272,000 people.
From that set of records and other reports,
Ball could map the timing and source of the
surges of refugees. Next, he sought to estimate
how many civilians had been killed, and where
and when they may have died.
Working independently of the U.S.
government, Ball and his colleagues drew
information from 15,000 interviews and
exhumation reports conducted by four different
humanitarian groups. Thousands of duplicate or
misspelled names had to be culled.
Ball’s team reliably identified 4,400 people
who had been killed. They then used a standard
population sampling technique to estimate the
total dead--10,356 Kosovo Albanians, with an
error margin of several hundred people more or
less.
By comparing the refugee movements
against the death records, Ball discovered the
numbers rose and fell in the same pattern in the
same parts of the country, suggesting that they
shared a common cause.
Then Ball compared records of the flight of
the refugees to daily military action reports and
tallies of the dead. To ensure fairness, he used
the records from Milosevic’s government of
NATO airstrikes and KLA ground actions.
He lined all the patterns of behavior up
against one another and created graphs of the
results.
The peaks of refugee flight consistently
occurred during and after intense activity by
Serbian forces, he found. Actions by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization and the KLA
generally happened after the surges in refugees
and killings, not before them.
“I find the data are consistent with the
explanation that Yugoslavian forces conducted a
systematic campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The
data reject the hypothesis that KLA or NATO
activity was responsible,” Ball said.
Several experts called the statistical analysis
“particularly innovative.”
UC Berkeley demographer Ronald Lee, who
reviewed the work, said: “There are very subtle
and difficult statistical questions about how to
draw these conclusions. I thought what they did
was very impressive, very valid . . . persuasive.”
A Scientific Application ‘Born of
Desperation’
Ball’s work is an application of science
“born of desperation,” said independent human
rights scholar Louise Spirer in Stamford, Conn.
“The reason for the push is that we have to come
up with a means to show what happened when
there aren’t any records.”
In World War II, Nazi officials who
orchestrated the death camps meticulously
documented their work. Allied armies captured
almost 14 tons of such files, which were then
used as evidence at war crimes trials involving
90,000 cases.
Attempts at concealment were half-hearted
at best, said Richard Pierre Claude, an expert on
human rights and government at Princeton
University, who is author of the forthcoming
book “Science in the Service of Human Rights.”
Today, by contrast, those who use terror and
mass murder as tools of statecraft take pains to
cover their tracks “to preserve plausible
deniability,” said Yale University international
law expert Harold Hongju Koh, who was U.S.
assistant secretary of State for democracy,
human rights and labor from 1998 to 2001.
So often too, both sides in a conflict can
muster victims of atrocities. Statistical analysis
holds out the hope of a reliable way to determine
relative guilt.
“What we can do with statistical analysis
that you can’t do with anecdotes is make overall
scientifically valid estimates,” said human rights
activist Herbert Spirer, an international law and
information management expert at Columbia
University and husband of Louise Spirer. “We
don’t have to sit and look at a single mass grave
and try to decide how many people died in an
entire country.”
During truth commission proceedings in
Guatemala, which were convened to investigate
abuses from more than 35 years of civil war,
human rights statisticians analyzed 7,500 cases
compiled from 11,000 depositions documenting
24,910 killings.
In rural areas, the number crunchers proved,
native people were killed by government death
squads at rates five to eight times greater than
rates among other ethnic groups, offering a
statistical hint of genocide.
In South Africa, researchers digested
interviews with more than 21,000 witnesses
covering 49,000 incidents during the latter
decades of apartheid. By comparing rates of
death among groups of people in different parts
of the country, they developed statistics
demonstrating that police were responsible for
the overwhelming majority of the killings and
that most of the victims were young black men.
By matching a database of 9,000 witness
accounts of beatings and killings in El Salvador
against comprehensive career records of military
and police officials, statisticians showed how
units became more violent when certain officers
were placed in charge. The analysis helped get
those officers banned from government service.
But in Kosovo, the high technology of
human rights may face its severest challenge yet.
Rarely has a government worked so
effectively to mask its operations against
civilians, several experts said. Never has so
much high technology been marshaled in the
effort to uncover evidence of sustained human
rights violations.
Said Koh, who helped lay the groundwork
for the technical evidence being presented
against Milosevic: “Kosovo is what I consider
the state of the art.
“You want an undeniable scientific account
of what happened,” Koh said. “Getting out the
historical record is as important as holding
someone accountable. These advances help make
it impossible to erase history.”
A ‘Hacktivist’ Who Thinks in Code
Ball, 36, is a “hacktivist,” employing his
programming skills in the service of human
rights. A sociologist by training, he has been
writing computer software since high school.
“I think in code,” he said.
He worked his way through graduate school
at the University of Michigan by writing
computer databases. His passion for dBase, Fox
and Paradox code was more than matched by a
sense of political outrage. He wrote his
dissertation on human rights movements in
Ethiopia, Pakistan and El Salvador.
When Ball found himself in El Salvador as
that country’s civil war was ending in 1991, he
heard that a local human rights group “needed
someone who could hack a database.”
He volunteered.
In the years since, every truth commission or
major human rights investigation in the world
has in some way drawn on his computer skills.
“It is an odd line of work,” Ball said.
For a decade, he has been pioneering the use
of computer databases and statistical analysis to
document human rights abuses. With his
colleagues at the American Assn. for the
Advancement of Science’s science and human
rights program, Ball recently published a
hacktivist manual. It teaches activists around the
world how to design computer entry screens,
questionnaires and databases that can be used to
track human rights abuses.
Helped initially by the American Statistical
Assn., a 162-year-old professional group that
advocates the use of statistics in science, a global
network of documentation specialists has spread
information management techniques to human
rights activists in 150 countries.
With solar-powered laptops, activists log
testimony of abuses from survivors hiding far
from any power outlet. They use the precision
navigation capacities of the Global Positioning
System to pinpoint the coordinates of mass
graves they find. They combine databases and
integrated mapping software to chart the
geography of terror.
To protect the integrity of the information
they are collecting, they code it with encryption
software and secure it behind Internet firewalls.
They create virtual havens for witnesses on Web
sites.
To further evade surveillance, they
communicate with each other through
anonymous e-mailing techniques that disguise
the location and identity of the sender.
In the computerized pursuit of justice,
analysts like Ball employ the same census and
data-mining techniques used by marketing
experts to analyze purchasing habits, naturalists
to estimate wildlife populations and medical
experts to document epidemics.
Instead of consumer profiles, herd counts or
public health warnings, however, the product of
Ball’s work is compelling circumstantial
evidence of official brutality.
Just as pathologists can use forensic DNA
techniques to restore the identities of those
exhumed from anonymous mass graves, human
rights statisticians can reveal much of what is
hidden to the individual eye.
What they are creating, said Spirer at
Columbia, is “the epidemiology of horror.”
Traditional Activists Uneasy With Statistics
Other more traditional human rights activists
are made queasy by so many formulas. They
recognize the power of statistics as an analytical
tool, but they are uncomfortable with it because
abstract mathematical modeling can rob the
victims of their humanity.
“You turn this into something you quantify-a smear of refugees--and you have to be careful
about dehumanizing it,” said Eric Stover,
director of the Human Rights Center at UC
Berkeley. “The real testimony is the body with
the single gunshot to the head and the hands tied
behind the back.”
For Ball, however, the anonymity of
numbers is a saving grace.
One afternoon during the data entry phase,
Ball found one of his co-workers Net surfing.
She was building a bookmark file in the database
of Internet links to online photographs of the
dead. He was dismayed.
“Stop. Don’t look,” Ball told her.
“She was useless for the next two days,” he
recalled. “All she could do was cry.
“This is data. Numbers. This is a technical
problem. Otherwise, you’re done. Burned out.
Gone.
“Crying.”