A human rights statistician finds truth in numbers
Whether gazing at a computer or into the eyes of a former dictator, numbers cruncher Patrick Ball is on the front lines of justice.
from the February 7, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
"We figured ... they were going to blow our office up," Ball says. Instead, the officers sued the commission – an unexpected recourse to the rule of law in a postconflict country. "We were tickled pink," Ball recalls.
Ball went back to Michigan, but word of his work got out and he spent the next years bouncing between truth and reconciliation projects – South Africa, Haiti, Guatemala, East Timor, and Peru – finding ways to uncover the scale and pattern of human rights violations.
The level of expertise and discipline his work requires puts Ball on par with Olympic runners or violin virtuosos. Lara J. Nettelfield, a Balkans scholar at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, says he's "one of the very small group of people in the world who could properly analyze and consult on [mass atrocities]."
Ball admits such a reputation carries a personal price. He has little time outside work, and no family.
But projects like the one he did in Kosovo make it worth it, he says. Kosovo attracted international concern when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fled to Albania. Amid what seemed little more than chaos, Ball saw dozens of data sources that, could point to the cause of the crisis: "Everything is data to us. A pile of scrungy paper from the border guards – 690 pages – that's data."
He combined those scrungy papers, one for nearly every family that crossed the border, with crossing records kept by several international organizations; later, he brought in data from 11 sources on civilian deaths in the province. He analyzed the two separately, using one method for patterns of migration and another for mortality. There were three plausible causes for civilian flight and death – violence by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) or the Yugoslav forces, or bombings of Serb targets by NATO – and he wanted to know which the numbers pointed to.
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Like all statisticians, Ball began with the most basic hypothesis: In looking for a common cause, he is already wrong. Statistics begins with an original assumption – that everything is random – and discards it only when the data suggest otherwise. In Ball's case, they did: He found patterns in the mass movement of refugees strong enough to suggest that more than ordinary wartime chaos was at work. At the same time, the relationship between migration and NATO or KLA actions was so weak that he knew neither was the cause.
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