The MSE numbers were not the only evidence for genocide, nor even the most important evidence. Genocide is determined by intent. The commission found that the Guatemalan military and the civil patrols it supported carried out a coordinated plan of massacres against the Mayan population to "kill the largest number of group members possible," reasoning that Mayans were natural allies of the guerrillas. Ball's data powerfully bolstered that conclusion. On Feb. 26, 1999, the commissioners presented their report, "Memory of Silence," which concluded that the state had committed "acts of genocide" against the country's indigenous population.
What Ball learned in South Africa and Guatemala -- the disconnect between what happens in a database and what happens in the world, and how to link them together -- has been the basis of his work ever since. Two weeks after he left Guatemala, he traveled to Kosovo, working for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), collaborating with Human Rights Watch and other groups to quantify the destruction of Milosevic's fourth war.
It was the site of one of Ball's most absurd adventures. He and his interpreter, Ilir Gocaj, had gone to save data -- the records Albanian border guards kept of Albanian Kosovar families who crossed into Albania. The records -- handwritten lists of the number of people in each fleeing party, place of residence, and name of the family head -- were evidence of when people fled specific villages. That was key to determining why they had fled.
The problem was that the border post had moved. A Serbian attack had driven the Albanian guards about 500 meters further into Albania. The records, however, were still in the old, abandoned border post. The Albanian guards told Ball and Gocaj that the 500-meter walk was a dangerous one: Shooting had seriously injured a journalist a few days before, and the area was still under sniper fire.
But Ball needed those records. He and Gocaj staged a rescue, walking -- very slowly -- to the old border post, a tiny white house. The records were scattered on the floor amid shards of wood and glass. Ball and Gocaj scooped up the papers and slowly walked back. When they returned, they found the guards laughing. The Albanian border guards, it turned out, had become the only source of cigarettes for Serbs on the Kosovo side of the border. A Serb attack was unthinkable; it could cut off their nicotine. Ball and Gocaj had been the butt of a practical joke.
Later, when Ball gave a talk on his findings in The Hague, someone from the prosecutor's office took him aside. "Would you testify?" he asked Ball. Only if he could strengthen his research, Ball said; he'd need more data. The prosecutor's office gave him information on Albanian guerrilla activities, exhumation reports, and surveys of the displaced. Using a four-way MSE -- effectively counting the fish on four different days -- Ball found that the migrations and killings of Albanian Kosovars matched up perfectly, suggesting the same thing had caused both phenomena. That thing was not NATO bombings or Albanian guerrilla activity; neither fit in date or place. What was left was attacks by Serbian forces.
There was one other devastating piece of evidence. Milosevic had called a halt to Serb military activity on the evening of April 6, 1999, in honor of Orthodox Easter. Instantly, the number of killings and people fleeing dropped to nearly zero. But NATO and the Albanian guerrillas had not stopped their hostilities. Two days later, when Serbian forces went back to work, the killings and flight of Kosovar Albanians also resumed. "The statistical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Yugoslav forces conducted a systematic campaign of killings and expulsions," Ball concluded.
"He directly refuted Milosevic's allegation that people were fleeing [NATO] bombs," recalls Fred Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch investigator who worked with Ball. "It directly undermined one of the main arguments of Milosevic's defense."
AT THE AAAS, Ball had been a solo practitioner. But in 2002, with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, he began to build the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and in 2003 he moved the group across the country to Benetech, a technology-in-the-public-interest nonprofit in Palo Alto, California. Over the years, Ball had worked with Benetech to create Martus, encryption software designed to preserve human rights data and keep it from being stolen and used to retarget victims. Ball is now vice president and chief scientist for the HRDAG, which has a team of 14 active staff members and consultants. They have designed databases and conducted statistical analysis for dozens of truth commissions, U.N. missions, international tribunals, and human rights groups. Ball himself has worked in Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Ethiopia, Peru, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka, among other countries.
Since Ball put together that first database, sophisticated statistical analysis has become obligatory; a truth commission would no sooner do without it than record data with pencil and paper. But the way Ball sees it, threats to good numbers still lurk everywhere -- among military officers displeased with what the numbers reveal, human rights groups making irresponsible claims, and even advocates for those same technologies that are revolutionizing the field of human rights. Often it's budget cutters seeking to skimp on data collection who pose the biggest obstacle to getting it right. Resources are limited, and despite what has sometimes been an all-out assault by Ball on truth commission staff members who disagree with him, collecting data is just one of the things truth commissions must do.
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