In some places, the challenge comes from political groups trying to discredit truth commissions' conclusions. In Peru, for example, Ball's work completely upended what Peruvians thought they knew about their country's war against the Shining Path guerrillas. Ball joined that country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission quite late. "Our initial idea was to do simple counts," recalls Daniel Manrique, who was in charge of the commission's database. "But we read Patrick's analysis in Guatemala and knew what he was doing in Kosovo, and we said, 'This is what we need.'" Ball merged six collections of data, reaching conclusions that were highly controversial. One startling finding was that the Shining Path guerrillas had committed not about 3 percent of the atrocities, as had been thought, but about 50 percent. In addition, the report put the number of killings at 69,000 -- nearly triple previous estimates. The enormous gap was proof of the disconnect between white Peru and the indigenous highlands -- 75 percent of the victims did not speak Spanish as their first language. How could so many indigenous Peruvians have died without Peru's elite taking notice? The implied racism made many of them uncomfortable.
While the proportion of killings committed by the state was lower than previously thought, the absolute number turned out to be higher. The state and right-wing forces accused the commission of inventing numbers to discredit the Peruvian military, a critique echoed endlessly in academia and the media -- and made most eloquently through brandished guns. To this day, commission members still get death threats.
Truth commissions are the organizations that take data most seriously, but they are far from the only groups that make numerical claims about human rights. And outside truth commissions, anything goes.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC), for example, has periodically studied the number of deaths in the Congo conflict; its latest study, in January 2008, put the number at 5.4 million deaths between 1998 and 2007. That has become the number for Congo -- you see it everywhere. The IRC found it by figuring out how many deaths would normally have occurred, then counting actual deaths and calculating the excess. Ball thinks the group's baseline estimate of a "normal" number of deaths was far too low -- correct that estimate, he says, and you get an excess death figure that is only one-third or one-fourth as high. "But we're not ever going to figure out Congo," he says. Other groups, like Human Rights Watch, have embraced numbers with more restraint, Ball believes; the group, traditionally given to the "who here's been tortured and speaks English?" style of investigation, as its program director, Iain Levine, told me, has used quantitative methods when possible since Ball's results in Kosovo. And Ball is complimentary. "When they don't know numbers, they say so," he says.
It's easy to understand sloppy numbers. Nearly every journalistic story, political speech, or campaigner's press release about a war needs the obligatory "a conflict that has claimed ____ lives so far." Advocacy groups are prone to filling in the blank with the highest number they can credibly cite. Journalists sometimes throw around big numbers to inflate the importance of a story. Most often, they reach for whatever number someone vaguely authoritative has used.
The two most violent revolutions of the Arab Spring -- in Libya and Syria -- are cases in point. In Libya, Ball says, the tools exist to get a careful estimate, but he "wouldn't take very seriously" the numbers thrown around today. At one point, the U.S. ambassador to Libya used a figure of 30,000 deaths -- three times what Libyan rebel leaders were claiming. "Have we seen more than 1,000 bodies?" Ball asks. "When I see numbers like 10,000 to 30,000 without any evidence, my broad guess is that it's just meant to signify 'a lot.'" The victorious opposition eventually claimed that as many as 50,000 had died in the fighting.
In Syria, the numbers seem much more precise. The Syrian Revolution General Commission, which claims to speak for the opposition, says 6,275 people were killed between March 2011 and January 2012. But is that number accurate? "Right now," Ball told me, "that number is probably too high -- there is undetected duplication. And too low, as a bunch of people fall outside it." Killings committed at demonstrations tend to get counted, while those outside might not. "The security forces may hunt people down late at night, and those people may not get documented," he points out. "The follow-up violence may end up killing more people than violence at demonstrations."
In 2007, the Save Darfur Coalition, a human rights advocacy organization, was called out by the London-based European-Sudanese Public Affairs Council, a group aligned with the government of Sudan. Save Darfur had been running full-page ads stating that 400,000 people had been killed in Darfur. The council brought a complaint to Britain's Advertising Standards Authority claiming the figure was untrue. The regulators ruled that Save Darfur should have presented that figure not as fact, but as opinion.
It was a huge embarrassment for Save Darfur. Censured in an advertising court at the behest of the government of Sudan -- "how much worse can it get?" says Ball. (He thinks 100,000 deaths is probably closer to the truth.) "A human rights group should never lose a factual challenge. Our moral legitimacy depends on speaking truth to power. People who want to dismiss us say we're just making shit up. If they're ever right when they say that, we're in big trouble."
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