THE HAGUE -- (13 March 2002) A U. S. Statistician, called as a witness in the Milosevic trial, presented a new study to a UN tribunal today, finding evidence consistent with the hypothesis that from March through June 1999, Yugoslav forces carried out a systematic campaign of killing and expulsions of Kosovar Albanians that led to the deaths of more than 10,000 people.
The testimony of Patrick Ball, a scientist with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), rules out other potential causes that had been proposed by Milosevic and his defenders -- that the dead had been killed by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) or during NATO air attacks. "The findings of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that action by Yugoslav forces was the cause of the killings and the refugee flow," Ball and his co-authors wrote in their report to the tribunal, Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo: March-June 1999. "Killings were used either to motivate the departures, or the killings were a result of the campaign."
The authors of the report collected their data on Kosovar refugees from the registries of Albanian border guards in the Albanian village of Morina, and complemented it with the records of other Albanian government agencies and the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. The data on killings were based on exhumation records, and on interviews with refugees conducted by the Human Rights Watch, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative, co-sponsor with AAAS of the Ball report.
Ball explains that the data on killings and refugee flows, based on 15,000 interviews and exhumation records, reveal that both seemed to occur in the same place, at the same time, and in distinct surges that suggest "the existence of an external cause."
"When the overall estimates are compared at the regional level, a clear relationship remains between the patterns of refugee flow and killings," according to Ball's report to the tribunal.
"The structure of the patterns in both refugee flow and killings over the time period in question is the key component for the findings of the present study...The correlated, nearly simultaneous variations in the social phenomena being measured in time and location strongly suggest a common, systematic cause of which the patterns are a result."
Ball and his co-authors, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jana Dudukovich and Jana Asher, tested the data against what they knew about patterns of KLA activity and NATO airstrikes, and found that NATO and the KLA increased their activities after clear spikes in the number of killings and level of refugee flows, and not before. In contrast, the study's authors note that the only time there was "a drastic reduction in killings and refugee movement" came during a ceasefire that the Yugoslav government called to coincide with the celebration of the Orthodox Easter.
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Founded in 1848, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) works to advance science for human well-being through its projects, programs and publications in the areas of science policy, science education and international scientific cooperation. With over 134,000 members from 130 countries and 273 affiliated societies comprising more than 10 million members, AAAS is the world's largest federation of scientists. The association also publishes Science, an editorially independent, multidisciplinary, weekly peer-reviewed journal that ranks as the world's most prestigious scientific journal and administers EurekAlert!, the online news service featuring the latest discoveries in science and technology.
AAAS established its Science and Human Rights Program in 1976 to give scientists a way to help their colleagues around the world whose human rights are threatened or violated. AAAS continues in its mission to protect the human rights of scientists around the world, as well as making the tools and knowledge of science available to benefit the field of human rights. Ball, Ph.D., is deputy director of the AAAS human rights program, has designed information management systems and conducted quantitative analyses for large-scale human rights data projects for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, tribunals and United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, and Kosovo.