Patrick Ball is indeed one of the witnesses who appreared in the Hague. Patrick Ball, who claims to have demonstrated, with a statistical analysis, the justice of the charges against Milosevic.
We shall get to that shortly. But first, let us ask, who is he? The American Association for the Advancement of Science explains:[1]
[Start Quote From AAAS Website]
“Patrick Ball, Ph.D., is Deputy Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Human Rights Program. Since 1991, he has designed information management systems and conducted quantitative analysis 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. His 1997 Ph.D. dissertation “Liberal Hypocrisy and Totalitarian Sincerity” examined the roots of the non-governmental human rights movements in Ethiopia, Pakistan, and El Salvador. AAAS has published two previous books by Dr. Ball: Who Did What to Whom? Planning and Implementing a Large Scale Human Rights Data Project (1996), and State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: a Quantitative Reflection (1999, with Paul Kobrak and Herbert F. Spirer).”
[Start Quote From AAAS Website]
It is obvious from the description that Patrick Ball is considered a leader in the application of science to questions of human rights abuses around the world, and it seems he has a hand in deciding who did what to whom in just about every conflict.
This is cause for considerable worry.
As this piece will show, Patrick Ball’s own data directly contradict the hypothesis that Milosevic’s government carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo. In other words, when Mr. Ball concludes that there was such an ethnic cleansing campaign, he is doing so in defiance of his own analysis. This does not inspire confidence in the various ongoing efforts to assign blame around the world (listed in the quote above), and which feature Mr. Ball’s work rather prominently.
The problems with Patrick Ball’s study are dramatic and obvious on first inspection.
(1) He did not test as a hypothesis the claims of the defense.
(2) He used the most tainted data possible.
(3) Despite using such data, he was unable to put anything together that even remotely indicts Milosevic. On the contrary, Mr. Ball's analysis, on the face of it, suggests that Milosevic's claims are true.
(4) But since the claims of the defense were not even included as a hypothesis, that Milosevic's version of events might be what really happened was not even possible as a conclusion in Mr. Ball's fatally biased study.
That Hague Tribunal prosecutors should accept such trash, as you might call it, and pretend that it convicts Milosevic, demonstrates that the Hague Tribunal is not interested in the truth. Its purpose is simply to convict the former Yugoslav president, come what may.
Patrick Ball’s study is entitled “Policy or Panic: The Flight of Ethnic Albanians From Kosovo.” You may read it here :
http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/policyorpanic/toc.html Patrick Ball says that “many arguments were advanced” but in fact he lists only two:
(1) PANIC. Albanians were fleeing in fear because of the fighting in Kosovo (whether because of NATO bombs or fighting between the Yugoslav army and the KLA - or both), or else
(2) POLICY. Albanians fled because, as NATO alleges, the Yugoslav forces under Milosevic’s command carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Either-or. And Mr. Ball proposes to adjudicate between the two.
But nothing in nature limits the number of possible hypotheses to two. And Patrick Ball is supposed to be a scientist. Hence, one expects that he will put on the table *all* of the relevant and obvious hypotheses. But he hasn’t. Incredibly, the claims of Milosevic’s government that the Albanians were chased out of Kosovo in an organized campaign that used both KLA intimidation and NATO bombs in order to blame the Serbs for fictitious ethnic cleansing - *these* claims are not even included for consideration. Here is Milosevic repeating the argument in court:
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: The movement of Albanians from Kosovo was of strategic importance for the Clinton Administration to win the support of the media and public opinion, [in order to give the appearance of] confirmation [for their allegations against the Serbs] and justification for what they were doing... I wish to underline that under the threat of bombs, more than 100.000 Serbs also fled Kosovo. And this is an official figure of the International Committee for the Red Cross in Geneva...
...simultaneously with the fierce bombing, the KLA terrorists forced all Albanians that did not leave Kosovo upon their orders and the requests of NATO and under pressure of leaflets and horrific round-the-clock bombing. So they referred to all these Albanians who did not leave Kosovo as traitors because they betrayed the wartime concept which should have created the illusion of an exodus of the population before what you are referring to as the Serb forces. Simply the allegations of Albright... of Serb deportations needed to gain confirmation. And there were hundreds of cameras waiting at the borders to examine the witnesses of alleged Serb misdeeds and to perform that part of the media war
[Quote From ICTY Transcript Ends Here]
Milosevic's point about the phony interviews of Albanian refugees at Kosovo’s borders is well documented. As Daniel Pearl (since murdered) and Robert Block explained in the Wall Street Journal:
[Quote From Wall Street Journal Starts Here]
“The KLA helped form the West’s wartime image of Kosovo. International human-rights groups say officials of the guerrilla force served on the Kosovo-based Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms, whose activists were often the first to interview refugees arriving in Macedonia.”
[Quote From Wall Street Journal Ends Here]
As further documentation of this view of things, Milosevic submitted in court a flyer that instructed Albanians to leave the province of Kosovo, and which bore the seal of the KLA and Ibrahim Rugova’s signature (Rugova was one of the main secessionist Albanian leaders).
Now, of course, the claims made by the former Yugoslav government, repeated in court by Milosevic, don’t *have* to be accepted as correct a priori. The evidence should be examined to see whether the version defended by Milosevic’s government has merit. It is a hypothesis, and it should be tested along with the others, because the point is to find out what happened. Or isn’t it? Well, apparently not for Patrick Ball, whose study does not even *mention*, let alone test, the claim made by the defense!
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: ...is it clear to you that, in this war, NATO and the KLA were acting with the same objective in mind? Did you give any thought to that?
PATRICK BALL: I did not give any thought to that idea.
JUDGE MAY: ...Now, the question appears to be this: Were there, in your view, other matters or did you consider other possible causes for, it seems to be, the refugee flight, namely, propaganda and threats of the KLA?
PATRICK BALL: This was an occasional topic of discussion among my co-authors and myself. We did not consider the effect.
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: ...I'm also talking about threats that were not empty threats only, because the KLA killed many Albanians as well in order to discipline them...
JUDGE MAY: ...Did you consider threats made by the KLA?
PATRICK BALL: No. We considered it unlikely...
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: So this has no effect, propaganda, calls, threats, orders issued by the KLA to the population to leave the territory. Is that the way it is in your opinion? Or the media war either that was part of this war as well?
PATRICK BALL: As I said and I think as is clear from the report, we did not consider these hypothesized causes presented by the question in a direct way.
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: I am asking you about the effect of such a message, when a column of peasants who are going back to their village are bombed and at the same time there are orders and requests put through the media that Albanians should leave Kosovo. Did you take that into account as an effect of this message or did you only add up the persons killed by NATO in these columns?
PATRICK BALL: We did not take that into effect...
PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC: Did it cross your mind that... the appearance of refugee columns were preplanned and organized in advance in order to create an impression around the world that they were a product of an ethnic cleansing campaign, and other things that you are claiming, rather than the war in all its complexity, as is obvious?
PATRICK BALL: ...on your new question, did it occur to me that this was preplanned, the answer is no.
So there you have your expert witness. I was hoping you would bring him up, which you obviously did.
Unbelievable. Patrick Ball confessed repeatedly, under cross examination, that not one of the claims made by the Yugoslav government - that is, not one of the claims made by the *defense* in the Milosevic trial - had even been considered in his study!
I can go on and on about Mr. Ball. I have read his whole anaylsis and even talked to several people who have expertise in statistics and they also pointed out:
“The report also examines other official records of refugee movements as well as surveys conducted in refugee camps in Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Now, there is an important omission here, because no Albanians who fled Kosovo into Serbia made it into Ball’s data set. Those who consume only NATO propaganda for ‘news’ don’t know this, but many Albanians were fleeing north, to Serbia, because they knew this was the safest place.
How do we know this? One dramatic piece of evidence comes from an article published in the Daily Telegraph, after the bombing, by a puzzled David Millward, who reported on just how eager Albanians were to leave Kosovo and go to Belgrade.
And yet Patrick Ball did not use any data concerning Albanians who fled north to Serbia. Rather, he uses ‘data’ only from refugees who fled to the Albanian part of Macedonia, to Albania, and to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In other words, Mr. Ball was careful to use ‘data’ only from refugees who went to places where NATO and its allies (the terrorist KLA) could control the interviews.
And this all demonstrates something else: Mr. Ball’s study was never peer reviewed in proper fashion. The problems with his sources of data and with his mode of reasoning are *obvious*, and an insult to anybody with normal intelligence. That Mr. Ball should be the Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program of something calling itself the American Association for the Advancement of Science is, quite simply, a scandal.
Slobodan Milosevic, Question to Doctor Patrick Ball:
Do you know what homo sapiens means?
Judge May (NATO):
You don't have to answer this question!
Just to add, I was opposed to both wars. The war against Yugoslavia and Iraq, both of which in my opnion were not authorized by the UN.