Doing a Number on Violators

For three years, Ball traveled back and forth to Kosovo, systematically culling data on civilian deaths from refugee reports, exhumations and witness accounts. Building on that evidence, he and his colleagues compiled a database documenting the ebb and flow of "ethnic cleansing" of ethnic Albanians during the spring of 1999 in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic. The statistical portrait of the displaced, missing and killed reveals the timing and ferocity of fatal blows that fell across an entire province. This numerical pattern of death and panic exonerates some people; it points toward others.



Now, the statistics that Ball calculated on a Boston white board have become evidence in a war crimes trial. On Wednesday, in an international courtroom in The Hague, Ball confronted the man he believes is responsible for the deaths--former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.