1 Thursday, 14 March 2002

2 [Open session]

3 [The witness entered court]

4 [The accused entered court]

5 --- Upon commencing at 9.32 a.m.

6 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

7 WITNESS: PATRICK BALL [Resumed]

8 Cross-examined by Mr. Milosevic: [Continued]

9 Q. I would now like to check some facts. The American Association

10 for the Advancement of Science, in 2001, gave Flora Brovina its annual

11 award. Do you know that?

12 A. Yes.

13 Q. As far as financiers are concerned, we tried to clarify something

14 yesterday when we said that this was financed by the US government. The

15 sponsors of your association are also an agency of the German Catholic

16 Church, the Institute for Peace, the Ford Foundation, and some projects

17 are funded by the governments of the Netherlands, Great Britain, and

18 Denmark; is that correct?

19 A. Some of your -- some of the organisations you listed -- could you

20 repeat them, please, so that I could review them.

21 JUDGE MAY: Put them to the witness one by one so he has a chance

22 to answer.

23 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

24 Q. An agency of the German Catholic Church.

25 A. Although I'm not aware of all the groups that fund the entire

1 association, I do not believe that such an agency has funded the Science

2 and Human Rights Programme, of which I am a part.

3 Q. All right. In your report, you said that there was a

4 harmonisation of figures that was carried out together with the

5 International Crisis Group, the ICG.

6 A. Perhaps there's a translation issue. I don't believe we used the

7 term "harmonisation." Furthermore, I do not think we used any data from

8 the International Crisis Group.

9 Q. But you did compare your figures with theirs?

10 A. Not with the International Crisis Group. We made comparisons to

11 analyses presented by Physicians for Human Rights and for -- and by our

12 two epidemiologists who worked with the US Centre for Disease Control,

13 which was published -- their work was published in a medical journal.

14 Q. All right. Did you make a report for Burundi, for example?

15 A. I have never worked on Burundi, no.

16 Q. Did you do anything for this International Crisis Group or did you

17 cooperate in any way with them?

18 A. I have met some scientists who have in the past collaborated with

19 the International Crisis Group. I have met them at meetings, at

20 scientific meetings. I have heard them present papers. I have never

21 personally collaborated with the ICG, no.

22 Q. All right. You said that -- you said yesterday in your statement

23 that 45 per cent of the data you statistically processed, you simply took

24 over from the Prosecutor, if I understood you correctly; is that right?

25 A. The sources listed in the database that was provided to me were

1 sources internal to the Tribunal, of various types. That's correct, 45

2 per cent.

3 Q. Forty-five per cent. And the rest are reports of the Albanian

4 government and those lists that were compiled by Albanian clerks, and they

5 handed them over to you at Morina and elsewhere, as you had put it. So

6 that is the database that you've been operating with.

7 It seems to me that I've heard --

8 A. That's not quite correct.

9 Q. In what sense is it not correct?

10 A. There are distinct systems of data. Each examines one of the

11 kinds of information we are looking for. The Albanian government data is

12 used only in the migration analysis. The lists to which you refer are

13 used in the analysis of killing. The discussion to which I just referred,

14 the 45 per cent sources contributed by the Office of the Prosecutor's

15 internal sources and the corresponding 55 per cent of the sources which

16 were primarily from the Yugoslav government, these data were on KLA

17 activities only. The fourth series of information on NATO activity comes

18 exclusively from Yugoslav government sources.

19 In order to understand how the analysis is done, I think it is

20 quite important to be clear about each source.

21 Q. And then since you're talking about sources of the Yugoslav

22 government, did the Office of the Prosecutor give to you the reports that

23 the government handed over to the Office of the Prosecutor?

24 Let me clarify this. I heard here from Mr. Tapuskovic, I believe

25 it was, Tapuskovic, an amicus curiae, when he spoke during one of the

1 hearings - Mr. Tapuskovic, please correct me if I'm misquoting you - that

2 the government of Serbia sent 26.000 pages regarding activities of the KLA

3 to this institution. Is that right? Did you obtain from the Office of

4 the Prosecutor these 26.000 pages about the activities of the KLA, these

5 26.000 pages that were sent by the government of Serbia?

6 A. I don't know what the government of Serbia sent. What I do know

7 is that there were many sources in the data among the -- in the data on

8 the KLA exclusively. There were many sources that referred to Yugoslav

9 government activity. Our interpretation of the sources is that they were

10 primarily open sources, that is, information that had already been made

11 publicly available. As I mentioned, we began our analysis of the patterns

12 of KLA activity by using information that was on a Yugoslav government

13 website that covered casualties to Serb forces inflicted by the KLA.

14 Q. So my question is: Did you obtain from the Office of the

15 Prosecutor materials of the government of Serbia or of Yugoslavia,

16 whatever you prefer, that pertain to KLA activities? I am asking you, did

17 you obtain this from the Office of the Prosecutor?

18 A. The sources I received in the database refer to a number of

19 Yugoslav government sources. Whether these sources are the same as the

20 reports to which you have referred, I don't know. I don't know. The

21 sources are listed in Appendix 3 in terms of the originating or authoring

22 organisations which produced this information. Perhaps that will help

23 clarify the question.

24 Q. Yes. But none of the things I've been referring to are contained

25 there. All right. This question is quite clear. This side across the

1 way gave you 45 per cent of the data for your database.

2 I see in your report, on the 19th of February, 2000 [as

3 interpreted], that is to say, two or three weeks ago, you say: [as read]

4 "The Office of the Prosecutor asked us to look at the analysis on pages

5 [sic] 8 and 9, bearing in mind the relationship between the killings and

6 refugee flows."

7 And your ultimate conclusion is: [as read] "In this review, we

8 noted that the correlation neither proves nor implies that the killings

9 led to refugee flows or vice versa."

10 So the Office of the Prosecutor put forth certain requests to you

11 in respect of the expert activities that you are to carry out, and you

12 give answers. As far as I can see, even up to the 19th of February,

13 2002. How intensive were the contacts between you and your co-authors

14 from the OTP while these statistical surveys that you presented were being

15 made?

16 JUDGE MAY: What co-authors from the OTP?

17 THE WITNESS: I have no co-authors from the OTP. That seems to be

18 a lack of clarity. My co-authors come from the American Statistical

19 Association, Carnegie Mellon University, and the American Bar Association,

20 Central and East European Law Initiative, in addition to the American

21 Association for the Advancement of Science.

22 The OTP asked for a clarification because in Figures 8 and 9 - not

23 pages - in Figures 8 and 9, there were some questions they had about

24 whether the same analysis would reveal what we would expect it to reveal

25 with respect to killing and migration. Again, we found that there's a

1 strong relationship in time and space between killing and migration. That

2 is, in the same places and at the same time when one is strong -- when

3 killing is at a high point, migration also tends to be at a high point.

4 And when killing tends to be at a low point, migration tends to be at a

5 low point. And that is consistent over different times and places

6 throughout the period.

7 The analysis that the OTP asked me to clarify here is to examine

8 whether, when migration is at a peak, if there has been some presence of

9 killing just prior to that; that is, in the same period or in the previous

10 two-day period, have there been one or more killings, reported killings?

11 Similarly, when killing is at a high point, has there been, in the same

12 period or in the subsequent period, some migration activity?

13 We find that in both relationships, we find very high levels of

14 presence, much higher than we found in Figures 8 and 9. This is -- in

15 fact, we find roughly double the proportions of presence.

16 JUDGE MAY: Dr. Ball, you've given your evidence about that.

17 THE WITNESS: Okay.

18 JUDGE MAY: We'll see if there are any more questions.

19 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

20 Q. Well, I didn't want to go into these questions related to killings

21 now, but since you have given such an extensive explanation, I would like

22 to remind you that it says here, in connection with what the OTP asked

23 you, it says here, on the 19th of February this year: "We have noted in

24 this paper that the correlation neither proves or implies that killings

25 brought about refugee flows." That's what it says here.

1 Then the OTP also asked you, as you put it here, during a

2 telephone conversation that took place last week: "The representatives of

3 the OTP asked me to apply the peak method related to the correlation

4 between killings and refugee flows." And you also say that this

5 observation is in line with the original findings.

6 Then finally, you say: "However, we would like to caution that

7 these observations are not a confirmation that it was killings that caused

8 refugee flows."

9 That is what you said here. That is what you have written here.

10 Is that correct? Do you abide by that position?

11 A. The reason that this analysis was not included in our original

12 report is that we believe that this method is appropriate to reject a

13 hypothesis. It is not an appropriate method to confirm one. We did not,

14 therefore, use it to try to confirm the method, although, as I said a

15 moment ago, the statistics imply the confirmation. I am cautioning here

16 in the sections that have been quoted, I'm cautioning that although the

17 numbers seem to be favourable to the arguments and the conclusions we have

18 reached, that we should not use these in that manner. That is not

19 statistically sound. That is the extent of the finding. I confirm that

20 we have concluded that there is a strong correlation over time and space

21 between killing and refugee flow, but that confirmation should not be

22 drawn from this argument. That is the point of the sections that have

23 been quoted.

24 Q. All right. But since you are going into this problem in such

25 detail, you have a few manipulations - that's what I'd call it - in terms

1 of the number of persons killed, estimates. On page 3, you say the

2 analysis includes the estimate of killings, about which none of the four

3 sources had been informed. That is the main problem, because NATO and the

4 KLA also relate to killings, and this has to be based on true data as

5 well. Is that correct or is that not correct?

6 JUDGE MAY: Do you follow the question?

7 THE WITNESS: Not quite.

8 JUDGE MAY: Would you clarify the question, Mr. Milosevic.

9 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

10 Q. The question is that I believe that what I quoted here is indeed a

11 problem, because when analysing the NATO and KLA relationship to the

12 killings, he enters that problem -- he approaches that problem with

13 estimated figures, not true figures, actual figures. Am I being clear? I

14 think I'm being very clear.

15 A. All of the analysis of the killings of ethnic Albanians, with the

16 exception of Figures 8 and 9, all of the rest of the analysis, however, is

17 based on the estimates, including the residual analysis in section 5.3,

18 the analysis of the residual patterns which we discussed in depth

19 yesterday. So the exception on the analysis of killings of ethnic

20 Albanians here is only on Figures 8 and 9.

21 Q. All right. But there is a difference, a big difference, between

22 your estimates and what you have as facts, because on page 5, it says the

23 estimated number of killings obtained by statistical analysis is 10.356,

24 with an error margin of 9.002 to 12.122. And on page 17, the table of

25 exhumed bodies is a total of 4.211, a total of 4.211, and identified

1 bodies are 45.4 per cent. Identified Albanian victims actually amounted

2 to 1.912, so that is 45 per cent of 4.211. And all analyses consistently

3 apply the invented figure of 10.356. Can you explain that?

4 A. Ten thousand, three hundred fifty-six is not an invented figure;

5 it's an estimated figure. The estimate is based on sound and well-known

6 statistical principles that are in wide use throughout the world and have

7 been subjected to both rigorous preparation and review.

8 Q. Have you finished your explanation?

9 A. Yes.

10 Q. Is it correct that the total you have of identified Albanian

11 victims, those you can identify as Albanian, that you have certified

12 figures only amounting to 1.912?

13 A. No, that is not correct. The number is 4.400. Those are the

14 victims we can identify by name.

15 Q. And what about the difference between 4.400 and 10.356? What is

16 in between the two? And quite a bit of scope is provided there. What

17 about that, in relation to what you say you have identified?

18 A. As I suggested in my previous answer, the estimate of 10.356 is

19 made by well-known scientific methods which have been used in a wide

20 variety of statistical contexts throughout the world. The techniques are

21 explained in significant detail in Appendix 2.

22 Q. Well, now I understand this a bit more, and I hope those who have

23 been following this too as well, why this statistical research of yours

24 can only be used for educational purposes and for the purpose of providing

25 information, not for the purposes for which it has been used.

1 JUDGE MAY: It's suggested that you can't use it as evidence.

2 What's your answer to that?

3 THE WITNESS: I'm afraid, because I'm not lawyer, I don't know in

4 this kind of level.

5 JUDGE MAY: It's a comment, Mr. Milosevic. Yes, let's move on.

6 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

7 Q. All right. Then I have the following question: In view of this

8 cooperation with the OTP, a question for you personally. Do you believe

9 that the Prosecutor is making a maximum effort, a maximum effort to prove

10 that NATO aggression did not cause an exodus of the population?

11 JUDGE MAY: It's not a matter for the witness.

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I think that the question is for the

13 witness because he cooperates with the OTP.

14 JUDGE MAY: It's a comment.

15 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

16 Q. And do you think that this paper of yours is very important for

17 the Prosecutor?

18 JUDGE MAY: It's not a matter for the witness, not a matter for

19 the witness. He's simply giving evidence. It's not for him to comment.

20 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right. That's an answer too.

21 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

22 Q. Do you remember, Mr. Ball, that some time ago you said that the

23 NATO claims about 100.000 persons missing in Kosovo are absurd? Do you

24 remember having said that? Do you remember that you said that?

25 A. Yes, I did say that.

1 Q. That's what you said. So my question is: In your opinion, what

2 was the reason for such assertions to be made by NATO, these that you had

3 called absurd? In what opinion, what was the reason underlying such

4 assertions?

5 A. I have no idea. My claim was that the number is too high and the

6 estimates bear that out.

7 Q. Mr. Ball, did you in the -- the advisory board of the Hacktivism

8 group of international computer hackers, are you in the management board

9 of that group which is known as the "Dead Cow Cult"?

10 A. I'm not on the management group. I advise them in their efforts

11 to try to help young computer programmers move away from illegal

12 activities and direct their activities toward productive and legal

13 activities.

14 Q. And what is the purpose, the mission of that group which you are

15 assisting?

16 A. I think they do many things. The only thing I do with them is to

17 assist them in their effort to help young computer programmers move away

18 from illegal activities.

19 Q. At the conference of hackers, DefCon 9 on the 14th of July in

20 California [as interpreted] last year, did you say: "It would be very

21 nice if you would applaud the extradition of Slobodan Milosevic to The

22 Hague, and I hope you are as excited as I am about his trial which is

23 about to start in nine months"?

24 A. Two corrections. The conference was in Las Vegas, Nevada, not in

25 California. And there seem to be some translation slippages between my

1 exact quote and what you quoted.

2 JUDGE MAY: What did you say, Dr. Ball?

3 THE WITNESS: That's the essence of it. I don't think we need to

4 parse it too much more closely.

5 The context of the conversation was that I was explaining to young

6 computer programmers what international human rights are. You will note

7 in the paragraph previous to that quotation I had to explain what the

8 Universal Declaration is, what the Geneva Conventions are in a very, very

9 simple sense to people who have no idea of what human rights,

10 international human rights law might mean and why those are important

11 things to respect. My comments were very well-received, and we noticed a

12 lot of excitement in the room around the possibility of doing good rather

13 than, as I said earlier, doing illegal or harmful things, which we

14 discourage.

15 There was an indictment against Mr. Milosevic, and thus anyone who

16 supports international justice should welcome the extradition and welcome

17 the trial as an opportunity to hear the evidence relevant to that. I

18 support international law and international human rights. This is where I

19 have placed my career. And therefore, it seems to me entirely logical to

20 support the comment that I made.

21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I understand --

22 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic.

23 It's not very clear to me. Were you just now paraphrasing what

24 you said or offering an explanation for what you said? I'm particularly

25 interested in the passage, "... and thus anyone who supports international

1 justice should welcome the extradition..." Is that what you said at the

2 conference?

3 THE WITNESS: No, Your Honour.

4 JUDGE ROBINSON: Because what the Presiding Judge asked you to

5 tell us was what did you say in relation to that matter at the conference.

6 THE WITNESS: I'm sorry that I -- Your Honour, I do not have the

7 quote immediately available to me. There were just some infelicitous

8 phrasing that I heard in the quotation made by the Defence that did not

9 sound like my words. That was the basis for my suggestion that we needed

10 to correct them a bit.

11 The essence of what he has quoted is essentially correct. My

12 explanation of why I said that is that I support international law and,

13 therefore, welcome the extradition. That is my explanation. I did not go

14 into that complex detail in the talk. I was speaking to a room full of

15 primarily 19- to 22-year-olds, so one has to be very simple.

16 JUDGE ROBINSON: Proceed, Mr. Milosevic.

17 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

18 Q. I did not ask you about your motivations when making that

19 statement. I asked you whether it was correct, whether it was accurate.

20 And it does not mention international law anywhere.

21 And I'm quoting it again because I see a mistake in the

22 interpretation, because I never mentioned California, and you later

23 corrected me that Las Vegas was not in California. Maybe something was

24 added in interpretation maybe by accident.

25 JUDGE MAY: He has accepted that was in essence what he said, and

1 he's now given an explanation for it. Whether it was in California does

2 not matter.

3 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] No, that doesn't matter. I'm taking

4 California as an illustration of the error in interpretation probably.

5 Maybe I was reading the quotation too fast and I did a disservice to the

6 interpreter.

7 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

8 Q. So the quotation has nothing to do with international law. It

9 says: "It would be very nice --"

10 JUDGE MAY: We have that point. Now, what is the next question?

11 What is the next question? You --

12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, why are you interrupting me

13 all the time?

14 JUDGE MAY: Just ask the next question.

15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] He is talking about --

16 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

17 Q. Well, my question is as follows: Do you, when you are saying that

18 it's nice to applaud the extradition of Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague

19 last week, do you believe that regardless of that attitude, your personal

20 attitude, that is, do you believe that despite your personal attitude,

21 your work related to the indictment against me can be considered as

22 objective?

23 A. Science does not depend on who the scientist is. I believe that

24 any statistician or demographer or sociologist competent in the methods

25 described in the appendices could take the same data and arrive at the

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1 same conclusions. However, I believe that supporting international law

2 does not in any way prejudice one's objectivity.

3 I support international law. Thus I do not believe -- but I do

4 not believe that my objectivity is in any way prejudiced.

5 Q. Well, since you are applauding my extradition and you say you

6 support international law, do you know that precisely under that law which

7 you say you support, you may not consider me guilty in any respect unless

8 I am proven guilty?

9 A. Yes.

10 Q. Therefore, you applaud my punishment, and you provide this

11 fabricated evidence, which is serving the policy that we have noted at the

12 beginning of the examination. Is that right or not?

13 A. No, that's not right.

14 Q. And do you remember saying, during that speech in Las Vegas: "In

15 the '80s, we relearnt that people who oppose the American support to wars

16 are targets"? Are these your words?

17 A. I was asked by people in the audience if they should have physical

18 or data concerns should they do something that would contradict American

19 policy. I replied that during the 1980s, there were some domestic

20 opponents of the United States who were investigated and harassed. This

21 was a domestic question and a domestic concern.

22 Q. Well, precisely that. People who oppose the American support to

23 wars are targets. Have you changed your views on that since?

24 A. I was referring to something in the past. I have no knowledge

25 about anything like that more recently. But again, this is a domestic

1 concern that I raised about a domestic question, internal to the United

2 States.

3 Q. So why does one set of criteria apply to the ethical approach

4 within the United States and a different set of criteria apply to the

5 ethics outside the US?

6 A. I don't know that -- I don't think my comment had anything to do

7 with ethics.

8 Q. Well, it is an ethical belief that somebody is a target if he or

9 she opposes a certain policy. You are just placing it within the context

10 of the US, as something specific to that country. Why would that differ

11 in terms of within or outside the USA?

12 JUDGE MAY: Do you understand the question?

13 THE WITNESS: No, I'm sorry, I don't.

14 JUDGE MAY: No. He doesn't understand the question. If you want

15 to ask a relevant question, ask it, but this seems to be irrelevant.

16 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

17 Q. All right. Your entire statistical construction is based on the

18 premise that Kosovar Albanians were telling the truth, that they are

19 telling the truth; is that right?

20 A. No, that's not correct.

21 Q. Is it partially correct?

22 A. No, it's not. This is better construed as a test of whether it's

23 plausible that the truth was told. It's the reverse of what has been

24 implied.

25 Q. You yourself, at the seminar sponsored by the Project for War

1 Crimes 2000, said and admitted that they were concerned over the

2 possibility that Kosovar Albanians were not telling the truth when

3 speaking to journalists and others; is that correct?

4 A. That was a concern, and in fact a journalist at that conference

5 discussed a widely-known case in which she had been misled. My response

6 was to point out that these methods test that sort of problem and in fact

7 will reach the same conclusions even if some fraction of the witnesses

8 have lied.

9 Q. Let's leave witnesses aside. Let's add to those truthful

10 statements of the Albanian side the documents you obtained from the

11 Albanian government and the documents you yourself have discovered in the

12 Morina border crossing. What is not truthful among those things?

13 A. As far as I can establish, all of the documents that I have

14 received are truthful in their statistical interpretation.

15 Q. Statistically speaking, when something is true, it doesn't mean

16 it's actually true, but let's deal with that now. Is it correct, in

17 addition to the Albanian guards, border guards, and clerks, that people

18 who collected data for your paper were activists, human rights activists,

19 who worked for the Human Rights Watch and the Institute for Human Rights

20 Studies based in Tirana?

21 A. My partner organisation in Tirana is the Institute for -- or was,

22 for the migration study, the Institute for Policy and Legal Studies, not

23 for human rights studies. They were my partners, as I said, only for the

24 migration study. I also had partners, as you suggested, at Human Rights

25 Watch, and their data -- I used their data for each part of this analysis.

1 Q. Migrations are the central thesis of the Prosecutor; in fact, he

2 calls them deportations. So your partner from Tirana is your partner in

3 the main issue of migrations. On top of that are doctors for human

4 rights. Is that true?

5 A. Data from the organisation Physicians for Human Rights was used in

6 the migration study.

7 Q. Now, my question is: Is it correct, is it true, in your estimate,

8 of course, that these groups - so that institute from Tirana and other

9 groups - that they had a vested interest in encouraging and justifying the

10 international intervention in Kosovo, as you call NATO's war against

11 Yugoslavia? So my question is: Do you believe that these groups had a

12 vested interest in encouraging and in justifying the international

13 intervention in Kosovo?

14 A. I don't know what their interests were or are. I don't work for

15 them.

16 Q. I'm asking you about your opinion. What could be their interest?

17 JUDGE MAY: He says he doesn't know. That's sufficient.

18 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

19 Q. And have you noticed that they made a portrait of a variety of

20 human rights violations to galvanise public opinion and raise hostility

21 against the Serbs and the desire to punish them? Have you noticed that?

22 A. I'm sorry. Who are you talking about?

23 Q. I'm speaking about these groups who were involved, this institute

24 from Tirana and the others who worked for you in gathering data.

25 A. I don't know of any reports issued by the Institute for Policy and

1 Legal Studies in Tirana. Human Rights Watch has issued several human

2 rights analyses of conditions in the region.

3 Q. Does it seem to you from your cooperation with them that they have

4 an identical or similar attitude to all of this as the OTP, for which you

5 are testifying now?

6 JUDGE MAY: That's a matter of comment.

7 Witness, you needn't answer.

8 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Why would this be a comment,

9 please?

10 JUDGE MAY: It's purely a comment on the OTP, the Prosecutor.

11 It's not for the witness to answer.

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. All right. Is it true that when you compared the data of this

14 Physicians for Human Rights group, who selectively interviewed selected

15 refugees and asked them only about killings in their families, when you

16 compared this to Human Rights Watch data, the data did not correspond, did

17 not coincide?

18 A. Physicians for Human Rights conducted a random sample survey,

19 choosing people by a method to assure randomness through the population

20 being sampled, to clarify the idea in the question that they were

21 selected. Human Rights Watch, on the other hand, was investigating

22 particular events, not sampling randomly at all. We noted the differences

23 between these two sources and in fact found them to be complementary.

24 However, the data from PHR are not used in the analysis of killings in the

25 current report. They enter into the current report only as one of the

1 three sources of survey information used in the migration analysis, and

2 thus have only a very small impact on the conclusions.

3 Q. So you made a selection of what you will and what you will not use

4 even within that circle of groups who gathered data for you?

5 A. Yes. We chose the largest ones.

6 Q. If I understood your explanation correctly, your study's mainly

7 based on data obtained at one border crossing to Albania.

8 A. The migration study is based on one border crossing. The killing

9 analysis is based on a much wider selection of information.

10 Q. You described that place as a very chaotic one and said that

11 40.000 people crossed that narrow road in one day.

12 A. On one of the days, yes. That was a high point.

13 Q. In the interview in May 2000, you described the way in which you

14 obtained this information, and if my information is correct, you said that

15 Serbs fired a shell at the administrative building on the border, that you

16 took out records from the rubble and then you gave that to a 17-year-old

17 son of a local Albanian, who scanned them on a computer over a few days,

18 and the documents were then handed over to guards at the border and were

19 relayed to a group in charge of collecting data in Tirana. Is that an

20 authentic description of what you told about this?

21 A. The border post had been damaged. Local Albanian officials told

22 me there had been some sort of an explosion which they believed to have

23 come from the Kosovar side of the border. There was some broken glass and

24 some broken wood inside the border post. I did collect the documents

25 there from among the broken glass, and I took them back to Kukes in

1 Northern Albania.

2 We did -- I did have an assistant, the local Albanian assistant,

3 the 17-year-old to whom you refer, and he helped us scan the documents,

4 but I scanned most of them myself. I was also assisted by my Albanian

5 translator, a Kosovar Albanian translator.

6 There were more than 690 pages, 690 pages of the portion used for

7 this analysis, as well as some others which we ended up not using that

8 were not border records and but were other kinds of things. We didn't

9 realise that at first. So there was a great deal of work to be done, and

10 I appreciated the assistance.

11 We then took the scanned images -- I returned the documents, of

12 course, to the border guards. They weren't mine. But after we'd

13 inventoried them, we returned them to them, and I then did return with the

14 scanned images to Tirana [Realtime transcript read in error "Toronto"]

15 where I worked with a commercial firm to have the scanned images keyed

16 into a database.

17 Q. It says here in the transcript that you [In English] "scanned

18 images to Toronto." You said "Toronto" or "Tirana"?

19 A. Tirana. Sorry.

20 Q. [Interpretation] Tirana then.

21 A. Yes.

22 Q. You said yesterday that more than half of the Albanians left

23 precisely over that Morina border crossing. Is that correct?

24 A. Half of the Kosovar Albanians who left Kosovo crossed through that

25 border. I believe so. That's my estimate.

1 Q. And can you show this to me on the map, where this border crossing

2 is, on your map.

3 A. You mean -- are you referring to Figure 3?

4 Q. I haven't got that list of maps here. My resources are very

5 meager, my resources of work.

6 JUDGE MAY: Have you got a copy of your report in front of you,

7 Dr. Ball?

8 THE WITNESS: Yes.

9 JUDGE MAY: If you look Figure 3 - put it on the ELMO - perhaps

10 you can show us where you mean.

11 THE WITNESS: It's right there. There we go.

12 It's in this area. To be more specific, we'd need a map that had

13 the roads marked.

14 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

15 Q. I couldn't see this well, please.

16 A. This area.

17 Q. Can you see that what you have been pointing out is not the Morina

18 border crossing? Morina is much further to the north. You are showing

19 the crossing Vrbnica, south of Prizren. And it is logical that many more

20 Albanians used that border crossing to cross the border, because from

21 Prizren to the border where there is a border service, where on the

22 Albanian side there is also a border service, there is a normal road that

23 people took, and Morina border crossing is much further up to the north.

24 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness deal with this.

25 Would you be assisted by a more detailed map, Dr. Ball?

1 Just a moment. Just a moment.

2 Would you be assisted by a more detailed map?

3 THE WITNESS: Yes, Your Honour.

4 JUDGE MAY: Yes. Provide a more detailed map. One of the

5 exhibits.

6 MR. NICE: I'm not sure if this map is going to assist. We're

7 still waiting for the map that I told you about. We'll have another look

8 at another map in a second.

9 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness see that map and see if it assists.

10 THE WITNESS: I see the confusion. The border crossing to which

11 the question refers is on the Kosovar side, Vrbnica. Or I'm sorry. My

12 pronunciation is probably incorrect, but V-r-b-i -- V-r-b-n-i-c-a is the

13 spelling on the Kosovo side of the border.

14 The Albanian guards on the Albanian side of the border refer to

15 the tiny post on the Albanian side as Morina. There is another village

16 substantially to the north.

17 This is going to be hard to do. No, no, no. We have to move way,

18 way this way. Well, I guess we can start here.

19 The -- this is the town to which I believe the question refers.

20 That is not what we're talking about here.

21 I'm just going to move it down here.

22 As the question suggested, there is a road from Prizren to the

23 border here, and as the question referred, there is a small town on the

24 Kosovar side called V-r-b-n-i-c-a. There is also a tiny settlement here,

25 several houses and the border post, which is, as the question suggested,

1 an official border crossing point. The Albanian guards at that point, in

2 conversations with me through my translator, referred to this point as

3 Morina as well.

4 So what that confusion is, I think, is -- probably comes from the

5 same name being used to refer to -- being used to refer to different

6 points. But indeed this is the point at which the records were collected,

7 as I discussed a second ago.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. So you put the Morina border crossing at the wrong place, and the

10 documents were given to you by border guards from the Morina border

11 crossing. I am not saying this just in passing, Mr. Ball. I am saying

12 this because I think that you have been deceived.

13 JUDGE MAY: Just a moment. Let the witness answer that. You're

14 suggesting he's being deceived.

15 Yes, Dr. Ball.

16 THE WITNESS: I collected the documents. I saw them being

17 prepared. I saw the process by which the documents were prepared and I

18 later collected them. I very strongly doubt that I was deceived.

19 This was the name that the guards used to me in their references,

20 and that's the name I reported in the various documents in which I have

21 discussed this. There's another name -- another town, substantially

22 larger, with the same name. That's quite common. There are many towns

23 throughout the region that have the same names, as we discuss, actually,

24 in the current report.

25 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

1 Q. There are not two border crossings by the name of Morina. There

2 is only one Morina, one border crossing of Vrbnica, and you put it in the

3 wrong place, Morina, the Morina border crossing. And then you said

4 according to the records collected at the Morina border crossing, over

5 half of the Albanians crossed there. And that is as if you were saying

6 that a million cars cross the Brooklyn Bridge in one day. It's

7 impossible. That possibility is precluded altogether. This is undoable

8 at the Morina border crossing. It's not a big border crossing anyway.

9 It's just for small border traffic. There's only a macadam road there.

10 There is no real across-the-border traffic there.

11 JUDGE MAY: Will you assist with that? You were at the border

12 crossing. Is the description which the accused gives the right one?

13 THE WITNESS: Not at all. Actually, this -- at this border

14 crossing here, there is quite a -- there's a two-lane blacktop road as

15 well as official border posts on both sides of the border, on the Kosovar

16 side and on the Albanian side. There is a significant presence of guards

17 on the Albanian side. I don't know about the Kosovar side. And it's

18 easily capable of having 40.000 people through it, although it will be

19 very, very crowded when that happens.

20 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

21 Q. Such explanations, a person can explain any kind of deceit.

22 Anything is possible. But --

23 JUDGE MAY: Thank you. Let the document be removed.

24 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

25 Q. Did it perhaps cross your mind now, when you see this border

1 crossing, Morina, how you put it in an inaccurate map, in the wrong way, I

2 hope, I hope through no fault of your own. You are a researcher. I

3 imagine that you don't do things like that. But now, now, can you imagine

4 the following situation? Think about this and give us an answer. That

5 these are fabricated papers, that Albanian clerks fabricated these papers,

6 and that this was their mistake, that they put the Morina border crossing

7 there. Because Morina, due to its inaccessibility, is easier for

8 fabricating data because international observers do not get there. And

9 then they gave you a truckload of papers, allegedly from the Morina border

10 crossing.

11 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness answer -- Milosevic.

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. -- where hardly --

14 JUDGE MAY: Let the witness answer. If you stop making -- if you

15 stop speeches, Mr. Milosevic, and ask questions, we'd get on more quickly

16 and get through this evidence more quickly.

17 Now, then, what is suggested is this: that you were handed

18 fabricated papers. Now, can you deal with that?

19 THE WITNESS: I think it's very unlikely. I collected the papers

20 from a place that had I not collected them there, they would likely have

21 been ruined by the weather in a day or two or whenever the next rainfall

22 were to come.

23 They did not look fabricated to me. In fact, they looked the

24 same -- as we saw the other day, they looked the same to me when I

25 collected them in June as the ones I had seen them preparing at that

1 border point in early April -- or excuse me, in early May. So it seems to

2 me highly unlikely that they were fabricated.

3 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

4 Q. In view of these errors that we have established, and I hope that

5 we have shown this quite unequivocally, it seems to me that it is highly

6 likely - not highly unlikely but highly likely - that they were

7 fabricated.

8 I would like to draw your attention to what you gave us

9 yesterday. This is a list of crossings at Morina. This was distributed

10 to us yesterday by the usher here in Court. This is your paper, with an

11 English translation. In all fairness, instead of the number of persons in

12 the group, it said the type of tools, but that was easily corrected. All

13 in all, they probably gave you an authentic paper from the border for

14 these purposes, and they had it translated for you because you cannot read

15 Albanian.

16 A. No, that is not correct, sir.

17 Q. What is not correct? Do you speak Albanian?

18 A. No, but there were several other misunderstandings in the

19 question. First, I selected that document, I selected that document, from

20 -- that page from among the 690 pages which I collected at the border.

21 Second, the document was -- all the documents, the 690 pages, were keyed

22 into a database, which selected the statistical information from the

23 documents, including the locations of residents, the address of each of

24 the parties crossing the border, and their quantity of people in that

25 group.

1 The other information on the document that's in Albanian was

2 unnecessary in the database, so I did not have to have the documents

3 translated nor did I have to speak Albanian in order to interpret the

4 statistical information that's in those documents.

5 Q. Even if we were to reduce life itself to statistics only, even

6 then it is worthwhile seeing what a document pertains to, because that

7 provides some information as well. In the English translation here, it

8 says [In English] "Note." [Interpretation] "Note," and that is empty. And

9 in the original --

10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Could you please place it on the

11 overhead projector, the original. The one you gave me yesterday. You can

12 take my copy. I'm not going to keep it as a memento. You can have it.

13 In all fairness, it's a photocopy, not an original. Put it down a bit,

14 just a bit, a bit, so that you can see the date on the top. [In English]

15 Please, put it down a little bit to see the date. Okay. But up, up now.

16 No, no. To see the date and to see the note at the same time, please.

17 Okay.

18 [Interpretation] Take a look now. Take a look now. The date is

19 on the top, the 7th of April, 1999, and further down, there is a note.

20 Could you please zoom in on the note, down here.

21 Down here, it says that the information pertains to the time from

22 the 3rd until the 7th of April, 1999. Therefore, from the 3rd until the

23 7th, even according to their data, 209 persons had crossed in five days.

24 That means an average of 40 persons per day in this critical period,

25 concerning which you have been claiming that across Morina, only in one

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7

8

9

10

11

12 Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and

13 English transcripts.

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

1 day - I don't know what you said - 40.000 had crossed or 60.000,

2 whatever.

3 You can now remove it from the ELMO.

4 So this deceit with Vrbnica, with Morina, with their alleged

5 lists, I hope deserves no further comment.

6 THE WITNESS: Perhaps we could move the document down again,

7 please. Thank you. There we go. All the way. Excuse me. There we go.

8 The documents came in bunches. This was page 43 of the section

9 that it came in. As I mentioned in my document - excuse me - in my

10 presentation, after the ceasefire declared by the Yugoslav government on

11 the late evening of the 6th/early morning of the 7th, the border was

12 closed on the Kosovar side. It was closed after the ceasefire. And so

13 after the massive flow of the previous days, the guards described to me

14 that when the flow stopped, they closed this section of the document,

15 which is what the note refers to. Again, noting at the top that this is

16 number 43, this is number 43 of its block, its section of documents, but

17 the documents did not always follow a day or two-day period. They seemed

18 to correspond to shifts or to moments when the guards could catch their

19 breath. They would stop a numbering sequence, put a band around it and

20 put it in the file, start a new sequence thereafter. So I just want to

21 clarify the confusion in the question that this document, this page by

22 itself, refers to the period from the 3rd to the 7th. That note

23 apparently pertains to this section of documents, which includes many,

24 many others.

25 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

1 Q. You have just explained what I have been asserting. That is

2 precisely what you've just explained. You analysed two-day periods of

3 flows, of movements, in order to draw certain conclusions, and now you

4 have said yourself that this is given for several days and that you cannot

5 exactly determine what pertains to which day, or which date, rather --

6 A. I'm sorry. That's not correct. That's not correct. That's not

7 what I said. The date of the document specifically identifies what day

8 this page refers to. However, the numbering sequence at the top does not

9 always refer to the pages that are relevant to a particular day. The

10 guards went along, dating each document specifically, and when midnight

11 occurred, they would draw a line across, put the new date in the margin.

12 This document is the final page from the 7th of April, in the early

13 morning hours, and the note says this block, apparently, of 43 pages, is

14 part of this section. There may actually be another block before this in

15 this same period. I don't know. We would have to refer to the original

16 images. But the -- again, to clarify, the list of people on each document

17 is clearly identified by date for each document, and then again, when they

18 broke, there's a line across, a new date.

19 Q. You know everything, Mr. Ball, except for how these documents

20 reached that rubble and who fabricated them.

21 JUDGE MAY: No need to answer.

22 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right. All right. I know about

23 that.

24 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

25 Q. I have a question: As far as I have understood, your methods of

1 analysis were first used for estimating population and legal immigration,

2 when you first started using these methods.

3 A. The methods I describe here for analysing killing; is that what

4 your question is?

5 Q. I mean your methods, your statistical methods. They were first

6 used for estimating the population and the number of legal immigrants.

7 That was the primary use of your methods. And they were considered to be

8 innovative, as far as I managed to find out.

9 A. I don't know to what you refer when you speak of legal

10 immigrants. The methods we have used for analysing killings have been

11 widely used in censuses around the world, yes. That is their central

12 application in scientific demography.

13 Q. Yes, but your methods were considered to be innovative, actually.

14 That's what I've been saying. Were your methods assessed as innovative?

15 A. I believe these methods are innovative in human rights. They are

16 not innovative with regard to scientific methods more broadly.

17 Q. Well, you know full well, just as I do, that "innovative" means

18 that in the scientific community, this is not considered to be reliable.

19 JUDGE MAY: He's already dealt with all this. We've heard it

20 several times. He's described the methods. He said they were

21 well-known. I don't think we can take this any further.

22 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I don't know what you're objecting

23 about, Mr. May. I don't understand.

24 JUDGE MAY: I'm objecting, and in fact I'm stopping you repeating

25 yourself and going over the same ground over and over again. Now, let's

1 move on to another topic.

2 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

3 Q. At one seminar, you stated that refugee flows -- I have to

4 continue from where the witness stopped a while ago. You stated that

5 refugee flows did not coincide with mass killings.

6 A. Yes. That's a conclusion, actually, in my first report.

7 Q. Is that correct or is it not correct?

8 A. Given the data I had in January and February of 19 - excuse me -

9 January and February of 2000, I did not believe that the patterns I

10 observed in migration coincided with the massacres, the massive killings

11 reported by the various human rights organisations and in the -- what was

12 then very recent OSCE report, as seen, as told. Subsequently, when we

13 looked at the overall patterns of killings, including the far more

14 numerous killings in small groups - one, two, three at a time - we

15 discovered this very close relationship. It seems that while massive

16 killings of dozens of people may be in a different cycle than refugee

17 flow, the small-scale killings, again much more numerous, do quite closely

18 follow these patterns. This was, I believe, a very interesting result of

19 the additional analysis.

20 Q. You have been operating with the figure of 10.000 persons killed.

21 You established 4.000, the identity of 4.000. The 6.000 whose identity

22 you did not establish, as for them, do you, as a statistician, accept that

23 these 6.000 imaginary or assumed persons can be manipulated and can be put

24 into various days, whichever way you want in this analysis of yours, in

25 these two days that you've been analysing? Because the number is so big

1 that you can prove anything with it. Is that correct or not?

2 A. No, it is not correct.

3 Q. I expected you to say that it is not correct, but how did you

4 manage to distribute, then, these 6.000 killings, the difference between

5 those whose identity you established and those who you are assuming? How

6 did you take care of that in your statistics? Where did you put them in

7 your statistics?

8 A. When we did the estimations, we did them in several different

9 ways. Notably, all the ways produced the same overall total or a total

10 very close to it. But in order to analyse the patterns in time and space,

11 we did the estimates for each point in time and space. That is, we did

12 not simply estimate 10.300 and then distribute them about as we wished.

13 Instead, we took each point, each day for each of the four regions, and

14 made -- or excuse me, each time period for each of the four regions, and

15 then made the estimate for that time period/region point. So the

16 distribution of the 6.000 estimated deaths for whom we don't have names

17 occurred as part of the process of analysing each time/space point. So

18 where those 6.000 occurred, where and when those 6.000 occurred, was

19 controlled tightly by the estimation process. It was not something over

20 which the analysts could control.

21 Q. So you distributed the assumed dead into assumed time points by

22 applying some kind of statistical methods. How can that be a serious way

23 of doing it? Tell me.

24 A. If we knew all the data, if we had every piece of possible

25 information, this would indeed be a trivial task. Scientific methods have

1 been developed over the last several centuries because we rarely have all

2 the data. We know a great deal about the reliability of those

3 techniques. They've been used in many contexts. Many different things

4 have been analysed, from wildlife populations to medical experiments to

5 censuses to surveys. We know the properties of the uncertainty. We know

6 how much we can or cannot conclude, based on analyses that contain missing

7 data. Those techniques have come into play here. And so I believe that

8 this study, done to, in my opinion and I believe in the opinion of my

9 co-authors, done to the highest scientific standards, this study respects

10 that. We respect that there are areas of uncertainty, and in my direct

11 testimony we discussed one point where we believe there is substantial

12 uncertainty. That is how I can be confident drawing these conclusions.

13 JUDGE MAY: Yes. It's now just after 11.00, and we'll adjourn.

14 Mr. Milosevic, how much longer are you going to be with this

15 witness, do you say?

16 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] You're asking me?

17 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

18 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, as you know, I do not have the

19 possibility to prepare for cross-examination, so I cannot estimate how

20 much time I need. I'll try to cut some of the questions short, because I

21 think it's quite clear what this is all about, but I won't manage to do

22 that with other questions. I don't know how much time I will take. As

23 much as necessary.

24 JUDGE MAY: We shall expect you to finish within half an hour.

25 You will have then had the same time as the Prosecution, plus another half

1 hour.

2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Objection, Mr. May.

3 JUDGE MAY: We are adjourning now. We'll adjourn until half past

4 11.00.

5 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have an objection. [In English] I

6 have objection, Mr. May.

7 JUDGE MAY: We'll deal with it afterwards.

8 --- Recess taken at 11.04 a.m.

9 --- On resuming at 11.36 a.m.

10 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic, your objection.

11 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have an objection to the

12 limitation you imposed on my cross-examination which you explained by the

13 time used by the other party. I think that anyone can see it's totally

14 incorrect, because the other party came here with an extensive written

15 alleged expert report, so they didn't need to go into detailed

16 examination. They just scanned through this exhaustive material, and in

17 my cross-examination, I have to deal in detail with the material that the

18 other party has presented here. So it's absolutely incomparable.

19 On the other hand, the other party's trying to go as fast as they

20 can through all these computer-made diagrams, maps, tables, and create the

21 impression that all this fabricated data constitutes a complex of

22 scientific argument supporting the indictment, and it is evident that it

23 is very easy to refute that great errors have been made and that the data

24 itself originates from the other warring party and had a vested interest

25 in fabricating such data.

1 So my objection is that you cannot limit my cross-examination. I

2 don't know how long I will take, but I certainly cannot finish in half an

3 hour.

4 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, the reason that time limits are being

5 imposed in this case is in order to make as expeditious use of the time as

6 possible. Now, we bear in mind, first of all, that you have been

7 defending yourself and therefore are entitled to some leeway, first of

8 all, because you have to prepare your own cross-examination; and secondly,

9 because you're not a professional advocate. All that we bear in mind.

10 On the other hand, what is not permissible is the use of

11 cross-examination as a vehicle for making speeches, for making comment,

12 and for repeating evidence which has already been given. All that is

13 impermissible, and when you indulge in it, you'll be stopped.

14 Now, we have in mind that this is important evidence, and we have

15 in mind the point that you make about a report and this being your only

16 opportunity to refute it. But in my judgement, and I speak for myself, a

17 great deal of the time so far has been wasted. What is required is

18 relevant questions. You claim that the evidence is fabricated. You

19 should put relevant questions to deal with that.

20 Now, in order for us to manage the time effectively, it would be

21 helpful to know how long you anticipate you need to put your questions.

22 It shouldn't be a difficult question for you to answer.

23 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have told you that it depends on

24 the course the examination takes. Certainly not too much time, but on the

25 other hand, half an hour is certainly not enough. I'll try to make it as

1 expeditious as I can. It's not in my interest either to make this longer

2 than necessary.

3 [Trial Chamber confers]

4 JUDGE MAY: We'll go for half an hour and then we'll review the

5 position.

6 Do you have any questions, for the amici?

7 MR. KAY: There will be some questions, probably 15 to 20 minutes,

8 in addition. If Mr. Milosevic covers those points, we won't be repeating

9 them.

10 JUDGE MAY: Thank you.

11 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

12 Q. During the break, I checked some assertions that you denied, and I

13 would like to ask you a few questions about this. Namely, I asked about

14 your cooperation and adjustment of data to the data of the International

15 Crisis Group, and you said that was not true. However, on the website of

16 your AAA association, and that is website hrdataaas.org/kosovo/index/html

17 [as interpreted], titled "Political Killings in Kosovo from March to June

18 1999," in the column called "Statistical Analysis of Data," it says: The

19 method of killing people in Kosovo coincides with migrations, and this

20 claim corresponds to the data obtained from the International Crisis

21 Group; and then others are enumerated as well.

22 Another heading says: The role and consequences of cooperations

23 with NGOs regarding the Kosovo conflict efforts have been made to

24 synchronise data gathered from the International Crisis Group and others.

25 Third, when you enter the website of the International Crisis

1 Group and when you type "Patrick Ball," you get a report on Burundi. Will

2 you please tell me: Is this true or not?

3 JUDGE MAY: Which part are you asking about?

4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] About all the three parts, because

5 the witness said he had no cooperation whatsoever with the International

6 Crisis Group, and from their own website and from the website of his

7 association, we can see that the questions that are being dealt here have

8 been harmonised with them. And my reason for asking is that it is common

9 knowledge what this International Crisis Group represents.

10 JUDGE MAY: Just a moment. Let the witness answer.

11 Can you deal with that, Dr. Ball?

12 THE WITNESS: Let's deal first with Burundi. That's the first

13 one. I have no idea what my name is doing in reference to anything having

14 to do with Burundi. I have never done any work on Burundi or, actually,

15 on any of the countries in that region, with International Crisis Group

16 nor with anybody else, so I have no idea why my name is there.

17 With regard to the report on the website of my organisation, the

18 report is "Political Killings in Kosovo," as you titled it. That's

19 correct. It is the intervening report between the migration report and

20 the current report. We sought the cooperation of the International Crisis

21 Group, but they declined. The reference that you have found may mean

22 that -- I mean, I don't remember the exact quotation and I don't have the

23 report in front of me, but I think it means that we find our results to be

24 roughly comparable to what they have reported. We did not, I repeat, use

25 any of their data, simply because they didn't give it to us.

1 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

2 Q. All right. That was one of the questions I wanted clarified. Let

3 us come back to the map which shows that it's not only an omission or an

4 accidental mistake when you put Morina on the Vrbnica border crossing. On

5 that map, 2.1, in the report from January, you drew Morina in the

6 territory of Albania. That's one element.

7 Second, on that Vrbnica border crossing --

8 JUDGE MAY: Just a minute. If you're going to ask questions,

9 where is this map?

10 Dr. Ball, do you have it?

11 THE WITNESS: Yes, Your Honour. I believe he's referring to a map

12 not in the report that's been entered into evidence but, rather, in this

13 report "Policy or Panic?"

14 MR. NICE: I think I have enough copies of this report for the

15 Chamber to look at it. And it can be found, I think, on page 12. I also

16 have other maps, but I'll deal with those in re-examination. I'll hand in

17 my colour version and I'll stick with black and white for the time being.

18 Maybe this can be dealt with comparatively informally at this stage and

19 decide on whether the document needs to be exhibited in due course.

20 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We have the map on page 12.

21 Dr. Ball.

22 THE WITNESS: Yes. The question, I think, is: Why is Morina on

23 the Albanian side of the border? As I answered before, in my

24 conversations with the border guards, in translation, they referred to the

25 small cluster of buildings and homes there only a few hundred metres from

1 the border as Morina. And so my reference to the town of Morina -- or

2 it's not really even a town, it's a tiny number of buildings and homes,

3 refers here to this point, as I pointed out on the map in the earlier

4 conversation.

5 I do not refer to the other considerably larger town to which the

6 defendant has earlier referred.

7 JUDGE MAY: So we can have this clarified; according to this map,

8 the crossing is on the road from Prizren to Kukes. Is that right?

9 THE WITNESS: That's correct, Your Honour.

10 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

11 Q. That's -- that's where Vrbnica is. That's not the location of

12 Morina.

13 Now, about that Vrbnica, there was no Albanian border service

14 there. After that crisis in Albania in 1997, that building was abandoned,

15 looted, and shepherds and cattle were there, not data. That's my

16 assertion.

17 JUDGE MAY: Dr. Ball, tell us what you saw when you went there.

18 THE WITNESS: Yes. I went there and there were thousands of

19 people, including dozens of -- perhaps hundreds, I'm not sure, of

20 journalists from all over the world.

21 Here at this point in the road south of Prizren, there is a border

22 crossing. There are buildings on both sides of the border, on the Kosovo

23 side and on the Albanian side. At the time I collected this data, I did

24 not cross the border. I was only on the Albanian side.

25 There's a small border post here, and as I suggest, it's

1 immediately on the border. It's drawn here a little bit off the border,

2 but it's actually immediately on the border. There are several other

3 houses there, farmers. But at the time of the -- which is covered by this

4 report, March to June of 1999, there was a great deal of traffic on this

5 road from Kosovo into Albania, and there were many international observers

6 as well as the Albanian border guards here. It's not abandoned. There's

7 quite a few people there.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. In that previous report, page 8.11, you said only three persons

10 had data from the border, which later went from Tirana to the database.

11 Who are those three persons?

12 A. Which note do you refer to, sir?

13 Q. That is in the previous -- the earlier report, page 8, item 11.

14 It says: "Only three persons had the data. They went later from Tirana

15 to the database."

16 My question is, and there's no reason to look for them there: Who

17 are those three persons who were the only ones who had the data?

18 A. Who handled the data at the border, there was myself and my

19 translator and the young man who assisted us. We conveyed -- I personally

20 conveyed the data to Tirana, whereas I said in my earlier reply the data

21 were typed or keyed into a database.

22 Q. So you are one of those three persons, and the other two were your

23 assistants. There was no one else; right?

24 A. I see your note here. Since they were keyed, we're talking about

25 three different people. The note you're referring to specifically, which

1 is actually quite important, I believe, for your question, says that:

2 "Only three people have had access to the border data since they were

3 keyed." Okay? So this refers to a different step.

4 The three I described earlier were the three people who obtained

5 the data and conveyed it to Tirana. Okay. There were four people in

6 Tirana who did the coding process, which I can describe in a moment, but

7 also the keying, the point at which the data are actually typed into a

8 database.

9 The three people that - excuse me - had access to the data after

10 it were keyed were myself and two people who assisted me in Washington.

11 At no time in that process was the data out of my immediate control after

12 they were sent from Albania to me in Washington.

13 Q. In that first report, on page 1 and page 29, on page 1 you say in

14 the first paragraph that killings were not a mass phenomenon, and on the

15 other hand, in those places where there was killings, there was no refugee

16 flow. So there is no correlation between the two. Is that correct?

17 A. No, it's not correct. I think I answered this before. My

18 conclusion in this report was that massive killings did not coincide with

19 the heaviest points of refugee flow. By "massive," I was coming from

20 Guatemala, where I was involved in the statistical analysis of the

21 killings of hundreds of people, and so I was sensitive to - excuse me -

22 sensitive to the difference between massive killings and individual or

23 selective killings.

24 The data available when I wrote this report, which I wrote between

25 September and February of 1999/2000, the data I had then were about the

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1 instances of massive killings, dozens of people at a time. Those massive

2 incidents did not correlate precisely with the flows that have been

3 documented in this report.

4 Subsequently, as I described in my earlier reply, we have

5 discovered that the far more numerous small-scale killings of one, two,

6 three people, small numbers of people at a time, those far more numerous

7 killings do in fact correlate quite closely with refugee flow. So this

8 later finding, including vastly more data, is much more precise and

9 enables us to reconsider the earlier finding.

10 I think it is good scientific practice, when one finds something

11 which contradicts an earlier finding, to make that clear and explore why

12 there's a difference, and I believe that the explanation I've just given

13 you and that I gave in my earlier reply explains why we have observed this

14 difference.

15 Q. Yes, but you encompassed there not only those whom you identified,

16 that is, 4.000, you included all of 10.000. So the assumed 6.000 were

17 distributed across the assumed time period; is that correct?

18 JUDGE MAY: You've already answered that.

19 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

20 Q. All right, then. Did anyone intervene to make you change that as

21 compared to your earlier report?

22 A. No. In fact, I remember well the moment of astonishment that I

23 felt when I saw the killing graph for the first time. When I saw it, I

24 assumed I had made an error, because the correlation was so close, and I

25 had hypothesised earlier that the correlation would not be close. When I

1 found that, I immediately began every measure I could consider to test

2 whether I had made an error. So I separated the data sets on to different

3 computers and re-ran the analysis, I checked it according to several

4 different ways of calculating the two-day period totals, and I found the

5 correlation to be quite robust, by which I mean it appeared in each of the

6 analytic methods and techniques I employed.

7 Q. And what do you mean when you say "datum" or "data"?

8 A. In this case, the data include, as I have described, the records

9 from the border guards, in combination with the counts provided by the

10 UNHCR, OSCE observers, and reported that the actual data I used were the

11 reports UNHCR made available on a daily basis in Tirana; the various

12 surveys that I conducted and that were conducted by partner organisations

13 and shared with me, again, as I described yesterday; the lists of deaths

14 that were used to prepare the analysis of killings, again by ABA/CEELI and

15 their partners; the exhumation records; the interviews conducted by Human

16 Rights Watch and the interviews conducted by the OSCE - those are the

17 killing data - and as we have described and discussed at some length this

18 morning, the data analysing KLA activity; and finally, the data published

19 by Yugoslav press sources in the Yugoslav government on NATO airstrikes.

20 These are what I call data. There are intermediate data points when one

21 does the analysis, but these are the data, I believe, in the sense implied

22 by your question.

23 Q. Let us now move on to a concrete question that you have been

24 trying to deal with statistically. In practical terms, as your paper

25 shows, you have put three questions that you need to answer. The first is

1 whether they were fleeing from the conflict, as you say, between the

2 Yugoslav troops and the KLA; then whether they were on the move in order

3 to avoid NATO airstrikes; or was their departure the result of an ethnic

4 cleansing campaign? You put these questions with the aim of establishing

5 which was the cause out of all of these three elements; is that right?

6 A. Let me refer to the actual language of the hypotheses in the

7 report to correct some of the minor misstatements made in the question.

8 So I don't want to take as read those -- the statement of the hypotheses

9 by the question. The hypotheses are in the report.

10 The purpose of a statistical analysis is not to find a cause, but

11 rather to evaluate hypotheses and to determine whether data are consistent

12 or inconsistent with the hypotheses. This is actually a somewhat

13 different logic than the question implies. We cannot sustain a hypothesis

14 or prove it. That's outside the realm of these techniques. Instead, we

15 can reject hypotheses if the data are found to be inconsistent.

16 As I explained yesterday, we rejected, of these, two hypotheses.

17 We reject the hypothesis that action by the KLA, as measured by the

18 variables we described, motivated Kosovars to leave their homes. We

19 reject that hypothesis, with a few qualifications. We also reject the

20 hypothesis that NATO airstrikes created local conditions or directly or

21 indirectly motivated people to leave their homes.

22 We find - and this is I think the point of most important

23 clarification - we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that

24 Yugoslav forces forced people from their homes, forced Kosovar Albanians

25 from their homes, and killed people. We find that evidence to be

1 consistent with it. And our observation about the consistency has to do

2 with this striking coincidence of the dramatic decline in people leaving

3 their homes and being killed at the very moment that the Yugoslav

4 government announced a ceasefire. This is a striking coincidence, and

5 especially in light of the --

6 JUDGE MAY: You've made the point.

7 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

8 Q. All right. It's not three questions. You have reduced this to

9 three hypotheses. Have we clarified that matter now?

10 A. Yes, they were three hypotheses. That's correct.

11 Q. Are you aware of the fact that on the 24th of March, 1999, a war

12 started, waged by NATO against Yugoslavia?

13 A. Yes.

14 Q. Do you assume that a war is a very complex situation and from many

15 points of view it is also chaotic, and it is therefore difficult to

16 simplify matters and to reduce everything to three hypotheses only, the

17 way you had done it?

18 A. We look at the data with the idea that there may be some broad

19 patterns in the data on refugee flow and killing, and those patterns may

20 be quite clear. The clarity of the patterns may be surprising in light of

21 what seems to be chaos. I think that this is one of the points of

22 science, is to find patterns and clarity in the midst of chaos. When we

23 look at these patterns, they are in fact much less chaotic than would be

24 implied by the question. These are the bases for our conclusions.

25 Q. Yes, but you assume that such a complex and chaotic situation, as

1 war is, cannot be reduced and simplified to three hypotheses only. Can

2 you assume that people were fleeing from the war, the war, the war that

3 included all sufferings, all fears, not only one of the three fractions

4 that you turned into hypotheses and that you wish to single out? Are you

5 aware of that?

6 A. Is the --

7 JUDGE MAY: Rephrase the question. May there be other reasons

8 than the hypotheses which you used for people to have fled?

9 THE WITNESS: Yes, there may. These seemed to us the most obvious

10 hypotheses since these were the three parties with significant arms

11 involved at this time. However, this method does not exclude the

12 possibility that there may be other causes.

13 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

14 Q. Yesterday you said that the subject of your statistical survey was

15 actually to establish the common cause of exodus, the common cause, the

16 reason. That is the wording you used, I believe.

17 A. We used the word "common cause." We did not use the phrase

18 "establish." What we are looking for in the analysis of common cause is

19 we are looking for patterns which move together over time and space. Such

20 coherence, the connection of patterns over time and space, correlations,

21 in the statistician's language, strongly suggest the existence of a common

22 cause. They do not establish it, nor do we make the claim that that is

23 established. We conclude, based on such a strong suggestion, that such a

24 cause existed. But again, the scientific language is quite formal here.

25 Q. Of course. This is not even contested that there was a common

1 cause, but did it occur to you that the common cause of the exodus was

2 war? You said there was a cause and then this cause was stopped. There

3 was a war going on from the 24th of March onwards and then that war

4 stopped. While the war was on, the exodus was going on as well. When the

5 war stopped, the exodus stopped.

6 Did it occur to you that this common cause was the war, not

7 this - how shall I put it? - this quest and elimination between and among

8 only three hypotheses that you have put forth by simplifying an extremely

9 complex phenomenon as war is?

10 A. Is the question that when the war stopped, the refugee flow and

11 killing stopped? Is that the question? I'm sorry.

12 Q. Yes. I'm asking you, did it occur to you that this common cause

13 was the war? Because everything happened from the 24th of March when the

14 war started. And then when the war ended at the beginning of June, when

15 this common cause ceased to exist, all of this stopped. The war stopped;

16 all of this stopped.

17 JUDGE MAY: Just let the witness answer.

18 THE WITNESS: Actually, it did occur to me. Excuse me. So we

19 tested it. We tested the idea given the data we had. In particular, we

20 were interested in what happened during the ceasefire period, the

21 ceasefire declared unilaterally by the Yugoslav government - excuse me -

22 on -- again, as I said, on the evening of the 6th of June, the early

23 morning of the 7th. So I looked at the four-day period from the 7th to

24 the 10th, and again as we've discussed, there was relatively little --

25 there were relatively few killings or - and little refugee flow. The

1 graphs are clear about that.

2 What's fascinating to me is that the number of -- the number of

3 KLA activities recorded and the number of NATO airstrikes documented again

4 by the Yugoslav government and press sources, both of those patterns

5 increase dramatically, doubling and tripling relative to their numbers in

6 the earlier period. So it in fact was a unilateral ceasefire during this

7 period since these other two parties dramatically increased their activity

8 at the time when refugee flow and killing declined to tiny fractions of

9 their earlier levels.

10 So while war, in a very broad and, in my opinion, vague sense may

11 be a cause, what is clear is that the statistical relationships are not

12 equal here. One party declared a ceasefire, the refugee flow and killing

13 declined drastically, but at the same time, KLA and NATO activity

14 increased drastically. There is no corresponding increase in the patterns

15 of killing and refugee flow.

16 This helped us to be increasingly confident in our rejection of

17 the hypotheses that I earlier stated.

18 Q. I have been talking about simplification in terms of three

19 hypotheses of this common cause that is called "war." It lasted, it

20 produced these consequences, it stopped, and then the consequences

21 stopped. Are you aware of the fact that in this war, it was not

22 Yugoslavia that attacked itself?

23 A. There was a conflict that -- between NATO and Yugoslavia, and

24 there was clearly an insurgency by the KLA. What language in formal legal

25 terms you use, Mr. Milosevic, I don't know.

1 JUDGE KWON: Okay. It seems to me that what is suggested by the

2 question is that the people might have fled because of war and not a

3 single factor of that.

4 THE WITNESS: Uh-huh.

5 JUDGE KWON: How could you simplify those complex factors into

6 three simplified hypotheses? That seems to be the question. Could you

7 answer it? Could you help us in that sense?

8 THE WITNESS: I do so by means of a theory, which is that if --

9 if -- in the presence of war, there would be -- certain things would

10 occur, and those things should leave us some way to count them. Some of

11 them would be countable. We look for things, in fact, that are countable

12 as indicators of our -- of our theory about what's going on. The

13 indicators we found were battles between the KLA and Serb forces. This

14 seemed to be a reasonable indicator of the local presence of this broader

15 idea called "war." Similarly, casualties inflicted on Serb forces by the

16 KLA would be an indicator of the presence of this broader thing called

17 "war."

18 I don't claim that these indicators, the things we can count and

19 measure - deaths, battles - I don't claim that these indicators encompass

20 the complexity of this enormous idea, but they should be present.

21 JUDGE KWON: Thank you. You may go on, Mr. Milosevic.

22 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

23 Q. So then these first two hypotheses, that is to say NATO and the

24 KLA, is it clear to you that, in this war, NATO and the KLA were acting

25 with the same objective in mind? Did you give any thought to that?

1 JUDGE MAY: Can you assist or not?

2 THE WITNESS: I did not give any thought to that idea.

3 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

4 Q. And now, now can you look at this idea, this concept that NATO and

5 the KLA worked with the same objective in mind, that is, a single

6 hypothesis, the concerted activity of NATO and the KLA?

7 JUDGE MAY: He did not consider that. Therefore, he cannot give

8 evidence about it.

9 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

10 Q. All right. Even if we are not bringing together many things but,

11 rather, separating them, we are looking at a complex issue such as war.

12 Even if we were not to link them together at all, do you think that this

13 question boils down to combat action only of the Yugoslav army and police,

14 of the KLA, and of the NATO bombers respectively? Or this complex

15 phenomenon called war, does it contain many other phenomena that also

16 affect --

17 JUDGE MAY: You have made this point. He has answered the

18 question. Now, kindly move on to another topic or we'll bring this to an

19 end.

20 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] That is the core of the matter,

21 because the witness himself has said that it is certain that there are

22 many other elements.

23 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

24 Q. I am going to mention some elements now, and you're going to tell

25 me whether --

1 JUDGE MAY: He said there may have been other elements. These

2 were the three that he concentrated on. Now, if you want to put some

3 other elements, you can, but the witness may not be able to help.

4 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

5 Q. But I want to put a question to the witness. So other phenomena

6 that affect people are, in my opinion, political means, propaganda,

7 threats of the KLA, orders of the KLA, the media war that waged, et

8 cetera, and the leaflets, the black and red ones that were thrown, in the

9 colour of the Albanian flag through which the citizens were ordered to

10 leave the territory of Kosovo. War is not only a bullet and a bomb.

11 JUDGE MAY: No. Ask a question. I told you before, it's not a

12 time for making speeches.

13 Now, the question appears to be this: Were there, in your view,

14 other matters or did you consider other possible causes for, it seems to

15 be, the refugee flight, namely, propaganda and threats of the KLA?

16 THE WITNESS: This was an occasional topic of discussion among my

17 co-authors and myself. We did not consider the effect. What we did,

18 however, is observe that propaganda is unlikely to cause killing in the

19 same way, and thus when we found the close correlation, the correspondence

20 between the patterns of killing and the patterns of migration, we felt

21 that that -- that the propaganda explanation was unlikely.

22 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

23 Q. Why are you simplifying matters? Why are you reducing it to

24 propaganda only? I'm also talking about threats that were not empty

25 threats only, because the KLA killed many Albanians as well in order to

1 discipline them. I'm talking about orders issued to the population to

2 leave --

3 JUDGE MAY: Let's deal with it one by one.

4 The next question is threats. Did you consider threats made by

5 the KLA?

6 THE WITNESS: No. We considered it unlikely on the same basis.

7 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

8 Q. So this has no effect, propaganda, calls, threats, orders issued

9 by the KLA to the population to leave the territory. Is that the way it

10 is in your opinion? Or the media war either that was part of this war as

11 well?

12 A. As I said and I think as is clear from the report, we did not

13 consider these hypothesised causes presented by the question in a direct

14 way. However, given what we have considered, it seems to me that they are

15 unlikely causes.

16 Q. All right. But let's think logically about this. You have linked

17 all reactions to combat action only, to fire, as if we were talking about

18 a herd that reacted to shooting only while the shooting was going on, as

19 if it weren't people who were at stake, who think about all these things,

20 who have reason, who are susceptible to pressure, to instructions, to

21 media manipulation. Homo sapiens think and bear in mind all these

22 elements, not only the momentary situation when somebody is shooting and

23 somebody is killing. Do you bear in mind this complexity of the situation

24 that you have simplified, reducing it to these three hypotheses only?

25 A. Certainly we considered the effect of something that has happened

1 in the recent past in addition to the events that are occurring at the

2 immediate time. We had an extended discussion of this yesterday around

3 the statistical term of a "lag." Again, that means that we considered the

4 effect of KLA activity and NATO airstrikes in the previous four days, the

5 current period, two-day period, and the previous two-day period. It is in

6 this way that we have considered time.

7 I did additional analyses that go under the statistical language

8 of - pardon the jargon - autocorrelation, which looks at patterns over

9 time, looks for those sorts of relationships. The one that I found that

10 was meaningful in this analysis was the immediately-prior period. It only

11 appeared to be meaningful in the variables we discussed yesterday about

12 the KLA having -- relating to migration in certain regions at certain

13 times, but that's where it appeared.

14 Q. For example, are you aware of the columns of Albanian refugees who

15 were returning to their villages after the bombing, and they were bombed

16 along the way by NATO as they were returning? Do you think these were

17 messages as well, that orders had to be carried out, that Kosovo had to be

18 left?

19 JUDGE MAY: Do you understand the question?

20 THE WITNESS: I think so. I think the question is am I aware that

21 NATO bombed Albanian refugees on the road.

22 JUDGE MAY: That seems to be the first part, yes.

23 THE WITNESS: There were some incidents of that kind reported in

24 the Yugoslav government and press sources. We counted them in our data.

25 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

1 Q. I am asking you about the effect of such a message, when a column

2 of peasants who are going back to their village are bombed and at the same

3 time there are orders and requests put through the media that Albanians

4 should leave Kosovo. Did you take that into account as an effect of this

5 message or did you only add up the persons killed by NATO in these

6 columns?

7 A. We did not take that into effect. And to clarify, the analysis of

8 the NATO airstrikes is not number of people killed; it's number of

9 airstrikes.

10 Q. The number of airstrikes is something that we will look at later,

11 but by enumerating all of these individual elements of war - far be it

12 that I have managed to mention all of them - the question is: Is it clear

13 enough that looking at all the phenomena related to war in their

14 cumulative effect, can be defined as a common cause and that this cannot

15 boil down to --

16 JUDGE MAY: You have been making this point over and over again.

17 The witness has dealt with it. Now, in light of your application for more

18 time, we're prepared to give it to you until the adjournment. There will

19 be no more time after that. It will give you nearly three hours to

20 cross-examine this witness, which is more than adequate.

21 THE WITNESS: Your Honour, may I have two or three minutes of

22 personal privilege if we're going to continue?

23 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We'll adjourn for five minutes.

24 THE WITNESS: Thank you.

25 --- Break taken at 12.29 p.m.

1 --- On resuming at 12.35 p.m.

2 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

3 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

4 Q. So we are discussing the inviability of these simplified premises

5 in statistical analysis, even if the data were accurate, and they simply

6 cannot be, in view of their source. Do you suppose that all these

7 complexities of phenomena encompassed by the war, as a fact, as a

8 phenomenon, should be explored for a scientist to arrive at valid

9 conclusions?

10 A. This study sets out very specific hypotheses and it makes

11 conclusions based on the best data available to us. I am not competent to

12 enter into a larger methodological or epistemological debate.

13 Q. All right. If we are talking about statistical data, does the

14 fact that this report is based on records made by immigration officers on

15 the Morina border crossing and research made in refugee camps in Macedonia

16 and Albania, and even Bosnia and Herzegovina is mentioned, does this put a

17 question mark over the validity of your report and its conclusions?

18 A. No.

19 Q. And does the question arise in your mind, as the person who

20 researched this: Who are these administrative officers on the border

21 crossing of Morina who were able to engage so quickly after the aggression

22 in drafting these records? And you said the largest report came in the

23 first stage, in your own words.

24 A. These were the regular border guards who worked that post. They

25 may have been supplemented with guards brought from other posts, given

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1 that this post was experiencing such heavy flow.

2 Q. At this first stage, do you think that the issue of this readiness

3 and alertness of border guards or clerks was important, the fact that they

4 were ready to deal with this very large inflow and quickly make records?

5 A. I don't know if they were ready in some sense. They were able to

6 do a good job within the limitations of their personnel and capabilities.

7 I discussed in some detail yesterday how I evaluated their work.

8 Q. Did it cross your mind that it can only be explained by the fact

9 that the appearance of refugee columns were preplanned and organised in

10 advance in order to create an impression around the world that they were a

11 product of an ethnic cleansing campaign, and other things that you are

12 claiming, rather than the war in all its complexity, as is obvious?

13 A. There are several questions there, some of which I think I

14 answered earlier, about the war's complexity. But on your new question,

15 did it occur to me that this was preplanned, the answer is no.

16 Q. Will you tell me: Who could have expected these records to be

17 accurate and truthful, knowing the objectives of the Albanian secessionist

18 movement and the attitude of Albania towards Serbia and Yugoslavia and the

19 so-called Kosovo problem?

20 JUDGE MAY: What is the question?

21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Precisely what I asked.

22 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

23 Q. Who could possibly expect these records to be truthful, knowing

24 the objectives of the Albanian secessionist movement and the attitude of

25 Albania towards Serbia and the so-called Kosovo problem?

1 JUDGE MAY: He's dealt with these questions. Let's move on.

2 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

3 Q. You have said that the research which has allegedly been conducted

4 in refugee camps were based mainly on interviews. Who conducted these

5 interviews?

6 A. We reviewed the sources of the information in these reports

7 several times. But to review again, in answer to this question: The

8 surveys conducted to supplement the migration analysis were conducted

9 both - excuse me - first, by teams that I organised myself; second, by

10 interviews conducted on a random sample population basis by Physicians for

11 Human Rights; and third, interviews of refugees conducted by Human Rights

12 Watch.

13 In the second phase of the study, the analysis of killing

14 patterns, there are three interview-based sources in addition to the

15 exhumation records. The first were the interviews conducted by the

16 American Bar Association, Central East European Law Initiative and their

17 partners; second, interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch; third,

18 interviews conducted by the OSCE. These are the interviews conducted in

19 order to support this -- in order to do this. They were conducted by very

20 different organisations, at different times and places, and yet they tell

21 a remarkably similar story.

22 Q. We are talking about --

23 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Milosevic, just a minute.

24 Who were the people interviewed?

25 THE WITNESS: Kosovar Albanian people who were either in refugee

1 camps or back in Kosovo, depending on which phase of which survey we're

2 discussing. They were Kosovar Albanian civilians.

3 JUDGE ROBINSON: I'm not sure if this is what Mr. Milosevic was

4 inquiring about, but I would be interested, in any event, to know whether

5 your analysis took account of the -- what would be a natural prejudice on

6 the part of the interviewees.

7 THE WITNESS: We did not take account of it in a direct sense;

8 however, statistically what I think is interesting is that our method for

9 the killing analysis depends on finding the same people reported by the

10 same or different witnesses to different projects. We found a relatively

11 high rate of those overlaps among different reporting processes. That is

12 to say, the same victims appeared in Human Rights Watch interviews, OSCE

13 interviews, ABA/CEELI interviews; and in exhumation records, not always in

14 all of them, but you see a very high rate of overlap among two systems or

15 among three systems. If people were making this data up, they would have

16 had to coordinate a fabrication among more than 15.000 interviews

17 conducted over an almost two-year period and given to four different -- or

18 three different organisations, as well as fabricating exhumation records.

19 The level of fabrication required is, in my opinion, deeply implausible.

20 It is in that way that, at a statistical level, we are confident of the

21 robustness, that is to say, the resistance of our findings to fabrication.

22 JUDGE ROBINSON: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

23 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

24 Q. I think precisely the opposite. I think they were coached,

25 because the statements, depending on their education attainment level,

1 were identical. But let us make one thing clear. We are talking about an

2 interview as a methodological procedure, requiring a very qualified and

3 unbiased approach. Is that correct?

4 A. For the purposes to which we put these interviews, all that I

5 required was that people write the story down. We're looking here just

6 for a list of people described as dead, and the time and place of the

7 witness's best recollection of where and when that person was killed.

8 Q. You know very well, being a sociologist, that the interview, as a

9 methodological procedure, cannot be conducted with one single question:

10 Please describe what happened.

11 A. The interviews were done in different ways. As you'll find in

12 Appendix 1, there's some discussion of the interview process. The Human

13 Rights Watch interviews were conducted by a qualitative method, which

14 proceeds along the lines of the interviewee's story. The ABA/CEELI and

15 OSCE interviews were conducted using a -- to use a tiny bit of jargon

16 here, a semi-structured interview process, which asked open-ended

17 questions, for example: Why did you leave your home? The witness would

18 report, in some phrases, his or her reply. Those would be recorded.

19 The interview - or excuse me - the questionnaire process for the

20 OSCE and the ABA/CEELI teams was quite similar.

21 Physicians for Human Rights used a much more tightly structured

22 interview process.

23 Again, the only use we put those interviews to in this work was to

24 calculate from the story the time it took from someone's departure from

25 their home to crossing the border. That's the only use we put those

1 interviews to in this study. Although the interviews that I designed and

2 that we did in the refugee camps in Albania and other refugee-gathering

3 locations in Albania, although that was a much more elaborate interview,

4 the only use we put it to in here was to calculate the transit time, as I

5 just described - the time it takes people to get out from their home, to

6 get to the border - as well as to provide a check on the distribution of

7 people's origin locations over time, as reported in the border data.

8 These methods are described in "Policy or Panic?"

9 Q. Precisely what you have just mentioned, that you used their

10 statements to establish the time of departure and the time of border

11 crossing. You said yesterday you had established that the overwhelming

12 majority crossed the border the day following the date of departure. Is

13 that correct?

14 A. No. I'm sorry. What we established is that the overwhelming

15 majority of people had crossed the border on the same day -- not the

16 overwhelming majority. More than half the people crossing the border on

17 any given day left their homes that same day. That was our -- what we

18 discovered.

19 Q. That is even less likely than what I mentioned in my question,

20 because that Morina crossing, and even the Vrbnica crossing, make it

21 implausible for anyone to cross the border on the same day as leaving

22 their homes, if we bear in mind the enormous mass of people. Do you know

23 anything about the distance, the difficulties of the journey? Do you

24 understand that it's very unlikely that such a great number of people at

25 that first stage crossed the border on the same day they left their

1 homes?

2 A. There are two independent counts of the number of people crossing

3 the border at that point. The numbers largely agree. And when they

4 disagree, the numbers reported by the UNHCR and OSCE observers is always

5 higher, always greater than what was registered by the border guards. So

6 I can't address the plausibility of whether it happened except to say that

7 I think that all available evidence says that it did happen. So

8 plausibility is no longer an issue.

9 Q. I understand that plausibility is not your area of expertise, but

10 it's -- when I'm saying that it's unlikely for them to have made a move on

11 the same day as crossing the border, then it puts a question mark over

12 their other statements if something that is physically impossible is

13 mentioned.

14 JUDGE MAY: Ask a question, Mr. Milosevic.

15 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

16 Q. Can we consider, in view of the fact that we agreed that the

17 interview as a methodological procedure has to be conducted neutrally and

18 by experts, by qualified people, can we consider as neutral the way that

19 interviews were conducted by the party which perpetrated the aggression?

20 JUDGE MAY: No. That's not a proper question.

21 THE ACCUSED [Interpretation] The question is very clear. I don't

22 know if it was put correctly.

23 JUDGE MAY: You can change the suggestion that it was conducted by

24 the party which perpetrated the aggression. That is not a proper

25 question.

1 What you can deal with, Dr. Ball, is this: Do you consider as

2 neutral the way in which the interviews were conducted?

3 THE WITNESS: For the purposes of obtaining the data required for

4 this analysis, the interviews were neutral.

5 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

6 Q. And in which way -- except for the statements of refugees, what

7 else is there to support the claim that only a few number -- that only a

8 small number of Kosovar Albanians fled Kosovo because of NATO bombing and

9 that it followed certain constant patterns so it had to be coordinated?

10 What is there to support this claim?

11 A. Well, I believe that is a conclusion from my first report.

12 However, I would point to the current report that we're looking at as

13 evidence here and say that we have now given the analysis of refugee flow

14 a thorough statistical test by two different measures and found

15 conclusively and consistently that NATO airstrike patterns do not explain

16 the patterns seen in refugee flow. Furthermore, the close correlation of

17 refugee flow with killing patterns over both time and space suggests more

18 strongly than in the first report that there is some sort of coherent or

19 common cause of the two phenomena.

20 Q. Yes, but NATO's airstrikes were also coordinated with the

21 activities of the KLA on the ground, and they constituted one

22 comprehensive form of attack on Yugoslavia.

23 JUDGE MAY: No. That is a speech. Now, have you got any more

24 questions? Because the time is practically finished.

25 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

1 Q. The main conclusion that Yugoslav authorities planned and carried

2 out a campaign which was centrally organised in order to ethnically

3 cleanse from Albanians at least certain areas of Kosovo, as claimed, is

4 not proven in any way except by hypothesis. So I'm asking you: If the

5 Yugoslav authorities planned and carried out a centrally organised

6 campaign, where is that plan? What is it called and who made it?

7 A. My conclusion here and the conclusion of myself and my co-authors

8 is that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Yugoslav

9 forces conducted a systematic campaign of killings and expulsions. Again,

10 we have found the evidence to be consistent with the hypothesis, and I've

11 described in some detail why and how we reached that conclusion.

12 That is the extent of my expertise, is to speak to the statistical

13 evidence related to the hypotheses which we proposed. Beyond that, I'm

14 unable to comment further.

15 Q. All right. But you are aware of the statement of one of NATO

16 Defence Ministers, the German Minister, Rudolf Scharping, who said that

17 there was a plan, the Horseshoe Operation, and this claim was later

18 refuted even by his own associates as a lie. Are you aware of that?

19 JUDGE MAY: Do you know anything about this?

20 THE WITNESS: I read about it in the press, that's all.

21 JUDGE MAY: He can't deal with this.

22 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

23 Q. Fine. If there is no such plan, and there is none, how can this

24 campaign be conducted in a planned and organised manner?

25 JUDGE MAY: He's here to give statistical evidence, which he's

1 given. He cannot answer that question.

2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right.

3 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

4 Q. How do you explain that if everything you are presenting in

5 statistical terms -- if I may ask you to agree with certain things, if we

6 added up, in terms of maps 1, 2, 3, and 4, it turns out that 471.000

7 people crossed over into Albania. So where is the difference, the

8 difference of 850.000 people mentioned in the indictment? It is

9 unimaginable that all of them crossed over to Macedonia or Bosnia and

10 Herzegovina.

11 A. The number to which you refer includes border crossings other than

12 the one that I studied. The number of total refugees, 850.000, does not

13 come from my most recent work. I can't comment on it.

14 However, it's important to remember that refugees went places

15 other than just Macedonia. They went to Montenegro. Some went to

16 Bosnia-Herzegovina. So should you seek a larger number, it seems

17 appropriate to look at all the destination countries.

18 Q. Very well. So it's not within the area of your interest. But

19 dealing with what you have, how do you explain the large difference in the

20 number of refugees, according to your maps 1, 2, 3, and 4, 471.000, and

21 the diagram which indicates 248.000 people? How do you explain that

22 difference?

23 A. Where does 248 come from?

24 Q. I mean the chart that you show for the first, second, and third

25 stages.

1 A. Can you give me a --

2 Q. You have the right -- I don't see how you marked the chart, but

3 this is a rectangular chart. 25th March, 12th April, 24th May. That is

4 the chart which shows in the first stage, second stage, third stage, and

5 when you add all the numbers up, you get 248.000.

6 A. Can you tell me which report it's in --

7 JUDGE MAY: Can you assist with this at all?

8 THE WITNESS: I don't know what he's referring to. I would look

9 at it, but I don't know.

10 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, the witness can't assist with this

11 matter. Now, you've got one more question to ask him and then we must

12 adjourn.

13 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have more than one question,

14 Judge May.

15 JUDGE MAY: We have given you a time limit and it's now come, so

16 you've got one more question.

17 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

18 Q. Please, this is very important. One of your claims is that NATO

19 bombing did not produce waves of refugees, while your own data go against

20 it, because the percentages of NATO airstrikes coincide with the numbers

21 of refugees by stages.

22 I will read to you the data. You said the number of targets --

23 you mentioned 942, with the proviso that at the first stage the number of

24 targets was 541, and that is from the 24th March to the 6th of April. Out

25 of the total number of targets, that is 58.55 per cent. And in that first

1 stage, from the 24th of March to the 6th of April, you quote in your text

2 that 236.000 people fled, which means at the first stage, according to

3 your own text, amounts to 61.14 per cent, which is an extremely large

4 degree of coincidence. 58.8 -- 55 per cent of targets --

5 JUDGE MAY: [Previous translation continues]... just break this up

6 so the witness can follow it. Now, what is being said? Just break it

7 up.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. Do you follow me?

10 A. If you can refer me to what you're looking at; which report, what

11 page number, what table?

12 Q. I made for myself, because I have no resource to any assistance

13 here, I made copies of your report, but you know that what you wrote in

14 your text that in the first stage, from the 24th of March to the 6th of

15 April, 236.000 got out. In the second stage --

16 JUDGE MAY: Just pause -- pause there.

17 Do you agree with that figure?

18 Just a moment. Just a moment. Let him deal with it.

19 Do you agree with that figure?

20 THE WITNESS: I think that is approximately correct. We'd need to

21 refer -- I don't want to be held to that number without checking it here,

22 but I think that's approximately correct.

23 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We'll accept that.

24 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

25 Q. You can check it on the tape. I'm reading your data. I'm not

1 reading my own.

2 So in your text, you're talking about 236.000 in total out of

3 which in the first stage 236.000, in the second stage 83.000, and in the

4 third stage 67.000, and the total is 386.000.

5 JUDGE MAY: Wait a minute. Two hundred and thirty-six thousand in

6 the second stage. Does that sound right?

7 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] [No interpretation]

8 JUDGE MAY: All right. 83.000 in the second stage. Does that

9 sound about right?

10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] That's true.

11 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

12 Q. In the first stage, 236.000. Is that correct? The second,

13 83.000; and in the third, 67.000. Is that correct?

14 JUDGE MAY: Just let the witness --

15 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

16 Q. And--

17 JUDGE MAY: Yes?

18 THE WITNESS: Those are approximately correct, yes.

19 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

20 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

21 Q. Now, look at the number of targets, bomb targets, NATO

22 airstrikes. 924, as you put it, in the first stage, 541 in the second

23 stage --

24 JUDGE MAY: Wait a moment. Let's break it down.

25 It's suggested there were 924 in the first stage. Does that sound

1 about right?

2 THE WITNESS: No. Where are you getting that data, please, so we

3 can refer to it here? I don't remember that. I don't think -- the

4 bombing numbers that I know of are much smaller than that. Remember,

5 we're counting airstrikes, not people killed or something else.

6 If you could give me a direct reference.

7 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

8 Q. You wrote in your text a total of 924 as the number of targets in

9 Kosovo. 924. In the first stage --

10 JUDGE MAY: Where will we find this in the text?

11 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] In his own text, Mr. May. I can't

12 leaf through it now. You can check this data. It can be found in the

13 text.

14 JUDGE MAY: He doesn't agree with you. But will you come to the

15 point?

16 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

17 Q. So what is the essence?

18 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Please take the time to hear me

19 out. And if you don't believe this data is in his own text, you can check

20 it later. In fact, he himself can do it.

21 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

22 Q. We have verified -- deal with the number of refugees. Now we are

23 dealing with the number of targets, 924 --

24 JUDGE MAY: [Previous translation continues] ... yes. What is the

25 point that you're making to him?

1 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

2 Q. I have been saying this: Out of the refugees number, in the first

3 stage -- 61.14 per cent crossed over in the first stage, because 236.000

4 out of --

5 JUDGE MAY: Does that sound right?

6 THE WITNESS: That sounds right.

7 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

8 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

9 Q. At the same time, the number of targets in the first stage is

10 58.55 per cent. 58.55 --

11 JUDGE MAY: What does that mean?

12 MR. MILOSEVIC: [Interpretation]

13 Q. -- and 61.14 --

14 JUDGE MAY: What does that mean?

15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] That means that the percentage of

16 refugee outflow in the first stage almost completely coincides with the

17 number of targets in the first stage.

18 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We have the point.

19 What is your comment on that?

20 THE WITNESS: I don't know where his number of targets comes

21 from. That --

22 JUDGE KWON: How about the percentage? Almost 58 per cent was

23 bombed during the first phase? That seems to be the question.

24 THE WITNESS: 58 per cent of what? Are we talking that 58 per

25 cent of the airstrikes occurred in the first stage? That is certainly

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12 Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and

13 English transcripts.

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1 false. If we mean that 58 per cent of the municipalities in Kosovo were

2 bombed during the first phase -- is that what the question is? That's

3 possible. We'd have to look at that municipality by municipality.

4 The question, though, it seems to me, for a causal argument, has

5 to do not with whether it occurs in a long period but whether there is a

6 sufficiently close correlation in time and place of bombing intensity and

7 refugee outflow to hypothesise or to sustain the hypothesis that the

8 bombing pattern has caused it, and we have conducted that analysis and

9 rejected that hypothesis.

10 JUDGE MAY: Can you take it any further than that?

11 THE WITNESS: I don't think so, no.

12 [Trial Chamber confers]

13 JUDGE MAY: Yes. We will adjourn now. After the adjournment, we

14 will hear the amicus.

15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] You won't let me put any more

16 questions?

17 JUDGE MAY: No. That's right, we won't.

18 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] What was that?

19 JUDGE MAY: We will adjourn until twenty to three.

20 --- Luncheon recess taken at 1.12 p.m.

21

22

23

24

25

1 --- On resuming at 2.43 p.m.

2 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Kay.

3 Yes, Mr. Milosevic.

4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] It was my understanding that you

5 would not let me continue my cross-examination. I just want to give some

6 explanations that the witness requested, and I did not have these things

7 at hand.

8 924 bombings. That particular figure comes from maps under B,

9 from the first report. 924 bombings: In the first stage, 541; in the

10 second one, 241; and in the third one, 142. And the percentages

11 calculated showed that the percentages of refugee flows and the

12 percentages of the targets engaged totally coincide. They correspond to

13 each other, actually.

14 Secondly, the chart that the witness asked me about is the chart

15 that is Chart 1, also from Annex 1 of the first report, and the total is

16 248.000: In one -- in first stage, 164; and in the third stage, 49 [as

17 interpreted]. And Maps 2.1, 2.3, and 2.4, the total is 471.000. The

18 second stage is 331 and the last one is 67 [as interpreted]. So according

19 to the maps, it is one figure, and according to the charts, it is another

20 figure.

21 In addition to that, the witness said that he did not operate with

22 the figure of 850.000 refugees.

23 JUDGE MAY: You've had your chance to explain the matter, and

24 that's sufficient. We're going to hear -- no, no. We're going to hear

25 now some cross-examination from the amicus.

1 Yes.

2 Questioned by Mr. Kay:

3 Q. Dr. Ball, have you ever appeared as an expert witness in court

4 before?

5 A. No.

6 Q. The data that you used for the compilation of your report and

7 research, is that available for an independent inspection?

8 A. The data for the migration study were placed on the

9 Internet -- were placed on the Internet over a year ago. The data on

10 killing were disclosed to the Defence along with the report. The

11 information on KLA activity and NATO activity were derived, as I

12 described, primarily from open sources, which we detailed. And so we

13 believe that the data are available to the Defence.

14 Q. Is there any aspect of the data that is not available? Is there

15 any aspect of your research that is unable to be disclosed or is

16 unavailable?

17 A. The 45 per cent of the sources used to analyse the KLA data are

18 the -- are in the domain of the Office of the Prosecutor, and I would

19 direct the inquiry to them.

20 MR. NICE: Can I just help with that, because I was going to deal

21 with it in any event. That material, subject to any redactions for proper

22 reasons that might be approved by the Chamber, will be available to any

23 expert who wants to have a look at it.

24 MR. KAY: I'm grateful.

25 Q. In relation to your research and study, what would be the leading

1 international journal in which a study such as this would be published for

2 reading and inspection by other members of your profession?

3 A. Probably demography, the journal of -- one of the journals of the

4 Population Association of America.

5 Q. Has your report been sent to that publication for publishing?

6 A. Not right now, no.

7 Q. Do you intend to do that?

8 A. Some portions of the -- I'm sorry, there's a ringing.

9 Q. Yes. There's a technical hitch, obviously, going on.

10 MR. KAY: Shall I ...

11 JUDGE MAY: It can't be interpreted.

12 [Trial Chamber and registrar confer]

13 JUDGE MAY: Apparently the technician is on his way. Yes. It

14 seems to be -- try it now.

15 MR. KAY: Thank you. I don't think that was me.

16 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

17 MR. KAY:

18 Q. Dr. Ball, just to repeat my last question ...

19 MR. KAY: I'll try again, shall I, Your Honour?

20 Q. Dr. Ball, just repeat my last -- no.

21 MR. KAY: We have something coming into the courtroom, Your

22 Honour.

23 JUDGE MAY: Try again.

24 MR. KAY:

25 Q. Dr. Ball, I'll just repeat my last question.

1 JUDGE MAY: We're going to have to adjourn. Ten minutes.

2 --- Break taken at 2.52 p.m.

3 --- On resuming at 3.02 p.m.

4 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Kay, it's apparently been fixed.

5 MR. KAY: Yes.

6 JUDGE MAY: It sounds all right.

7 MR. KAY: I will move on to another subject as I know time is of

8 the essence.

9 JUDGE MAY: Yes. I should say that we will in fact sit until 5.00

10 because we've had these breaks.

11 MR. KAY: Yes.

12 Q. I want to deal with general matters concerning data, Dr. Ball.

13 Data you have used depends upon the accuracy of the account or record

14 given; that is right?

15 A. Well, the data depends -- every piece of data has some precision

16 associated with it, if that's what you mean.

17 Q. Yes.

18 A. Yes.

19 Q. And the record made of data has to be accurate as well?

20 A. The record made of data. I'm not sure what you mean.

21 Q. Let's just take a simple example in this case of the border guards

22 in Morina. The account given to them must be accurate.

23 A. Well, what people say to the border guards when they say, "This is

24 my address," yes, that must be accurate.

25 Q. Yes. The date they left the country, that must be accurate?

1 A. It must be accurate when it's written down by the border guards on

2 the form, yes.

3 Q. And for any study such as yours, you are only able to act upon the

4 records what you're given?

5 A. That's not quite right, actually.

6 Q. Why not?

7 A. Because this concern that you're raising is the point of a kind of

8 study called sensitivity analysis. And we have done substantial

9 sensitivity analyses in both the migration study as well in the present

10 study, looking for, quite literally, the sensitivity of our findings to

11 imprecision in the data.

12 Q. The record made by the person writing a document upon which your

13 data is based must also be accurate; is that right?

14 A. No, it mustn't. Well, that's not quite right, actually. I'm

15 sorry, I will have to refer to my previous answer. We -- it is certain

16 that some data are in error. The question is then: Does that error

17 impact our conclusions? That is the point of doing a sensitivity

18 analysis.

19 If the findings are not subject to change, the conclusions are not

20 subject to change as a result of making very, very different kinds of

21 assumptions about the precision of the reporting, then we say the

22 conclusions are robust to imprecision in the data. So it -- I think it's

23 your term "must" that I'm objecting to. That's not quite correct,

24 actually.

25 Q. In relation to the raw data, the forms completed by the Albanian

1 border guards, are they available for inspection?

2 A. They are not currently available for inspection. I could -- I

3 had, at the time that I obtained the records, a brief note of agreement

4 with the Albanian government that I would maintain those records in

5 confidence. I could inquire of the Albanian government.

6 Q. Yes. You've heard the allegation in this case that these could be

7 fabricated.

8 A. I've heard that allegation.

9 Q. And a part of that allegation, if it's to be carried forward,

10 would require examination of the documents that you yourself have relied

11 upon.

12 A. That would be one way to test the allegation. However, I would

13 refer you to Appendix A in the "Policy or Panic?" study where we tested

14 the patterns in the border records against the surveys and found them to

15 tell substantially the same story. We have several different surveys. We

16 looked at some of the most important patterns we found in the border data

17 and we found the same patterns. So I think that for statistical purposes

18 we have already investigated the possibility that there might be some

19 problem, of whatever kind, with the border data, and we have rejected

20 that.

21 Q. Moving on now to an aspect of your analysis, which was the dates

22 of the migrations. As I understand it, the data that you have worked upon

23 has been compiled by an assumption of the period of time taken for each of

24 those individuals to migrate from their village through to the border

25 crossing of Morina.

1 A. Sorry. What's the question?

2 Q. As I take it, you have made an assumption.

3 A. No, we didn't make an assumption. I'm sorry.

4 Q. Right.

5 A. Let me clarify that. We looked at the survey records that I've

6 described in the past and we determined from the survey records how long

7 each of the respondents in the surveys had been in transit from his or her

8 home village to the border point. So we then have a set of transit times

9 that correspond to a particular -- leaving a particular village at a

10 particular time. Understand so far? I'll explain how this applies.

11 Q. Can I just clarify one matter: Is it an estimate, then, of the

12 time of each individual, when they would have left the village to have got

13 to the border crossing?

14 A. That's closer, yes, yes. We estimate, actually, for each person

15 crossing the border, how long ago they left their homes, and we make that

16 estimate based on the survey information.

17 Q. And it's that migration which -- or time of migration that really

18 underpins your research, doesn't it?

19 A. Well, originally I thought it would, which is why I did a

20 sensitivity analysis precisely on the question you're asking, and we

21 simulated very, very different kinds of migration or transit time

22 structure from people's departure to the point of getting to the border.

23 That distribution, the amount of time it takes the people who cross the

24 border on a given day - How long ago did they leave? Some people left

25 today, some people left yesterday, some people left the day before - that,

1 to a statistician, has a certain shape. I simulated -- and in the report

2 here that's been on the Internet for a year and a half or a bit more, I

3 simulated very, very different distributions. I said: Well, what would

4 happen if the transit time process was completely different? And I did

5 that in six different ways. All of those results were nearly

6 indistinguishable from the original. It turns out that the transit time

7 process makes very little difference to the conclusions which have been

8 presented in this report and subsequently in the report which my

9 co-authors and I have presented to the Court.

10 Q. One other aspect of data as well that I'd like to deal with here

11 is the dates of killings and identities of who has been killed, because,

12 would you agree, this seems quite an important part of your research?

13 A. The dates of killings are quite important.

14 Q. Yes.

15 A. The names are important, but I think less so for technical

16 reasons.

17 Q. Shall we just start with date of killing.

18 A. Sure.

19 Q. As I understand it, there are instances that you have relied upon

20 when people have given a date, and that's been a date with a named person

21 that you've been able to positively identify.

22 A. That's correct.

23 Q. There have been other occasions when accounts have been given of a

24 body being referred to by the side of the road or in a house, which is a

25 death that has formed part of your statistical material.

1 A. Well, let's clarify that a bit. The people who were identified

2 without name we referred to as the anonymous victims. The anonymous

3 victims played a role in this analysis only for one purpose. It's

4 important to be clear. For this purpose only did we use the anonymous

5 victims, and that was to establish that removing all the anonymous victims

6 who could possibly have been accounted for by name as a named victim,

7 there nonetheless remain quite a few; at minimum 2.000-some anonymous

8 victims.

9 The only use we put this information to is to say there have to be

10 more. There have to be more than the named victims. We do not believe

11 that the anonymous victims provide an adequate basis for a statistical

12 estimate. They do not provide sufficient information for us to do

13 analysis. So we used only the named victims. But we observe that net of

14 the named victims, nonetheless, many thousands of anonymous victims remain

15 who had names. These people had names, they are just not documented.

16 Q. In relation to deaths as well, was it possible to distinguish in

17 your research as to which of the victims were Serbs, which were Kosovo

18 Albanians, whatever ethnic group they may be? Was there any distinction

19 you are able to draw within the figures that you have given?

20 A. Yes.

21 Q. Could you explain further.

22 A. We attempted to identify names that appeared to be ethnically Serb

23 names. Because this was a study -- this is a study of ethnic Albanians,

24 it was important to exclude the Serb victims from the calculations. They

25 would get their own calculations in a different study, I presume. But for

1 this study, we wanted to exclude them from the lists. We sought lists of

2 surnames, and when we -- surnames of Albanian and Serb surnames, and when

3 we found names, we checked each of the names on our lists against the

4 Serb -- the list of Serb surnames, and when we identified them, we removed

5 them from the list and did not use them in the calculation.

6 Q. So the identification process that you underwent had to be

7 accurate to get the right people for your statistical study.

8 A. The identification of the ethnicity of their name?

9 Q. The people who identified them had to be right about the person

10 they had identified.

11 A. That's correct.

12 Q. And any problems associated with the identification process might

13 cause your attribution of those particular deaths to be flawed.

14 A. Well, "might" encompasses, to a statistician, a wide range of

15 probably. I think it's possible that misidentification could increase the

16 error range, the margin of errors that we have reported. However, I doubt

17 it, because in order for the misattribution to affect these results beyond

18 the error that we have already calculated, those misattributions would

19 have to be not only very large in number but they would have to be very

20 systematically distributed through these four independent projects. The

21 combination of those two assumptions seems to me very unlikely. So I do

22 not consider it probable. It is possible, perhaps remotely possible.

23 Q. We've heard about carbonised bodies, bodies that are

24 unrecognisable. How were they dealt with in your study?

25 A. Well, if they were unrecognisable, then -- and they were

1 identified, for example, by an exhumation, then they would be part of the

2 deaths -- the bodies exhumed there were not identified. In reference --

3 in Appendix 1, you will find that we excluded approximately half of the

4 exhumation records because they did not have names. So a carbonised body

5 that was never identified would be in that category.

6 On the other hand, if the person had been seen to have been killed

7 by someone else, if there was a witness to the death and if that witness

8 subsequently reported that death to one of -- either the OSCE or Human

9 Rights Watch or ABA/CEELI or its partners, that death would appear in the

10 lists.

11 If we can take a second on this observation, it's actually quite

12 insightful, because this is precisely what a statistician is looking for

13 by the combination of data with different kinds of data that are going to

14 be excluded.

15 Q. Yes.

16 A. So if, for example, a death occurs and there are no witnesses to

17 that death except the perpetrators, that person may nonetheless appear in

18 an exhumation, but of course, he or she would not appear on a list created

19 by witnesses because no one would have witnessed it.

20 The example that has been posed by the question is the opposite

21 problem; a death which cannot be identified in exhumation but might well

22 have been identified by witnesses.

23 To a statistician, these are biases or exclusions or data that

24 can't get into a list which complement each other when you combine the

25 lists. This is exactly the thing which this method, the multiple systems

1 estimation, is strongest at, is identifying those sorts of conditions.

2 Q. Moving on to another subject, I'd like us to turn to page 11 of

3 your final report, and Figure 8, which is the table headed "Timing of KLA

4 attacks with killings and refugee flow."

5 Have you got that before you, Dr. Ball?

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. Thank you. Looking at this table here in relation to your

8 particular study, killings preceded or coincided with peak in relation to

9 the KLA, from your study, am I right in thinking matched 38 per cent of

10 your material?

11 A. Not quite. It matched 38 per cent of the -- in 38 per cent of the

12 municipalities, of the 29 municipalities, the -- there is one or more KLA

13 attack or interaction with Serb forces in the four days preceding the peak

14 of refugee flow.

15 Q. So that appears --

16 A. Excuse me, killings. Ten for refugees.

17 Q. I was dealing with killings.

18 A. Right.

19 Q. That appears to be more than a third of the instances; is that

20 right?

21 A. It's a third of the municipalities, yes.

22 Q. Yes. And in relation to the refugee flow, that again is slightly

23 more than a third.

24 A. A third of the municipalities.

25 Q. Yes.

1 A. Yes.

2 Q. Turning to page 12, Figure 9, the timing of NATO airstrikes with

3 killings preceding or coinciding with the peak; 10 per cent.

4 A. Of municipalities, yes.

5 Q. Yes. Refugee flow, again with municipalities, in relation to NATO

6 airstrikes preceding or coinciding with the peak; 31 per cent.

7 A. Yes.

8 Q. You make the distinction with municipalities. Why do you make

9 that distinction?

10 A. I'm sorry. Why do I make -- why do we use municipalities as the

11 unit of analysis?

12 Q. Yes.

13 A. Because here we were seeking a method to present this kind of --

14 present an analysis of these statistical relationships in really quite

15 straightforward terms without using more complex statistical techniques.

16 In this way, we were really also looking for something that would be

17 comparable to the municipality level analysis done in the "Policy or

18 Panic?" study, the earlier study. This seemed one way to do that.

19 Q. You've chosen to represent your material by the use of a graph.

20 If we look at page 9 and other pages within your report, you use the graph

21 system for the presentation of your material.

22 A. The graph system?

23 Q. Yes.

24 A. We use graphs, yes. That's a standard statistical technique.

25 Q. Yes. There are other standard statistical techniques. One can

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1 use a column diagram of blocks. You can use a pie chart.

2 A. You can. However, in standard statistical practice, representing

3 something over time is done with a line where time is on the horizontal

4 axis. Other representational schemes are possible for other kinds of data

5 but would be inappropriate for these data.

6 Q. If we are dealing with amounts or quantity so that we could look

7 at this material, we could use a block system, column graph.

8 A. For quantity, yes.

9 Q. Yes.

10 A. Where the -- that would be most appropriate where the distinctions

11 were by category, but that's refinement.

12 Q. And if we were to look at this material in that form, we would see

13 in certain municipalities that the KLA killings were the more dominant

14 cause for the refugee flow.

15 A. Well, the interpretation would never be about the cause. The

16 interpretation would always be that there seemed to be a higher level of

17 KLA killing in some areas, or KLA interactions, battles, or casualties

18 inflicted on Serb forces. Those would be higher in some municipalities

19 and lower in others, and in some municipalities that would coincide with

20 higher levels of other phenomena.

21 Q. Just taking your material, and in relation to it, I'm not saying

22 whether it's good or bad, but in relation to your material, there have

23 been killings caused by KLA activity that caused refugee flow?

24 A. I think we have a confusion about what the header "Killings" means

25 here in this table. Are you referring to Table 9?

1 Q. Yes.

2 A. Right. The "Killings" column does not refer to KLA killings; it

3 refers to the killings we have estimated -- or actually just counted in

4 this case. These are not estimates, as we discussed in my direct exam.

5 These killings are only those which we counted in our 4.400. So that's

6 distinct from the KLA killing measure which we have discussed in the

7 context of the tests, for example, in Figure 8, or also in Figures 10 and

8 11.

9 Q. And in relation to your conclusion, you have written that you

10 believe the activity of the Serb forces was the primary cause. If you

11 want the reference ... I've had to shorten my questioning, so I can't put

12 my finger on it, but --

13 A. Perhaps I can help you.

14 Q. Yes.

15 A. Our conclusion is that the evidence is consistent with the

16 hypothesis that Yugoslav activity was the cause of these -- of the

17 killings and refugee flow of Albanian -- of Kosovar Albanians. We do not

18 refer to that being the proof nor do we say that it establishes that;

19 rather, we find them to be consistent with the hypothesis. These

20 statistical methods do not prove things, although they can assist us in

21 rejecting claims. So I think it's useful to be as formal as possible in

22 the scientific language here.

23 Q. Just one other matter I want to deal with, which is the border

24 crossing of Morina, wherever that might be. The issue doesn't change.

25 You have taken the documents from one place. We know from the evidence

1 there are six or seven other border crossings that might be used by

2 refugees. Why do you say that just taking the one place is able to

3 provide a statistical analysis for the whole region?

4 A. I believe I covered this in my direct testimony, but to repeat

5 that, there were two reasons. First, by my estimate presented in the

6 first report, "Policy or Panic?" I believe that somewhat more than half of

7 all Kosovar Albanians who left Kosovo did so through this point. Thus,

8 this is clearly more important than all the other exit points combined.

9 Second, I examined survey information from other places and

10 considered what the likely pattern from those places would be. The likely

11 pattern discovered that -- that I found in the survey data suggests that

12 patterns of refugees entering the other countries would be similar to the

13 pattern I found in -- on the refugees that crossed through the data I did

14 examine directly.

15 So both because I have more than half the data, and second,

16 because what other information available suggests that other places are

17 similar or the same, leads me to conclude that this analysis, using this

18 data, does represent the most likely patterns of refugee movement.

19 That was where we had to leave it in the first study.

20 Subsequently, of course, as I've been discussing for the last two days,

21 the information on killing patterns again correlates quite closely to the

22 original migration patterns. This provides us with an external,

23 completely separate statistical validation of the original findings.

24 Q. But it does depend upon an assumption that, first of all, the

25 border crossing that you have chosen -- and there may be a dispute about

1 the place and whether it's the right place - I don't know - but it depends

2 upon the assumption that you do have up to half the total figure of people

3 migrating through that particular channel; is that right?

4 A. Well, it's not exactly an assumption; it's more like an estimate,

5 because we do know something about the numbers of people who crossed

6 through other points. We are not -- we do know something. We know

7 something from the counts kept by the Albanian border guards at the two

8 other primary crossing points; we know something, although, in my opinion,

9 with quite a bit of error, we know something about refugees who crossed

10 into Macedonia; and we do know something about refugees who crossed into

11 Bosnia; and we know a little bit, with less certainty, about those who

12 crossed into Montenegro. So knowing those other things, I think we can

13 narrow the claim I've made from an assumption to, I think, a reasonable

14 estimate.

15 JUDGE ROBINSON: Mr. Kay, just let me --

16 MR. KAY: Yes, Your Honour.

17 JUDGE ROBINSON: -- ask the witness a particular question, since

18 it's before me here.

19 One of the reasons that you advance as to why you used Morina is

20 you say the other information that you have in relation to other crossings

21 is more or less the same, or is the same. I mean, have you exhibited that

22 in your report?

23 THE WITNESS: It's statistically similar, I think is what I would

24 say; not the same but, rather, that it would not, if we added it, change

25 the findings. I have not exhibited it in the current report, because I

1 did not anticipate this would be of so much question. It is, however,

2 documented in my earlier report, in the "Policy or Panic?" report, which

3 we looked at this morning. It is discussed in some detail there.

4 JUDGE ROBINSON: I see. I would have thought that that was a

5 matter of some importance.

6 THE WITNESS: I'm sorry. I didn't see that.

7 MR. KAY:

8 Q. If it is an issue that's investigated, is the data able to be

9 scrutinised upon which you have said you have based your estimate?

10 A. As I said in the answer to the first data inquiry, the data from

11 the migration report have been available on the Internet for over a year.

12 So the data analysed in this report and in the report I've presented here,

13 these have been available for some time.

14 The other sources that I used - not the surveys, but the other

15 overall counts - are available -- they're cited in the OSCE report and are

16 available from the UNHCR. UNHCR made many of those estimates.

17 The survey data are not all mine to disclose. That which is mine,

18 I could make available. I have not yet, simply because there hasn't been

19 time. It's complicated to make sure that the confidentiality concerns are

20 all addressed.

21 But the other data that I used for this process from Physicians

22 for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch, again, I have under

23 confidentiality agreements, so I would have to inquire of them.

24 MR. KAY: Thank you. I have no further questions.

25 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Nice. Fairly briefly, please.

1 MR. NICE: I'm afraid I have a number of matters, and I think they

2 are important, and I must seek to deal with them.

3 Re-examined by Mr. Nice:

4 Q. Dr. Ball, much of this can be dealt with by yes or no answers, and

5 if you would be so good, I'd ask you to provide those answers whenever

6 possible.

7 Just dealing with the questions of the amici, first of all, the

8 report to the Court, has it until now been kept confidential because it's

9 appropriate to go to the Court first?

10 A. It has been -- it has not been disclosed publicly. I have shared

11 it with the reviewers.

12 Q. It is now available publicly?

13 A. I saw it on a stack in the lobby. Many of them are being taken

14 away. It is quite publicly available.

15 Q. Just yes or no. The Albanian records, in respect of which there's

16 an agreement, are you physically in possession of a disk or whatever that

17 has photocopies of those records so, subject to the agreement, you can

18 provide them?

19 A. I believe I have scanned images. I will have to look.

20 MR. NICE: Your Honour, may "Policy or Panic?" now be produced as

21 an exhibit and given an exhibit number? It's been extensively referred

22 to.

23 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

24 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecution Exhibit 69.

25 MR. NICE:

1 Q. Dealing with the particular question you were asked by Mr. Kay

2 about the dates upon which people left and the accuracy of that, apart

3 from estimating the time that might have been taken from one village to

4 reach a border, did any of the questionnaires actually contain the

5 question: "When did you leave?"

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. And so you were acting on the basis of that information as well?

8 A. That was the basis for the estimate, yes.

9 Q. Has any reason been advanced to you as to why people should

10 give -- they might give inaccurate, but why they should give intentionally

11 dishonest reasons about the date they left their premises?

12 A. No.

13 Q. Can we look -- and this is the last question from the amici and

14 then I'll come back to the accused's questions. Can we look at Table 8,

15 which, to remind the Chamber, is the table built on the raw data -- not

16 the raw data, but the elementary data rather than the enlarged figures.

17 Table 8, or Figure 8, on page 11. Thirty-eight per cent, thirty-four per

18 cent, and slightly different figures for deaths.

19 JUDGE KWON: Could you put that on the ELMO, Figure 8.

20 MR. NICE: Can page 11 go on the ELMO first?

21 JUDGE KWON: Dr. Ball has it.

22 MR. NICE: If we could have the ELMO up, from the booth, please.

23 If the booth could operate the ELMO, the overhead projector. Thank you.

24 Q. Looking at this, the figures of 38 per cent, 34 per cent, you said

25 just over a third, is it appropriate at this table to look at figures in

1 that very elementary way, as percentages, when one's looking at the sort

2 of issues you're looking it, or is there another argument, another

3 approach that one should take?

4 A. Percentages seem fine.

5 Q. The majority in the left-hand column but one, 63 per cent, do not

6 precede or coincide with; in the right-hand case, 66 per cent - the total

7 of 38 and 28 - do not precede or coincide with. The significance of that,

8 and the argument to be derived from it?

9 A. As I said in direct, that tends to reject the hypothesis that KLA

10 attacks are responsible for killings or refugee flow.

11 Q. Thank you very much. Let's now go to --

12 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Nice, excuse me. Before we move on, could you

13 put Figure 9 on page 12 on the ELMO, because we are dealing with the

14 problem. And our learned friend dealt with it briefly, but my question

15 yesterday wasn't yet answered, so I'd like to ask.

16 MR. NICE: Sorry. That was my error.

17 JUDGE KWON: No problem.

18 Do you see the Figure 9? So am I right in understanding that your

19 conclusion is that given the fact that NATO bombing preceded the refugee

20 flow only in nine municipalities out of 29, then NATO bombing could not be

21 a plausible cause for the refugee flow?

22 THE WITNESS: This table begins my conclusion in that direction,

23 Your Honour. It combines with later analyses to bring us to the final

24 conclusion.

25 JUDGE KWON: Yes. So the question yesterday was that -- yes. Let

1 me put it this way: It seems that the analysis may not take into account

2 the effect that an attack in one municipality have on one another.

3 Hypothetically, a situation could have arisen in Kosovo whereby a KLA

4 attack or NATO bombing strike took place on a particular day in one

5 municipality and that, as a result of that, the people, Kosovo Albanians

6 in the neighbouring municipality, fled their homes. Has such a

7 possibility been taken into account?

8 THE WITNESS: I did not do a neighbour-by-neighbour comparison, as

9 your question suggests. Instead, in the following analysis, the analysis

10 of the residual patterns, Figures 10 and 11, we treated Kosovo by regions

11 much larger than single municipalities, and I thought by -- what a

12 statistician would often do with a question such as the one you have posed

13 is to look at a bigger area, to expand the boundaries outward, thereby

14 reducing the number of little boundary-crossing incidents that would

15 perhaps muddy the analysis as you have suggested. So by expanding the

16 areas in the analysis of residual patterns, I believe I would have

17 captured the subtle differences across regional -- excuse me, across

18 municipal boundaries that I think you're investigating, you're thinking

19 about.

20 JUDGE KWON: Okay. Thank you. My next question is: I wonder if

21 you can name those municipalities by the name, by their names. In, for

22 example, Figure 9, there are nine municipalities in which the NATO bombing

23 preceded the refugee flow. Could you tell the names?

24 THE WITNESS: Not from memory, sir, Your Honour, I'm sorry.

25 JUDGE KWON: But you have the data.

1 THE WITNESS: Yes.

2 JUDGE KWON: Well, you are dealing with 29 municipalities in your

3 research, but the indictment against this accused relates to the incidents

4 which took place only in 13 municipalities among them. So if the nine --

5 or the municipalities here are all included in the 13 municipalities which

6 is dealt by this indictment, can we say then that, in those

7 municipalities, the NATO bombing was the primary cause for the refugee

8 flow?

9 THE WITNESS: I would answer no, and my logic there would be

10 expressed in the addendum that the -- that the Office of the Prosecutor

11 requested from me and that we looked at briefly at the end of my direct

12 exam yesterday. In that, I argued, and the Defence brought it up on cross

13 at some length, that finding the presence of a particular phenomenon, in

14 this case, say, KLA attack or bombing, finding the presence before the

15 peak of the resulting phenomena, the hypothesised cause, would not

16 necessarily imply in a positive sense cause. Okay? The absence of the

17 presence of the cause does lead us to reject it as a cause.

18 However, let us imagine that we measure the rising sun every day.

19 The sun comes up every day in every municipality in Kosovo. So if we

20 check for the presence of the sun rising before the peak of refugee flow,

21 we'll find it. The sun will have risen on the day that has the peak

22 refugee flow. However, that tells us nothing about whether the sun caused

23 refugee flow.

24 If the sun had failed to rise for four days before the refugee

25 flow, we could reject the hypothesis that the sun had caused it. However,

1 finding the sun does not lead us to suggest that it was a cause.

2 If that's -- I hope my logic is clear there. But this method is

3 adequate only for rejecting this hypothesis, which I believe it has helped

4 us to do. In order to suggest that there is a closer correlation which

5 might imply cause, we need a subtler, a subtler tool which we attempt to

6 provide in the analysis of residuals in Figures 10 and 11.

7 JUDGE KWON: Thank you.

8 MR. NICE:

9 Q. Just one other question about method and reports and one thing and

10 another. If the accused or if the amici choose to instruct an expert, not

11 only will you do everything you can to provide materials, but if the

12 expert would prefer to enter into a dialogue with you before coming to

13 court, would you be prepared to cooperate?

14 A. Under instruction from the Court on how we should control that

15 dialogue, yes.

16 Q. Let's move on to Morina just to make sure we've got this clear.

17 The Morina statistics were what you used for refugee flow. Killing

18 statistics came from much wider sources; correct?

19 A. Correct.

20 Q. And are not in any way geographically local?

21 A. Correct.

22 Q. And yet from both the Morina refugee flow figures and from the

23 Kosovo-wide killing figures, you happen to derive very similarly shaped

24 graphs.

25 A. Correct.

1 Q. Thank you. Morina itself, did you approach it from Albania or

2 from Kosovo?

3 A. Albania.

4 MR. NICE: Two more maps. I'm neutral as to whether they go in as

5 separate exhibits or the original. And I can deal with them very briefly,

6 but I'm sure the Court wants to see them. The first map -- and in each

7 case they are essentially Yugoslav maps.

8 That's right. This one. Original for the overhead projector, for

9 distribution to the Court, and one for me, I think. I'll just keep one.

10 They are originally Yugoslav maps.

11 One at a time. Just put that on the overhead projector. We can

12 deal with it quickly.

13 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecution Exhibit 70.

14 MR. NICE:

15 Q. They're opened at the right place. They show the road from

16 Prizren down to the west or --

17 MR. NICE: It was opened at the right place, usher. Thank you.

18 They're all folded so as to help.

19 THE WITNESS: This isn't quite there. May I adjust it?

20 MR. NICE:

21 Q. Yes, do.

22 A. It's to show this piece down here, okay? Yes, that's it. That's

23 it. You may wish to put the point on --

24 MR. NICE: My video channel isn't working. I don't know if

25 anybody else's is.

1 JUDGE MAY: Let's not waste time. The ELMO should be working, but

2 it doesn't seem to be.

3 MR. NICE: Morina can be found on this map - thank you very much -

4 immediately to the west of the border between Albania and Kosovo, coming

5 up in the direction that the witness came from from Albania.

6 And the next map which abuts this one and covers Djakovica, with

7 which the Chamber is familiar. They're all opened at the right place for

8 displaying immediately on the ELMO or distribution. Thank you very much.

9 I'll keep one for myself.

10 JUDGE MAY: Pausing there. Vrbnica is the other side of the

11 border.

12 MR. NICE: Yes, it is.

13 JUDGE MAY: And Zur, which we've been hearing about, is further

14 along the road towards Prizren.

15 MR. NICE: Your Honour, indeed it is.

16 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecution Exhibit 71.

17 MR. NICE: Turning to the next map, opened at the right place.

18 West of Djakovica, following the black -- the strong black line that I

19 think is probably a power line but it doesn't matter what it is, towards

20 the -- I'll hold up where it is. There. Just above the strong black line

21 where my thumb is. And in this case, Morina is on the Kosovo side of the

22 relevant boundary, as we can see.

23 All right. That's all for that, but more --

24 JUDGE MAY: What's the explanation for that? What's the

25 explanation? You've got Morina on the first map, which is Albania.

1 MR. NICE: I'm sorry. The witness -- beg your pardon. The

2 accused has been asking about Morina, and I thought it helpful for you to

3 know exactly where it is.

4 JUDGE MAY: This is another Morina.

5 MR. NICE: This is the other Morina that the accused is saying is

6 the subject of the corrupted documents. That's his case. I want to deal

7 with that.

8 The exhibits can go off the overhead projector. Thank you very

9 much.

10 Q. Who's idea was it --

11 JUDGE MAY: No, no. Just -- no, no.

12 MR. NICE:

13 Q. Who's idea was it to collect the records, Dr. Ball?

14 A. Originally, it was my collaborator Fritz Scheuren and then it was

15 mine, but we were together.

16 Q. All right. At the time you collected the documents, was there any

17 risk associated with the collection?

18 A. We were a bit worried, yes. There had been shooting at the border

19 a few days earlier, and the border guards themselves were very reluctant

20 to go to the border.

21 Q. And the border was indeed unmanned?

22 A. That's correct.

23 Q. Was any -- you see, the suggestion is that you were in some way

24 set up. When you went to the border, did you go with guards yourself?

25 A. Originally they didn't want to go, but after I just set off

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1 walking down the road, they -- one of them kind of trotted after me.

2 Q. Is there any way you indicated in advance that you were going to

3 take the risk and go into territory where people were shooting to get

4 documents --

5 A. Not --

6 Q. -- that could be planted there?

7 A. Not to the guards, no.

8 MR. NICE: Other questions about -- other questions about

9 materials. Your Honour will recall that the substantial quantity of

10 material about the KLA that's been referred to, thousands of pages, has

11 only been provided to us and to everybody else very recently and was

12 obviously not available for this witness.

13 Q. The suggestion is that in some way the statistics have been

14 produced to match -- or not the statistics, the data has been produced to

15 match the findings that you ultimately made. So a couple things arise

16 from that.

17 The maps that -- not the maps. The graphs that you've produced,

18 as we have seen, have characteristic and recurring shapes, and what's

19 being suggested is that data has been provided falsely at the border by

20 other people of the Kosovo Albanian persuasion in some way just to create

21 these particular shapes. Is that even possible?

22 A. Only in the most remote sort of science fiction sense is it

23 possible.

24 Q. If somebody had a desire that a statistician should produce graphs

25 of this particular form and shape for any particular reason, he or she

1 would then have to generate a whole quantity of false material that would

2 give rise to these statistics; is that right?

3 A. A vast quantity of false material, yes.

4 Q. Distributed according to particular dates and locations and so

5 on?

6 A. That's correct.

7 Q. Did you see anything in the material at all to suggest that such a

8 thing had happened?

9 A. No. To the contrary.

10 Q. And of course, that material, subject to your own confidentiality

11 concerns, is going to be available.

12 You told us that the Physicians for Human Rights data was not used

13 for killings. Why?

14 A. Because they documented only a very small number of killings.

15 That is a limitation of their method.

16 Q. Thank you. The accused challenged you with making a selection of

17 what you use insofar as you excluded some and admitted others. On what

18 basis did you make the selection of data that you did use?

19 A. For the four sources that we used, we chose the biggest ones.

20 Q. Thank you. Is there any reason for selecting against any of the

21 others on grounds of unreliability or method or anything of that sort?

22 A. No.

23 Q. You've been challenged with the suggestion that this is an

24 innovative method and, therefore, not reliable. As to the component parts

25 of what you have done, do you accept that they're innovative or not?

1 A. No. I think they're -- each of the pieces are part of the

2 standard tool kit of a competent demographer/statistician.

3 Q. And as to each part of the process, have your calculations been

4 guided by error calculations and by conservatism or not? Just tell us in

5 general.

6 A. Yes.

7 Q. To what degree have you been cautious and conservative?

8 A. Greatly. To what degree implies that I can quantify it. We have

9 made every effort at each decision point to be conservative, and I've

10 described those, I believe, in a question to the Bench -- from the Bench

11 yesterday.

12 Q. The accused asked you about statistics prepared for Serb

13 casualties, and you spoke of a Serb statistician. Where did you meet

14 him?

15 A. I met him at a conference of the International Association for

16 Official Statistics in Montreux, Switzerland.

17 Q. His name?

18 A. Slavko Kapron [phoen]. I'm sorry for the pronunciation.

19 Q. Is this a person to whom you provided anything?

20 A. I gave him a copy of the "Policy or Panic?" report, and I told him

21 the data would be on the Internet.

22 Q. Have you heard any criticism from him of the work that you've

23 done?

24 A. I did not hear back from him, no. We exchanged business cards,

25 but I did not hear back from him.

1 Q. You were asked a couple of questions about the combination of NATO

2 and the KLA as causative of what you discovered. In fact, did your first

3 residual exercise and the two figures to which that gave rise reflect

4 those factors in combination?

5 A. Yes, they did.

6 Q. And it was then subsequently that you broke down the analysis to

7 each factor individually?

8 A. Yes. To add a technical note, "in combination" to a statistician

9 implies something called an interaction analysis. I didn't do that. The

10 reason is that, in order to do that, you must first have found a

11 significant effect in the individual components, which we did not find.

12 So I did not go the next step.

13 Q. And of course, there was also a breakdown by regions, as we know.

14 A. Yes.

15 Q. You've been asked several questions about the multiple systems

16 estimation. I want you, if you have a plain piece of paper and a pencil,

17 to assist those who are not statisticians in a concept -- I said we might

18 come to this but just help us if you will. If one will forget that it was

19 four topics -- four sources here, assume three, can you, via Venn diagram,

20 for those who are familiar with Venn diagrams, simply display and explain

21 very shortly, as it were, the concept. Not the technique, the concept.

22 A. Put it on the ELMO and I'll draw it there. Yes.

23 Q. Just, very quickly, if you can draw three interlocking circles,

24 please.

25 A. The idea is the following, that -- let us imagine two studies have

1 been conducted. There are several possibilities about how those two

2 studies might encounter each other in the world. Okay. By "encounter,"

3 here I mean document the same deaths. They might interlock or overlap in

4 some small quantity or, hypothetically, they might not encounter each

5 other at all, the two small circles, or one would subsume the other, the

6 concentric circles.

7 Our idea is to look for the entire universe, which here we've

8 labelled "N." I want to know how big all -- how many killings there are

9 in total, but I have two studies, and I use their rate of overlap to

10 estimate the total. The insight we use is that if we saw that the two

11 systems did not overlap at all, the universe would be vast. The two

12 systems would have gone into the field and never encountered each other.

13 If, on the other hand, the two systems went into the field and documented

14 essentially the same lists, we would assume that the universe is only a

15 bit larger than the two projects.

16 By measuring how much the projects have in common, we can use some

17 mathematical insight, some mathematical formalisation of the insight that

18 I've suggested to make an inference, an estimate about the entire

19 universe, which I've labelled here as "N."

20 Q. And of course, in this case we had four interlocking circles with

21 the complexity that that brings, and the workings of the system is set out

22 in the appendix; is that correct?

23 A. That's correct.

24 Q. My last few questions, then, are these: The accused has asked you

25 several questions about hypotheses, but correct me if I'm wrong about

1 this. Does the shape of the graphs that the statistics produce lead to

2 the inference that there is either one or more than one cause?

3 A. The shape of the first graph we looked at suggests that there is

4 one or more causes. As we elaborated and looked at additional graphs, it

5 seemed increasingly likely that there was one common cause.

6 Q. It's only when you've reached that position, as opposed to an

7 entirely random distribution or a flat-line distribution, it's only when

8 you've reached that conclusion that you seek, for discussion purposes,

9 hypotheses?

10 A. Yes.

11 Q. And as you explained at the beginning of this re-examination, your

12 method restricts itself to excluding, rather than confirming, hypotheses?

13 A. Correct.

14 Q. Save to the limited extent that you felt able to offer a comment

15 about the Orthodox Easter?

16 A. That's correct, because of the coincidence there.

17 Q. Thank you. Finally, the accused, in the last stages of his

18 questioning, asked you questions with a great number of references we

19 weren't able to track. Were you able to track them?

20 A. In his last comments, I finally have tracked them down, yes.

21 Q. Can you -- and I may be wrong, but it may be that he was trying to

22 suggest that in some way the proportion of deaths matches the proportion

23 of NATO bombs. But insofar as we have his observations - and I can just

24 pull them out in the transcript, I think - he was referring, as we'll

25 remember, to 248.000, 164, Maps 2.3, 2.1, 2.4, and a figure of 471. Can

1 you just deal with those statistics, insofar as you can now recall them,

2 and give your comment on what he appeared to be proposing.

3 A. We reviewed, with the Bench assisting, we reviewed the numbers

4 that he proposed, and he was suggesting certain numbers of refugees who

5 had crossed the border during each of the three phases. In that, the

6 numbers that he suggested were roughly correct.

7 Q. As to any conclusion that he was driving at about the coincidence

8 of NATO and refugee movement or killings or anything of that sort, what do

9 you say to that?

10 A. Well, what we got to after the break was the Defence suggested

11 where he had derived the numbers of bombings. He said it came from

12 Appendix B in the "Policy or Panic?" study. Appendix B begins on page

13 70. However, he interpreted the little red dots on these maps, which look

14 like this, as bombings. If you refer to the legend, however, to this map,

15 the red dots are not bombings at all. The red dots, in fact, indicate the

16 density of refugee flow. So he counted up the dots that indicate how much

17 refugee flow there had been over time and he discovered that the number of

18 dots correlates with the graph earlier in the book. I had never thought

19 to do this, but it is an interesting check on my work, confirming that

20 these maps do, in fact, represent the graphs earlier, since these graphs

21 and the maps here in Appendix B represent refugee flow, not bombing. In

22 fact, bombing is nowhere on the maps in Appendix B.

23 Q. And indeed, since it's now an exhibit, since the point has been

24 made, I think that these maps are particularly helpful in relation to the

25 regional variations, aren't they, over time?

1 A. Yes. It was looking at these maps that I just sort of understood

2 this pattern of geographic variance that is now the subject of the later

3 report as well.

4 Q. Just to put one example on the ELMO to explain to the Chamber why

5 you happened to observe, although it wasn't an original intention, you

6 happened to observe this coincidence. Which one? What page?

7 A. Page 72.

8 Q. Yes. Just explain which one.

9 A. We can look at any of them, but 28 March is a day of particularly

10 high flow. The size of the dots represents the quantity of flow from that

11 point that was reported to the border guards. Again, as we've discussed

12 earlier, these are the dates that we estimate people to have left home.

13 So in this period, most of the people leaving home are leaving in this

14 area in the south and west, relatively fewer in the north and east.

15 Later in the period -- excuse me. In a later period, if I flip

16 forward to, for example, the period in April, we see that the flow is

17 concentrated in the north and east, and there's relatively much less

18 activity in the south and west. I spent several days looking at these

19 maps, and when that occurred to me, when this observation occurred to me,

20 I was able to develop more precise kinds of statistical tests to look for

21 this geographic and time pattern.

22 MR. NICE: Your Honours, that's all I ask, although I'll ask

23 Dr. Ball to produce an answer in the form of the most original

24 documentation he has, in copy form, to deal with His Honour Judge Kwon's

25 question. We'll make that available, and he will remain available to

1 assist if other experts are instructed in the way that we've already

2 identified.

3 I observe that there were some questions asked yesterday by His

4 Honour Judge Robinson about potential utility or value of the report,

5 which lay outside the ability of the witness to answer and were probably

6 more questions for counsel. I can deal with them, of course, now, or

7 right at the end of the case, when it's a matter of submissions, as the

8 Chamber prefers.

9 JUDGE MAY: This isn't the time for comment.

10 Dr. Ball, thank you for coming. That concludes your evidence.

11 You're free to go.

12 MR. NICE: May that become an exhibit?

13 JUDGE MAY: Yes. Next exhibit number.

14 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecution Exhibit 72.

15 JUDGE MAY: We'll adjourn for five minutes before the next

16 witness.

17 [The witness withdrew]

18 --- Break taken at 4.06 p.m.

19 --- On resuming at 4.14 p.m.

20 [The witness entered court]

21 THE ACCUSED: [No interpretation]

22 JUDGE MAY: Just a moment.

23 Let the witness take the declaration.

24 WITNESS: PADDY ASHDOWN

25 THE WITNESS: I solemnly declare that I will speak the truth, the

1 whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

2 JUDGE MAY: If you'd like to take a seat.

3 Yes, Mr. Milosevic. What is the point?

4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, a while ago I heard from you

5 that you had extended our working hours today until 5.00. We have already

6 discussed this once. That means that yet again you've decided not to let

7 me get this one-third of fresh air that I have been entitled to, and I

8 consider this to be simple mistreatment of the accused. I'm not asking

9 you for any correction in this regard. But by the way, since last

10 night - actually, all the way until I left the prison - the air

11 conditioning or the air circulation apparatus had broken down. So try to

12 make up your mind and see what kinds of mistreatment you're going to

13 resort to next.

14 [Trial Chamber confers]

15 JUDGE MAY: I'm told your time will be extended. There's no

16 difficulty about it. Now, we need to get on with this case.

17 Examined by Mr. Nice:

18 Q. Can you give us your full name, please.

19 A. My name is Jeremy John Durham Ashdown. I'm more normally known as

20 Paddy Ashdown.

21 Q. Your history is as a soldier, diplomat, Member of Parliament,

22 leader of the Liberal Democrats of Great Britain, member of the House of

23 Lords, and currently High Representative Designate for Bosnia?

24 A. That's correct.

25 MR. NICE: Your Honour, as I think I flagged up a couple of weeks

1 ago, or a week ago, I'm going to ask this witness, unless there's any

2 objection, to deal with a single topic in paragraph 3. It may be all

3 we'll ever ask for him to give. In respect of earlier matters, it's

4 indicated that he might be able -- would be willing and might be able to

5 come to give evidence at later stages of this trial, but of course it's

6 inconvenient for any witness to come twice and it might be particularly

7 difficult for him. So I'd ask that this evidence, which doesn't relate

8 particularly to Kosovo - it doesn't relate to Kosovo at all - this rather

9 well-known passage of evidence, and to give it briefly now.

10 JUDGE MAY: Yes.

11 MR. NICE:

12 Q. Lord Ashdown, in the course of last decade or so, have you taken

13 an interest in the affairs of the former Yugoslavia?

14 A. I have. I first visited Sarajevo, I think, in July 1992 and

15 subsequently a parlay in August of that year, and since then have visited

16 the region usually, I think, almost without exception, twice every year.

17 Q. With that interest already established, did you find yourself, on

18 the 6th of May of 1995, at a dinner at the Guildhall in London, where you

19 were seated next to the late President Tudjman of Croatia?

20 A. I was.

21 Q. Did you have a conversation with him about the future of

22 Yugoslavia?

23 A. I did. It was an extended conversation. We, I think, if I

24 recall, chatted together, to the exclusion, probably, of our fellow dinner

25 guests, for most of the evening. I think at some stage in it, I asked him

1 to draw on the menu. It was the Guildhall dinner celebrating the 50th

2 anniversary.

3 MR. NICE: And can we have a look at a copy of the drawing?

4 Your Honour, the original is held by Registry, in respect of

5 another case. Efforts are already at hand to secure it, but it can't be

6 available now until tomorrow.

7 We'll lay this on the overhead projector.

8 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecutor Exhibit 73.

9 MR. NICE:

10 Q. The first page shows the menu, or whatever it may be, for the

11 banquet, and just interpret for us, if you can, the first little markings

12 we see on the left.

13 A. Yes. I think it's fairly self-explanatory. On the right is the

14 printed menu and on the left is the logo of the event. And then down

15 below -- I don't know whether this shows up, but here are some lines. I

16 had asked President Tudjman if he would draw out for me what he believed

17 to be the future shape of this area of ex-Yugoslavia. He drew the

18 Croatian coast here. This line here represented Bosnia-Herzegovina. This

19 line here represented his idea of the current front line. And he drew an

20 S here, which is what he believed the ultimate position would be. All to

21 the left was Greater Croatia; all to the right, Greater Serbia.

22 All the lines there on the map are those of President Tudjman.

23 The crosses are ones that I had put in, this cross indicating Sarajevo,

24 this cross indicating Banja Luka, this cross indicating Zagreb. And I

25 said to him: "Is that the right positions, as far as you're concerned, in

1 respect of these lines?"

2 Q. Thank you very much. Then if we look at the other part of the

3 photocopy of the exhibit, can you interpret this for us, please, and

4 explain who drew what.

5 A. I drew -- these are my annotations on the lines drawn by President

6 Tudjman, made immediately after the dinner, so that the English,

7 obviously, sentences here refer to the various lines, this thickened line

8 being the final line of division as he saw it; the towns of Sarajevo, the

9 Krajina, Zagreb, also marked. This line which I put crosses on represents

10 the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I have marked up the Dalmatian

11 Coast and the present front lines. So all the annotations, that is, all

12 the differences between this map and the previous ones are my

13 annotations. As it says on the top here - I don't know if this is yet

14 visible - lines drawn by FT, Franjo Tudjman; annotations by PA, myself.

15 Q. Lord Ashdown, you'll see I wait until another language comes to

16 the conclusion so that we don't overstrain the interpreters.

17 A. I'll make sure I do the same.

18 Q. In the course of this conversation, what, if anything, was said,

19 and on the map, what, if anything, was allowed for Muslim interests and

20 areas?

21 A. President Tudjman said that the Muslims had been incorporated into

22 the territories of Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia, that Bosnia no

23 longer existed.

24 Q. Was there to be any area for the Muslims alone that you can

25 recall?

1 A. No.

2 Q. Thank you. Can we now move on to matters in 1998.

3 MR. NICE: Perhaps the exhibit can be removed from the overhead

4 projector.

5 Q. In the course of one of your visits between the 20th and 25th of

6 June of 1998, did you meet the Macedonian Prime Minister?

7 A. I did. I paid a visit to the Balkans. Wishing to see all sides

8 of the matter, I planned the visit should include Macedonia and Albania.

9 Q. Before we move on to the detail of this and subsequent meetings,

10 when you went, did you -- in what capacity did you go and how, if properly

11 described, were you to be described?

12 A. Well, I went as a -- I suppose you would say a private citizen. I

13 was the leader of a political party. I wished to inform myself of the

14 situation from all sides. I did not go as -- I was not asked to go by the

15 British government, did not go as their envoy. But on this visit, as on

16 previous ones, I felt it right and proper that I should do a report to the

17 then-Prime Minister about the conditions that I discovered and any

18 recommendations that I should have. So the direct answer to your

19 question: As a private citizen.

20 Q. Do you remember -- sorry. You, I think, have kept a diary for

21 many years?

22 A. I have, since I first became leader of my party in 1988.

23 Q. The way in which you keep your diary, is that regular or

24 irregular?

25 A. I try to do it every night. I can't say that I'm successful in

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12 Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and

13 English transcripts.

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1 that discipline on every night, but I do it pretty well every night. And

2 if there have been major meetings, meetings with the Prime Minister or

3 meetings with other significant figures, I try to make notes immediately

4 on leaving that meeting and then construct my diary from that as soon

5 after that meeting as possible. It may not be that I wait until the

6 evening to do so.

7 Q. Has part of your extensive diary, subject, of course, to

8 appropriate editorial amendments and corrections and so on, been

9 published?

10 A. Indeed, they have, yes. They were published -- first of all it

11 was published in September 2000, and the second volume published in

12 September of last year.

13 Q. But material to this hearing, when looking back on a particular

14 visit or a particular meeting, have you had a diary entry that you can

15 refer to to refresh your memory when necessary?

16 A. I have had exactly that. In fact, on most occasions when I've

17 been seeking, for instance, to construct the conversation you've just been

18 talking about in relation to Mr. Tudjman, but it applies to all the

19 evidence in relation to the events we are about to discuss, those were

20 recorded either that evening or straight after key meetings, in my diary.

21 Q. On the Macedonian visit in June, can you remember the date upon

22 which - it may not matter particularly - can you remember the date upon

23 which you met the Macedonian Prime Minister --

24 A. I fear I cannot, but it's in my diary. I can certainly recover

25 that, if wished.

1 Q. With them, the Prime Minister and the foreign minister, what did

2 you discuss?

3 A. Well, I think we discussed primarily their concerns. I mean, I

4 had gone there in order to make an assessment of what was, to me, a very

5 dangerous international situation developing because of what was happening

6 in Kosovo, and I wanted to discuss their fears and any recommendations

7 they might have for resolving it. Their fears were that the instability

8 at that stage in Kosovo could, if handled wrongly, lead to a further flood

9 of Kosovar refugees into Macedonia, a country which is already fairly

10 delicately balanced in terms of its ethnic balance as between the

11 Macedonian Slavs and Albanians.

12 Q. Did you, in the same visit, travel to northern Albania?

13 A. I did, indeed, straight after leaving the Prime Minister's

14 office. I drove south to Tirana. On the way, it became evident to me as

15 I thought about the situation that one of the destabilising factors in

16 Kosovo was the activities of the KLA, and that if we were to seek to

17 assist in the stabilisation of an inherently very dangerous situation, we

18 ought to be considering what means we could apply to limit the activities

19 of the KLA and preferably to stop their armed activities. And it was

20 clear to me also that the arms to the KLA were passing through northern

21 Albania, through a widely regarded as very lawless area, in the region

22 known as Bajram Curiju and Trepoje, and I felt that if I was to make

23 propositions about the resolution of this impending crisis, I ought to go

24 and look at this myself, and I arranged to do so.

25 Q. In northern Albania, in that general area, did you have an

1 opportunity to speak to any refugees?

2 A. I did. I spoke to, I suppose, altogether some 40 or 50 refugees,

3 all of whom had, according to their descriptions, been driven over the

4 mountains by what was going on in the Pec/Djakovica area of Kosovo. Many

5 of them arrived in a very harrowing state - women, young children - and I

6 was able to observe in the hospital in Bajram Curiju a number of people

7 who had been wounded by shells, shrapnel, and gunfire, who were in various

8 stages of illness, some one or two, I think, close to death.

9 Q. The refugees to whom you spoke, all genders and ages?

10 A. Yes, all genders and ages, from young babes in arms through women

11 and some young men. The two I saw in the hospital were indeed young men

12 and may well have received their wounds as members of the KLA. The

13 others, however, were just ordinary families, some with truly terrible

14 tales to tell about their passage across the mountains and about their

15 experiences when they were driven out of their villages.

16 Q. And was there any -- and was there any pattern in what they

17 asserted they were fleeing from?

18 A. Yes, there was. They all had the same or similar stories to tell,

19 that they were ordered out of their villages by army police. They weren't

20 specific as to which at the time. If they stayed, they were subjected to

21 small-arms fire. If they did not leave, they were then subjected, either

22 the same day or sometimes later, to tank fire, artillery fire, and mortar

23 fire.

24 In nearly all cases, all cases I spoke to, this caused the

25 population to leave, usually at night and nearly always together, and it

1 caused them to embark on an extremely difficult journey through forests

2 and overpasses of about 6.000 feet high, in the course of which they were,

3 they said, constantly shelled on the high passes and in the forests, and

4 as they described it - their stories were consistent but, of course, all

5 of them hearsay - they -- many died on this journey, some of the very

6 elderly, some of the very young, and some from the effects of shell-fire.

7 The final decent into Albania was extremely precipitous. I saw it

8 and inspected it close up myself. And they had some very harrowing

9 stories to tell.

10 Q. Thank you. Did you also concern yourself with the degree to which

11 the KLA had become established? Did you make inquiries about that or make

12 observations about that?

13 A. Yes, I did. I was unable to judge the extent to which KLA

14 operations on the other side of the border were -- how extensive they were

15 or how effective. I had, I should say, asked for permission from the

16 Yugoslav government to enter Kosovo to see for myself, but a visa had been

17 refused. So I was left with no option but to look at the situation from

18 the Albanian side of the border. But I was able to see that there was an

19 extensive passage of arms across the border. It appeared to me that the

20 KLA were well organised. The mechanism by which they had obtained these

21 arms was that some force, I believe but cannot prove, probably criminal

22 organisations, bought the arms. The largest that I saw or heard of was no

23 bigger than a 0.5 machine-gun, I think 12 -- 12-millimetre machine-gun, up

24 to the area of Trepoje.

25 Would it be helpful if I pointed this out on the map?

1 Q. Yes. We're going to distribute the map. You have the map there.

2 MR. NICE: Your Honour, what we have made available is a large

3 map, which I hope will have a scale helpful to the Court, folded to the

4 correct place. A copy of that, I think, is on the overhead projector, and

5 you will be able to follow the other.

6 THE REGISTRAR: Prosecution Exhibit 74.

7 MR. NICE: The -- I'm sorry. Put that one on the overhead

8 projector. Thank you very much.

9 Q. This is the 1999 Kosovo planning map. Are you familiar with it?

10 A. I am familiar with it, yes.

11 Q. If you would like to point out, then, on the map --

12 A. The area of Bajram Curiju is here. This was regarded as an

13 extremely lawless area, where the writ of the Albanian government does not

14 run. Indeed, I was specifically advised by Foreign Office authorities

15 that I shouldn't go into the area because of its lawless nature.

16 These are the mountains across which the refugees were passing,

17 here. The village of Trepoje, which is here, was, so far as I could tell,

18 essentially an arms supermarket. The weapons were brought up, I think

19 probably by criminal organisations, to here. The KLA would send runners

20 across the mountains, as it were, with orders of what they should take

21 back, and then carried by either man-pack or by mule, and I saw both,

22 across these high passes back into Kosovo, small arms, ammunition,

23 grenades. No weapons that I saw or heard of larger than, as I say, a 0.5

24 machine-gun calibre.

25 I drew the conclusion that the KLA were at least as visible here,

1 organised, had support, and were -- and were exporting arms, collecting

2 arms to foment disturbances inside Kosovo.

3 I should perhaps add that when I returned to the -- made my report

4 to the British Prime Minister, I recommended that if we wished to stop the

5 actions of the KLA, which were destabilising Kosovo at the time, that the

6 way to do this would be to assist the Albanian government to ensure that

7 the rule of law did run in the area of Bajram Curiju and Trepoje, and that

8 we should assist in that process. I regret that that recommendation was

9 at the time not followed, because it is the only way that I think could

10 have, at this stage, acted in a way which would have brought about the

11 conditions for peace.

12 Q. Now, while in Albania on this visit, and indeed at this part of

13 your visit, were you able to keep observation, through binoculars, on the

14 area of Junik, which we can see? Perhaps you can just point it out for

15 us.

16 A. I was. I journeyed from Bajram Curiju through Trepoje, along the

17 lines here - there's a very rough track up to the border crossing

18 here - and then followed this border crossing up to a point on the

19 Albanian Kosovo border, approximately where my marker is now, above a

20 village which I was informed was called Gegaj, G-e-g-a-j, and this gave me

21 a very good view of the whole area around south of Junik. There are some

22 small villages down here. And indeed, I could see deep into Kosovo,

23 because this is an area of plains here, almost as far as Pristina.

24 Q. What did you observe in this four-hour period?

25 A. I was up here with some European Community Monitoring Mission -

1 ECMM - officers who had been spending time up there, and they were able to

2 guide me as to what I was able to see. But it was pretty self-evident

3 what was happening.

4 In this area here, I saw a number of VJ, Vojska Jugoslavija,

5 tanks, a number of VJ positions, in particular, a mortar position laid out

6 in a classic military Warsaw Pact style, and that throughout this area

7 there were small units, probably platoons, moving about in armoured

8 personnel carriers, APCs, and that they were bombarding, subjecting to

9 tank fire, subjecting to mortar fire - I would estimate perhaps 82

10 millimetre mortars - the houses and villages around here.

11 I would have been, I suppose, two kilometres away. I neither saw

12 nor heard any return fire, at two kilometres, with small arms. That may

13 not be exceptional, but you would expect to see puffs of smoke through

14 binoculars, and I saw no return fire. I did, however, see these units

15 engaging, it appeared to me, I'm bound to say, indiscriminately the houses

16 and villages in this area, in a way which I could not relate to military

17 objectives, viewed at from where I was, and I regarded as very shocking.

18 MR. NICE: Can the witness please see our Exhibit 17.

19 Q. Lord Ashdown, do you think you might be able to identify some of

20 the vehicles, pieces of equipment and vehicles that you saw? If you

21 could --

22 A. Yes. I referred to armoured personnel carriers. I can't be

23 certain about this vehicle here, but this one, which is --

24 Q. Number 2.

25 A. Number 1, I can't be certain about this one, but number 2, which

1 is an armoured personnel carrier, I certainly saw at that stage. And

2 again, unless I'm mistaken, that's a T54 tank. There were certainly

3 those.

4 Q. Number 6.

5 A. But not, so far as I could tell from the distance I was at,

6 those.

7 Q. Number 5.

8 A. Number 7.

9 Q. Is that something you did see?

10 A. Yes.

11 Q. Thank you.

12 A. Not, as I can recall, number 8. And I think probably 10, but not

13 the others on that sheet.

14 Q. Did you see any small artillery pieces travelling in a particular

15 direction?

16 A. Actually, we did. I mean, the main -- the main activity going on

17 below me, I suppose something like two kilometres away, was a tank

18 engaging a collection of houses for an extended period of time. But

19 looking to my north, I suddenly spotted, and I don't think it had been

20 seen before by the ECMM monitors, a deployment of troops, which I believe

21 to be Yugoslav army troops but I can't be absolutely certain, somewhere to

22 the north of Neziraj.

23 Q. Can we put the map back on the -- the other map.

24 A. Sorry.

25 Q. Can we put it back on the overhead projector so that people can

1 see it.

2 A. Right. So I was here. It appeared suddenly on the ridge about, I

3 should think, a thousand metres, a kilometre away from me. Through my

4 binoculars, I could quite easily see troops deploying at least one gun -

5 there may have been two - on a mountain ridge, and firing, so far as I

6 could tell judging by the sound of the firing and the report of the shell,

7 to the north of me; i.e., firing away from me into what I took to be -

8 indeed there are no other possible targets there - the forests. This

9 being consistent with the refugee stories of being subjected to shell-fire

10 as they sought to escape Kosovo across -- through the forests and across

11 the high mountain passes.

12 Q. Yes. Can we now move on from that mission, in respect to which

13 you tell us you made a report to the Prime Minister, to the next visit, I

14 think it was on the 26th of September, three months later, a visit that

15 lasted some three days.

16 On that occasion, did you meet Dr. Rugova and an Albanian

17 delegation?

18 A. I did. I met -- I'd have to refer to my diaries if I were to go

19 through all the meetings, but I certainly met Dr. Rugova and other

20 representatives, Albanian representatives.

21 Q. You set out in your statement - it's more fully set out than in

22 the summary that we have - your opinion of him as a man. Just in a

23 sentence, please.

24 A. Quiet, studious, rather withdrawn, really. He claimed to be a

25 pacifist, and I can't comment on what contacts he may or may not have had

1 with the KLA, but he certainly spoke in the language of a pacifist. A man

2 who was -- I think, regarded himself and was regarded by many,

3 particularly in rural Kosovo, as the -- the moral head of their -- of

4 their nation.

5 Q. Did you make a tour with the ambassador, UK ambassador, Brian

6 Donnelly, and the military attache, John Crossland, of Western Kosovo?

7 A. I did. I should say that that tour had been arranged and I'd

8 indeed been collected by the British ambassador on this occasion. I had

9 received visas from the Yugoslav government, and I was carrying with me a

10 letter from Mr. Blair to Mr. Milosevic, then, of course,

11 President Milosevic.

12 Q. Yes.

13 A. We started from Pristina --

14 Q. I don't know if you want to use the map --

15 A. I think it might be --

16 Q. -- to make more vivid your narrative. So you can just fold it

17 yourself.

18 A. I'll just see if I can find -- there we are. It's slightly off

19 the map and would -- that would be a better --

20 Q. We're concerned, of course, with the Pristina-Pec road. And the

21 document at which you're looking, just for the purposes of the Chamber?

22 A. This document is my diary. The diary as published. It's not -- I

23 just want to make sure that we get the dates right. Right.

24 Q. The Chamber has no objection to --

25 A. On the 27th and the 28th. On the 27th, we left Pristina here and

1 travelled on the main road to Pec. There's Pec up here. And the main

2 road runs here, and we were, of course, travelling in this direction.

3 Q. Yes. What observations did you make in late September of 1998

4 about the condition of the villages you passed; about farm animals, crops,

5 and the like?

6 A. Well, all the way along this road, there was clear evidence of

7 very substantial burning of properties. The properties were, I think,

8 almost all without exception, destroyed, uninhabited, shops on the sides

9 of the road and in the small hamlets burnt, all the properties roofless,

10 having been set on fire, evidence of gunfire, shell holes, small-arms

11 holes.

12 I stopped -- can't be absolutely certain, I regret for the Court,

13 but I stopped on this road, I think somewhere around about the Klina

14 crossing. This is Klina here. Somewhere around about here. I mean,

15 purely at random, simply so as to be able to take a look at one of these

16 hamlets for myself. It consisted of I suppose half a dozen houses,

17 perhaps to a dozen houses, a small group of shops which I had suspected

18 being an auto repair shop and a television shop, and some purely

19 agricultural houses.

20 The cattle were either dead and bloated from putrefaction, having

21 been shot, or roaming the fields. The houses seemed to me to have been

22 systematically burnt. In one house I went into, there was a store of

23 grain which was, it appeared to me and I was told by those who accompanied

24 me, was clearly a store of grain for next year's planting - i.e., not

25 grain to be eaten but grain to be planted - that had been set on fire,

1 destroyed by water, and trashed.

2 And I can only describe this village like every other I saw, as

3 being utterly trashed, nobody living there, and all means of livelihood in

4 the village had been destroyed.

5 Q. Were there any local residents to whom you were able to speak?

6 A. No. They'd all gone.

7 Q. The place was deserted?

8 A. Deserted.

9 Q. Did you -- did you reach Pec?

10 A. We did. We stopped for coffee in Pec, as I recall, and Pec struck

11 me as being nervous but quiet. I mean, there was no immediate evidence of

12 destruction in the Pec area.

13 Indeed, if I recall correctly, close where we had coffee there

14 were a couple of Albanians who were busy sawing up wood for winter, and

15 there was every sign of a normal Balkan town preparing for the season

16 ahead.

17 Q. And I think you visited a monastery.

18 A. Yes. I particularly wanted to be able to see, as it were, both

19 sides of the story, and so we visited the Decani monastery, which is

20 approximately here. It's a wonderful jewel of a Serbian monastery. I was

21 informed, and this was confirmed by everybody else, that to the nation of

22 Serbia, to Serbs, this area is rather like Canterbury is to Britain, their

23 centre of religious importance.

24 It's a very beautiful monastery, and I was rather privileged of

25 being shown around by one of the monks, Father Sava, and, if I recall,

1 afterwards enjoying a glass of slivovitz with him. But it was in perfect

2 condition and that stage remains today, I'm informed, but I can't be

3 certain of that, being completely untouched.

4 I fear the same cannot be said of the villages down the

5 Pec-Djakovica road. It might be helpful if I were just to say that in one

6 of these, a place called Prilep, the village was completely destroyed. In

7 my opinion and that of the military attache with me, it had been subject

8 not only to tank and artillery fire but almost certainly to rocket fire,

9 aircraft rockets, in our opinion, and there was certainly sufficient bits

10 of ordnance, bits of rocket lying around to indicate that.

11 In this village, I came across an elderly woman and her young

12 daughter living in the remains of a house. She explained to me that she

13 came there every day from staying with her neighbours 14 or so kilometres

14 away, having been driven out of her village, to look after the farm

15 animals, and she explained to me how she was preparing to live in these

16 very miserable conditions, the whole of the village around her having been

17 destroyed during the winter.

18 I asked whether any men came back, and she said yes, some had

19 dared to. She described a situation where two men had come back and done

20 something nobody else had dared to do, which was to spend the night in the

21 village. And they had returned the next day to find both dead, with their

22 throats cut.

23 Q. Before we -- just one minute. Before you got to Prilep, had you

24 observed Albanian-dominated villages in the area of Decani?

25 A. Yes. Decani too was in a very bad state, though I think Prilep

1 was the worst of them.

2 In fairness, I think it's important to say that I did hear a story

3 that, close to Prilep, some Serb policemen had been killed in a recent

4 ambush, presumably by the KLA, and the condition of Prilep was the result

5 of reprisals as a result of that military action.

6 Q. Did you visit a Serb community near Decani and get an account of

7 KLA activity?

8 A. I did, actually. When I was on my previous visit, I noticed a

9 group of sparkling new houses in a -- what I can only describe as a

10 rather -- housing estate you would have recognised on the outskirts of any

11 British town, in the area not of Decani but of Junik. If you remember, I

12 was watching the Junik area. And I was informed on my previous visit that

13 this was the home of Serb refugees from the Krajina in Croatia. And so I

14 wanted to see what condition they were in, and indeed I was able to see

15 the same houses I had seen in my earlier visit.

16 They were indeed occupied by Serbs, and although I was told

17 stories that they too had been subjected to KLA attack, I inspected the

18 outside of the houses carefully and only saw occasional -- I mean

19 occasional -- by "occasional," I mean four or five single bullet holes in

20 the outside. They were at the time being visited by Serb police members

21 of the -- I suspect of the Ministry of Interior police, or MUP, but they

22 could have been Serb irregular units because they were often dressed in

23 very similar uniforms.

24 I have to say that -- that I saw no evidence there of a community

25 significantly under threat. That is not to say that some Serbs had not

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1 been taken by the KLA, murdered by the KLA. I condemned that at the

2 time. It is not to say that there were Serb policemen who were not

3 subject to attack, it is not to say that there were not ambushes, but this

4 community of houses did not appear to me to be having experienced severe

5 threats or having experienced significant or any, indeed, attacks.

6 Q. Thank you. I think you visited some sites of alleged deaths of

7 both Serbs and burial sites of Albanians?

8 A. Yes. I was again concerned to make sure that I got a balanced

9 picture and asked to be taken -- was taken to the site of an alleged Serb

10 execution. I say "alleged" because I can't prove otherwise, but I have

11 presented my evidence of this to the International Tribunal. I'm

12 convinced that an execution did take place there. It was in a culvert of

13 a stream. I was informed that six or seven Serbs had been executed

14 there. Their bodies had been in the stream but were not there when I got

15 there, but they had been observed by Major Crossland.

16 Judging by the empty bullet cases that I found there, 7.62 short

17 magazine, Chinese origin shell cases, distributed in such a fashion that

18 there appeared to be four or five firing points, leading me to believe

19 that, (a), these were conducted by people with Chinese-manufacture

20 Kalashnikov weapons, a weapon that was very commonly used by the KLA, and

21 judging by the firing points, this had not been the result of a battle but

22 was indeed an execution.

23 I believe a -- I believe a couple or three days later,

24 Mr. Milutinovic from the Serbian government also visited this site.

25 Q. I think you were able to go to the hills above Suva Reka.

1 A. Well, we next went to Orahovac. I just need to find it. This map

2 isn't necessarily as absolutely clear.

3 Orahovac is here, an area famous for its wine growing, where we

4 were informed that some Albanians had been killed recently. We were taken

5 to a local refuse dump close to a cemetery, contiguous with the cemetery,

6 really, and there were coffins sticking out of the refuse and a strong

7 smell of putrefaction, leading me to believe that however they got there,

8 there were bodies hastily buried here, and everything was consistent with

9 the story that I had been heard -- I had heard.

10 We then passed along this road here, heading for Suva Reka,

11 through the village of Studencane, which is here. I should explain that

12 this is a road with high mountains on the left-hand side and the valleys

13 of Kosovo stretching south down here.

14 As we came round the corner, I would imagine this corner of the

15 road, I was able to see beyond Suva Reka the whole of this valley here,

16 which forms a sort of amphitheatre for this area here. And I am bound to

17 say I was deeply shocked by what I saw, as indeed was the British

18 ambassador, the British ambassador having been informed that the Yugoslav

19 government had said that the operations which were continuing against the

20 Drenica villages of Kosovo had stopped the previous day. What we -- or

21 two days previously.

22 What we were presented with was an entire amphitheatre of hills in

23 which every village was ablaze, and we saw and heard the reports of

24 shell-fire, saw the explosions.

25 Q. Were you able to gauge the weapons that were being used?

1 A. I've -- I have some experience in these matters. Perhaps not as

2 much as Colonel Crossland, but we concluded that the weapons being used

3 here were artillery. In our judgement, artillery being fired from the

4 Dolje Blace feature. This is a feature that runs down in this direction.

5 Dolje is there, some seven to ten kilometres from the villages concerned.

6 Q. Yes.

7 A. And we could hear the -- not only see the strike of the shells,

8 but we could hear the boom of the artillery. And our conclusion was that

9 the weapons being used here probably were the full range of weapons

10 available to an armoured brigade. T54 tanks, probably. Certainly there

11 was tank fire. Artillery, certainly 120 millimetre, and we believed

12 perhaps as big as 150 millimetre. And judging by the strikes we were able

13 to see in these villages, mortars. And again, the strike of a mortar is

14 very particular as against an artillery shell, and we estimated mortars of

15 82 millimetre mortars and perhaps 120 millimetre mortars as well.

16 MR. NICE: Your Honours, to conclude this passage of evidence,

17 there is --

18 JUDGE MAY: I think it's now after 5.00 and we need to adjourn.

19 We'll look at that in the morning.

20 This witness has to finish by a certain time tomorrow.

21 MR. NICE: Lunchtime.

22 JUDGE MAY: Lunchtime. Well, you will leave adequate time for

23 cross-examination.

24 MR. NICE: Of course. The balance will not take very long.

25 JUDGE MAY: Very well. Lord Ashdown, we're going to adjourn now.

1 Would you remember in this adjournment and any other there may be not to

2 speak to anybody about your evidence, including the Prosecution team,

3 until it's over. Could you be back, please, at half past nine.

4 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned

5 at 5.02 p.m., to be reconvened on Friday,

6 the 15th day of March, 2002, at 9.30 a.m.

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