Problems with organizing humanitarian intervention: Kosovo as a case | 143 comments (140 topical, 3 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

No, you compare that with indictments. We're not here to do your homework. You allege a packed court, you get to demonstrate it. All the way to q.e.d., with citations, arithmetic and the whole Turkish horn orchestra.

(FWIW, my quick mental arithmetic puts the ratios in my post downthread at 1/400 Serbian indictees vs. other people's civvies and 1/1600 Croat indictees vs. other people's civvies, respectively 18*10^5 Serbian indictees times dead Serb civvies, vs. 15*10^5 Croat indictees times dead Croat civvies.

So by one measure, they draw even - give or take 20 % - and by another measure you go from a factor of three to a factor of four. At the same time, the sensitivity to the choice of metric between these two decreases to a factor of four.

Still not convincing.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 02:52:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

We can also compare things to the ratio of convictions to acquittals/withdrawals.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 02:55:40 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Relax Jake. You're the one who said :

Then dig out those, and we'll play with them.

Besides, my comment wasn't an order or a request that anyone should do something. It was like saying "now look at that"... that's all.

by vladimir on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 02:59:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

No, you were saying,

Now compare this to the ICTY indictments and you have a seriously biased court.

In other words, doing the actual arithmetic. Which is your job.

That's not to say that I wouldn't happily do it for you once, or twice or even three times. But you used up that quota half a dozen posts ago, and I'm tired of first having to (re)construct your arguments from scattered data and vague insinuation before I can even begin to consider it properly.

Presenting free-floating data and claiming to have made a case is like presenting a bucket of paint and claiming that you've made a painting.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 04:55:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Presenting free-floating data and claiming to have made a case is like presenting a bucket of paint and claiming that you've made a painting.

What on earth are you talking about? This is a discussion, it's not a PhD thesis!

by vladimir on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 03:18:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 1)

Yeah, and that's probably why nobody's demanding that you cite affidavits, dig out old books and newspaper articles or whatever else historians do for their Ph.d.

But when you bring numbers to the table, you either do it to make a point - in which case you need to present a plausible model to translate those numbers into a conclusion.

Or you're not - in which case the numbers are just noise that add nothing to the debate.

You're the dude making claims here. You've got to present a case if you want those claims to be taken seriously. And so far, what you have presented is not a case, any more than a disorderly pile of bricks is a house.

And if you don't want your claims to be taken seriously, then why the are we having this discussion, anyway?

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 11:53:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

I don't quite get your mathematical logic.
> 1 Serb indicted for every 400 non Serb civilian casualties
> 1 Croat indicted for every 1 600 non Croat civilian casualties
That's just 4 times as many Serbs indicted per enemy casualty than Croats. In my books that's super stacked.

by vladimir on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 03:14:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

sigh

A factor of four is not conclusive evidence with a measure this crude. Certainly not for a charge as serious as packing a court of law. Particularly when another, not notably cruder, measure using the same data essentially breaks even.

If you massage the numbers enough and then cherry-pick the "right" metric, you can make them say virtually anything (which is why we spend so much time around here taking popular econometrics apart to see how they work).

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 03:34:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

yeah right

by vladimir on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 04:49:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Ballpark guesstimates give you the order of magnitude, and little more than that. This discrepancy (which, by the way, only exists when using one ballpark metric - you conveniently ignore that it goes away when DoDo and I used two other ballpark metrics) is barely more than half an order of magnitude. It says jack shit about the court being packed, unless you're in the hundred-to-one range or something of that order of magnitude.

Now, you may argue that this test is too crude (guilty as charged - it's a ballpark figure using a ballpark metric, nothing more). But then I invite you to construct a better metric - and argue that it is indeed better - and run the numbers on your own. Show your math, because when I do my math, it does not add up to your conclusion.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Mar 13th, 2009 at 05:01:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Err. No. Statistical significance is not as of 1:100. 1:4 is certainly statistically significant in this case. I'll do a t test as soon as I have some time and I'll post the results. Maybe that'll convince you.

by vladimir on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 03:20:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

I'm not talking about statistical significance. Statistical significance requires that your model at least attempts to correct for confounding factors. This one doesn't. It's a ballpark figure, and as such, it can tell you only whether you are at least roughly in the right ballpark. 1:4 is in the right ballpark. It is possible, of course, to be in the correct ballpark and still be offside, and a ballpark test won't allow you to decide that. To do that, you need something more precise. And if you want something more precise, you have to base your model on assumptions that aren't pulled out of my ass. But you're the one claiming offside. I'm not. So all I had to show was that the ball was not self-evidently offside. Which it isn't.

Besides, it's only 1:4 by one of the measures. The two other measures that have been put forward in this thread call it even. Furthermore, the measure that's 1:4 is the least appropriate one, because it assumes that all sides had an equal hand in all deaths that weren't from their own side, which is obviously nonsense.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 11:16:53 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

JakeS: ...you have to base your model on assumptions that aren't pulled out of my ass

Exactly which of my assumptions have come out of your ass?

by vladimir on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 03:30:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (4.00 / 2)

That all sides were equally responsible for all the deaths that were not their own nationals, that the number of actual war criminals is at least roughly proportional to the number of people killed, and that the number of war criminals for whom there is enough solid evidence to prosecute is at least roughly proportional to the number of war criminals.

None of these are trivial assumptions.

The first is pretty blatant nonsense. The second is something that I would be willing to bet money on. The third is not necessarily true: It might be the case that if there are more war criminals, they leave more evidence implicating each other, and picking up one end of the web and unravelling the whole thing might be easier. Or a larger number of war criminals might be indicative of a superior organisation, which might include better cutouts between individual members and better cover manoeuvres, which would make it harder.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 03:47:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Are there figures for local prosecutions? serbs brosecuted by serbia? bosnians by bosnia? croats by croatia?

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 05:10:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 1)

No, prosecutions within the ICCY framework.

So, actually, you can add an assumption to the list: That all countries have been equally unwilling and/or unable to prosecute their own war criminals - because ICCY only has jurisdiction when it is clear that the country of origin is not going to prosecute of its own volition.

But I think that's a pretty fair assumption, all things considered...

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 05:33:16 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

I knew that was the original state, but wondered wether there had been any shift since the process started.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 05:56:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 1)

IANAL, but AFAIK that's still the case. It's a standard (and IMO very sensible) condition for international tribunals, so I very much doubt that it would be waived unless some of the countries in question tried to "acquit" "their" war criminals in outright kangaroo kourts.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 06:02:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Actually, those are not my assumptions - they're yours. You were the one who proposed and calculated that metric in the first place. IMHO, the other two measures you provided seem less adequate than the first.

I'm working on a statistical analysis which I'll share with you - whatever the results.

by vladimir on Sun Mar 15th, 2009 at 02:29:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Yes, they are my assumptions, because so far DoDo and I are the only ones who have actually done any data analysis in this thread.

But that does not matter. The figure you used to state your case was based on those assumptions, no matter who came up with them. Which means that its validity is limited to the validity of those assumptions. I explicitly stated at the time that this was a ballpark figure, not a precise measure. And I used it only as a ballpark figure, not as a precise measure. So when you use it as if it were a precise measure, you're violating the assumptions that went into it.

In plain English: That number does not say what you seem to think it says. I should know; I built it.

I'd also like to know why the other two measures seem less adequate to you? That the number of war criminals is anti-correlated to the number of civilian casualties on your own side does not strike me as an unreasonable assumption - or at least not any less reasonable than to say that all sides are equally responsible for all the civilian casualties that are not from their own side.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Mar 15th, 2009 at 05:53:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The EU as humanitarian intervention (none / 0)

Here's my analysis: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2009/3/15/154532/098.

by vladimir on Sun Mar 15th, 2009 at 03:47:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Another stacked court. Bravo EULEX! (none / 0)

Kosovo Accused's 40-year UN Conviction Overturned-EU Mission. Friday March 13rd, 2009 / 16h50
PRISTINA, Kosovo (AFP)--A European Union-led court in Kosovo has overturned a 40-year jail term U.N. judges gave an ethnic Albanian for a 2001 bomb attack on a bus that killed 11 Serbs, an E.U. mission said Friday.
"A Supreme Court panel of five judges - three EULEX and two local judges - ordered on the afternoon of March 12 the immediate release of Florim Ejupi from Dubrava prison," said the E.U. mission known as EULEX.
"He was acquitted of all charges and released for a lack of evidence," said EULEX, which in December replaced the U.N. mission that had administered Kosovo since its 1998-99 conflict.
Last year, a three-member panel of U.N. judges jailed Ejupi for 40 years over the attack on a bus carrying Serb pilgrims from Serbia to the enclave of Gracanica in central Kosovo for a commemoration service in February 2001.
Eleven passengers were killed and another 10 wounded in the incident, which occurred seven kilometers inside Kosovo, near the town of Podujevo.

by vladimir on Sat Mar 14th, 2009 at 02:31:46 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Problems with organizing humanitarian intervention: Kosovo as a case | 143 comments (140 topical, 3 editorial, 0 hidden)

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