Two decades after the end of the Balkan conflict, a three-year spasm of ethnic and religious bloodletting that came to define modern-day genocide, the war in Bosnia is still being fought in the United States.
On one side is a team headed by Michael MacQueen, an official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has spent years tracking down alleged war criminals among more than 150,000 Bosnian refugees in the United States, gathering evidence on their wartime records and often using charges of immigration fraud to have them deported.
The team’s efforts at ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unithave achieved some high-profile successes, including a recent federal court ruling against Almaz Nezirovic, a refugee in Roanoke who had been wanted by Bosnian authorities since 2003 on charges of tormenting prisoners as a guard at a military detention center.
Based partly on MacQueen’s interviews with former prisoners, Nezirovic, 54, was arrested and imprisoned in 2012. After nearly three years of legal proceedings, his appeal was denied in federal court last month, and he is now likely to be extradited.
But many other individuals pursued by ICE have less clear connections to wartime abuses. Some are former Serbian military conscripts, such asVitomir Spiric, 43, a Bosnian in Phoenix who says he repeatedly tried to escape military service and committed no crimes. He was convicted of immigration fraud in 2010, but his case is still on appeal.
“I never killed no one, I never did nothing wrong. I just kept trying to run and they kept catching me again,” Spiric, a medical courier with two children, said in a lengthy interview last week. “The war finished a long time ago, but it never ends. It never ends.”
The story of MacQueen’s mission to bring hidden Bosnian war criminals to justice, and of murky cases like Spiric’s that may fall short of that description, illustrate how difficult the truth can be to extract from chaotic, long-past events — and how hard it is to neatly distinguish between victims and perpetrators in a brutal, fast-moving conflict during which people did whatever they could to survive.
A number of high-level Serbian militia leaders and others accused of atrocities were prosecuted years ago before an international tribunal in The Hague. Some were sent to prison for crimes that included mass executions, rapes and the horrific massacre of Srebrenica in July 1995, in which more than 8,000 people were killed.
MacQueen and his associates pursue human rights violators from dozens of countries and have succeeded in deporting more than 650 individuals. They began focusing on Bosnia a decade ago and have opened about 300 cases, traveling to Bosnia to gather evidence and tracking down suspects from Vermont to Nevada.
Only 30 people have been deported. Some others have fled the country; the rest of the cases are either bogged down in court proceedings or are still being developed. MacQueen said the legal process in the United States has been slow and investigations in Bosnia have been hampered by a “conspiracy of silence” that lingers in the jittery, war-scarred region.
He has been accused of waging an anti-Serbian vendetta, persecuting low-level members of its former security forces against whom there is little or no evidence of any crime. But he insisted he has no agenda other than to see justice done.
“We’re not saying these people are all trigger-pullers or war criminals, and we have never said the taint of human rights abuses extends to the broader Bosnian community. But there are many ways to assist [in abuse] without pulling the trigger,” MacQueen said. “We work hard to find credible evidence and research links to human rights abuses. This is not a broad brush.”
The war may be 20 years gone, he added, but “these cases are red hot.”
Spiric is as eager to forget the painful past as MacQueen is to unearth it. Spiric’s version of the Balkan conflict, recounted in an often emotional interview, was a saga of flight and pursuit across shifting ethnic combat zones, of being forced to stand guard on frozen nights by Serbian military bosses, and of trying repeatedly to escape until he reached a refugee agency in Belgrade that helped him apply for sanctuary in the United States.
“I had a brother in Arizona, and they said he would guarantee me,” Spiric said. “But they told me, ‘Don’t say you are from Bosnia or they will never let you in.’ I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrote what they said.”
Spiric was admitted to the United States in 1997 and settled into life in Phoenix with his wife and a young daughter. But starting in 2005, he said, disconcerting things began to happen: phone calls from strangers asking about his past; a fake cable TV repairman whom he later encountered in an ICE detention facility. He was arrested and released on bail, but his wife left him. Government vehicles often parked on his street. After five years, his case has not been resolved.
“I have no life now,” he said. “I can’t go home to Bosnia, not even to visit my sister’s grave. If I leave the house, I am followed. The immigration people ask you a thousand questions about things you don’t remember and they call you a liar. It’s not just me. All the people they catch here, we were from the same villages. We never did nothing to no one. We just wanted to get away.”
According to court documents and to Spiric’s attorney, he has been charged with immigration fraud for failing to disclose that he had served in a certain Serbian army brigade that was linked to mass killings. But there is no public record of any criminal accusations against him.
“Yes, he committed fraud, but never once did they allege that he participated in any war crimes or [persecuting] activity,” said the attorney, Paul Djurisic, who has represented numerous other Bosnians from Spiric’s region who were charged by ICE. “The government has not produced one scintilla of evidence.”
Djurisic and several other defenders of the accused Bosnians suggested that MacQueen and his colleagues are on a witch hunt against Serbs to justify the continued existence of their program. MacQueen strongly denied that assertion, saying they have also prosecuted Croats and Muslim Bosnians.
He said he could not speak about any pending cases but strongly defended the government’s methods of locating suspected abusers and linking them to controversial security units. The practice stems from 2005, when ICE official Richard Butler brought back a trove of Serbian military rosters and proposed checking individual military service and duty records against statements by refugee applicants.
Butler claimed that many Serbian refugees had lied about their military service and that a “smaller number” aided in abusive conduct, such as guarding or driving prisoners who were likely to be killed. Even if they did not directly commit abuses, he wrote, these soldiers played “some witting role” in larger acts of persecution or genocide.
MacQueen said that with legal limits and investigative dead ends often hampering his team’s efforts to pursue war crimes directly, immigration fraud has become a fallback — a way to go after individuals who his group believes may be guilty of far worse.
“These people say they didn’t kill anyone, that they didn’t participate, but that’s not what the law says,” MacQueen said, adding that “acting as a lookout or blocking an escape route” can amount to assisting in a war crime. “Our bottom line,” he said, “is that we will use any legal means available to bring to bear.”
Source: The Washington Post
