US moving to deport Bosnians tied to war crimes

WASHINGTON: The United States is moving to deport at least 150 Bosnians suspected of taking part in war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
The report said US immigration officials had identified about 300 immigrants believed to have concealed their involvement in wartime atrocities, but the number could eventually top 600.
The accused immigrants include a soccer coach in Virginia, a metal worker in Ohio and four hotel casino workers in Las Vegas, the Times said.
Immigration officials have uncovered evidence that as many as 150 of the Bosnian suspects took part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which about 8,000 Muslim boys and men were killed.
More than 100,000 people were killed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war which followed the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
“As long as we are alive, war criminals will never be in peace. The fact that investigators will come knock on their door one day is a start,” Munira Subasic, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica group, told AFP.
Her association has turned over names of suspected war criminals to US prosecutors.
She said suspects were not just in the United States.
“There are some especially in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and European countries,” Subasic said, adding she had alerted authorities in some of the countries.
The over 120,000 Bosnian refugees who started asking for American visas in the mid-1990s were required to disclose military service or links that would hint at involvement in war crimes.
However, the system counted on applicants being honest and only a minor effort was made to check out their stories.
The immigrants were among refugees fleeing the violence in Bosnia after a war that erupted in 1992 with the collapse of Yugoslavia.
The number of suspects could eventually be over 600 as more records from Bosnia become available, the newspaper reported.
“The more we dig, the more documents we find,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement historian Michael MacQueen, who has led many of the agency’s war crimes investigations, told the Times.
Many of the Bosnian suspects were former soldiers and they include a Virginia soccer coach, an Ohio metal worker and four Las Vegas hotel casino workers, the newspaper said.
Some are now US citizens, it said.
The Times said evidence indicates half the 300 Bosnian suspects may have played a part in the massacre at Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in five summer days in 1995, towards the end of a war that claimed 100,000 lives.
The massacre was the culmination of a policy of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic’s forces to carve a pure Serb state out of communally diverse Bosnia.
Lawyer Thomas M. Hoidal represented two of 12 Bosnian Serbs in Arizona who face deportation over war crimes. “It’s guilt by association,” he told the Times.
The Bosnian war ended in a 1995 US-brokered peace deal. A UN tribunal subsequently ruled that genocide was committed in Bosnia.