US bill would tighten loophole
WASHINGTON -- Marko Boskic, suspected of the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims, was able to enter the United States and live unmolested in Massachusetts for more than four years in part because of a key loophole in US immigration policy, according to government officials.
Only Nazi-era human rights violators are systematically tracked and investigated by a US government office to prevent entry into the country, revoke their citizenship, or deport them if they slip through the net.
A bill that has been pending in Congress for five years but has yet to be approved, the Anti-Atrocity Alien Deportation Act, would expand the authority of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations to perpetrators of atrocities elsewhere, including Rwanda, the Balkans, and Central America.
The office, which has a list of 1,500 individuals suspected of involvement in Nazi-era war crimes, is widely regarded as one of the world's most successful organizations in bringing perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.
But officials say human rights violators and individuals wanted for other types of war crimes have eluded a US tracking system for non-Nazi criminals that is spread throughout different government agencies.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement division at the Department of Homeland Security has "placed comparatively few, if any, of the perpetrators of other atrocities that decimated human beings on the watch list, nor have they denaturalized or deported any of them," said Richard Krieger, president of International Educational Missions, a nonprofit agency based in Boynton Beach, Fla.
Krieger, a former State Department official, helps bring war criminals to justice and has personally recommended individuals for watch lists. His and other similar organizations estimate that thousands of human rights violators and war criminals are living freely in the United States.
Boskic, arraigned yesterday in Boston on a charge of lying on his immigration application at the US consulate in Frankfurt in 2000, has been cited in court testimony for his alleged role as a commando in the Bosnian Serb Army unit responsible for killing thousands of unarmed Muslim men near Srebrenica in 1995. Some 200,000 people died in the war in Bosnia, when Serb and Croat forces waged a brutal killing campaign against the country's Muslims.
It remained unclear yesterday whether he was on any watch lists used by immigration and law enforcement officials to prevent entry or to track them once they enter the United States.
When asked if there was lapse by officials who accepted Boskic's contention four years ago that he was a refugee, US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said, "Obviously, hindsight being 20-20, I'm sure we much prefer that we had caught this at the time of the application and had sufficient evidence to deny the admission, as opposed to allowing somebody to come into the country allegedly by falsifying their history."
Officials note that in cases where individuals suspected of war crimes are found in the United States -- especially those like Boskic, who has not been publicly indicted but has been implicated by witnesses -- bringing charges against them or deporting them requires an exhaustive investigation to build a case.
Proponents of the bill say that expanding the portfolio of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations to include all human rights violators from foreign countries would go a long way toward focusing government attention on the problem.
Globe correspondent Brian Whitmore contributed to this report from Prague. Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.
