www.newsday.com
War crimes suspect sent back to Bosnia (excerpt)
November 22, 2006
ISTANBUL, Turkey - This time last year Mladen Blagojevic was living in his neatly tended ranch home in the sprawl of Phoenix with his wife and young son. This week, he's in his homeland of Bosnia - sitting in a cell and facing the prospect of being charged with war crimes, his life in the safety of American suburbia over.
Blagojevic arrived in Sarajevo last Wednesday, the second in a group of more than 20 former Bosnian Serb soldiers living in Phoenix to be deported and detained while Bosnian prosecutors investigate their roles in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst war crime after World War II. A third was deported but is not likely to be charged with war crimes in Bosnia. (snip)
They went after & deported over 50 Bosnian Serbs in the US as "potential war crimes suspects" a few months ago. The Bosnian Muslim state went after them, just because they could and the US helped their little Bosnian jihadist proteges.
"Blagojevic, Bozic, and two others who were arrested in Bosnia, are the latest defendants in Bosnia's national war-crimes chamber - established in 2005 to take on mid- and lower-level ranking suspects - to be charged with alleged crimes at Srebrenica. Eleven others have been on trial for genocide since May, a trial that Damir Petrovic, a public-information lawyer at Bosnia's state court where the war-crimes chamber is housed,called "the largest criminal case in Europe right now."
Critics say the US has gone too far
A lawyer for Nedjo Ikonic, a Bosnian Serb arrested outside Milwaukee earlier this month who pleaded not guilty this week to making false statements, says that US officials are targeting too widely, and that the sting is sparking fears among the Serbian diaspora in the US.
"There's one lady in Salt Lake City who was a cook paid by the Republika Srpska Army. That's stretching the party to a crime concept. It seems like the [Bosnian] government wants to investigate every one of them," says Nikola Kostich, senior partner at the Milwaukee law firm Kostich, LeBell, Dobroski, & Morgan. Mr. Kostich defended several prominent Serb suspects in The Hague and has advised many of those arrested in the past 24 months.
"I've also given a lot of advice to people who have not been charged - people who have called me because they're not sleeping well, and they think there's going to be a knock on the door in the night, and they don't know what to do," he says."
Just what threat do you think that "a female cook" poses to anyone?