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NEWSDAY: Accused killer in Bosnian war makes a life in U.S.




Marko Boskic (AP Photo)

By James Rupert
Staff Correspondent

September 13, 2004


EVERETT, Mass. -- Hassan is trying to forget the summer nine years ago when a Serb militia surrounded the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and killed 7,500 Bosnian Muslims, including 29 of Hassan's cousins and a brother.

Now a construction worker in Boston, Hassan gathers often with Bosnian friends at a suburban cafe called Klub Sarajevo to play cards, drink and chat about their efforts to build futures and families in America. "All of us are in the same boat, and we want to help each other out," he said.


So when another Bosnian, Marko Boskic, landed here as a refugee in 2000, the friends at Klub Sarajevo welcomed him to their fraternity, helping him get an apartment and a driver's license. Hassan got him a construction job where they worked together and Boskic came by often for dinner at Hassan's apartment.

Two Fridays ago, "I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts on my way to work," and in the newspaper vending boxes outside, "I saw Marko's picture looking at me from the front pages," Hassan said. The papers said FBI agents had arrested Boskic, naming him as one of the executioners at Srebrenica.

Suddenly for Hassan, the unknown killers of his loved ones have a face - that of Marko, his buddy of recent years. It has revived old traumas in a way that Hassan prefers not to revisit, and he insists that his real name not be published in a newspaper. He has felt sick and skipped work, hanging close to his other friends. "How could this happen?" he asked.

Marko Boskic's arrest on Aug. 25 dramatizes how, after nearly a decade, Bosnia's wartime atrocities remain unbandaged wounds, its mass murders barely touched by laws or courts.

For years, Boskic has been named in the press and in war crimes trials as one of eight triggermen in one of Europe's most murderous acts since World War II. On July 16, 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army bused an estimated 1,200 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica to a farm where the gunmen lined them up in the fields, group after group, and shot them dead.

But Boskic, a hard-faced man of 40, has lived half of the years since then under his own name in Boston's northern suburbs. Even now, he is under arrest not for the killings, but, prosecutors say, for lying to conceal his military role in his applications to live in the United States.

As Boskic sits in a federal prison awaiting trial, important questions about him remain unanswered - how he might have become a mass executioner and how, in America, he came to seek shelter among the friends and loved ones of his alleged victims. Boskic and his court-appointed attorney have remained silent about his case.

Bosnia is a verdant, rugged land at the center of the former Yugoslavia, where centuries of rule and war by Europe's empires left a patchwork society of Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats, all scattered over the mountains in farming villages and a few industrial cities. While communist Yugoslavia suppressed divisions among the groups for decades under the rule of Josip Broz Tito, ethnic nationalism revived after his death and brought war in the 1990s.

Marko Boskic, a Croat, was the son of a relatively poor coal miner in a mountain village near the city of Tuzla. He told friends he attended a construction trades school as a youth.

When war came in 1992, he reportedly joined a local unit - the 115th Brigade - of the Bosnian Croat militia. The Croats were a minority around Tuzla and the brigade did little fighting, but guarded a sensitive line between the Muslim-dominated city and surrounding Serb-ruled areas, said Almasa Hadzic, a Tuzla-based journalist for the Bosnian newspaper Dnevni Avaz.

A frontline checkpoint in Boskic's village, Gornja Obodnica, offered the 115th's soldiers "a great chance to smuggle people, cigarettes, food, etc., across the lines, all for money," in cooperation with nearby Serb fighters, Hadzic said. In 1993, pressed by the Bosnian government to submit to its command, the 115th instead dissolved itself.

When the soldiers dispersed, "the ones who had been involved in smuggling and crime joined the [Bosnian] Serb Army," Hadzic said. Boskic and another Croat, Drazen Erdemovic, wound up in the Serbs' 10th Sabotage Detachment.

After the war, Erdemovic pleaded guilty at the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague and testified about crimes committed by the detachment. In trials, including that of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Erdemovic said he was one of eight men sent to the Branjevo collective farm to receive about 20 busloads of Muslim men and boys sent from Srebrenica on July 16, 1995. He said his squad led men off the buses and stood them in groups of about 10, facing away from the gunmen, before shooting them dead. He named seven fellow executioners, including Marko Boskic.

At least twice, Boskic has reacted to that accusation with violent rage.

In early 1996, Boston Globe reporter Elizabeth Neuffer tracked Boskic to the Bosnian town of Bijeljina. "Like any city tough, his hands are jammed into his pants pockets and his muscular shoulders strain at the seams of his cheap black leather jacket," Neuffer wrote in a subsequent book. "His eyes are as empty of expression as pure glass."

When Neuffer asked about his role at Branjevo "a flush appeared on Boskic's cheeks," she wrote. "His hands, when he raised them, were trembling, even as he held them out toward my translator and me as if he would strangle us like chickens whose necks he'd break with a wrench of their heads.

" 'Would you like to get whacked?' he hissed. 'I want you to forget this street and this restaurant. It doesn't exist anymore for you. Don't come looking for me anymore. I cannot guarantee the safety of your lives.'"

Signs of trouble

Soon after Boskic arrived in Boston, friends recalled, he met a refugee at a backyard barbecue who began questioning him suspiciously about his story that he had missed the Bosnian war by fleeing to Germany. "The man said, 'I don't believe you,' and accused him of working for the Serbs. Marko began shaking, and we had to break them up to stop a fight," said Enver Custovic.

Within four years of the war's end Boskic had left Bosnia for Germany, but like many refugees could count on only a short stay there. He applied to go to the United States. Where an official questionnaire asked about his military experience, he omitted his role as a fighter in the Bosnia war, according to the U.S. attorney in Boston. If convicted, he could face 10 years in prison and deportation to Bosnia.

Boskic's ability to hide in plain sight dramatizes the world community's failure to prosecute more than a handful of Bosnia's alleged war criminals, Bosnians and human rights advocates say. And it highlights a challenge to the United States in keeping war criminals from seeking refuge here.

Nearly a decade after the end of a war that killed an estimated 250,000 people - many of them in waves of brutal atrocities that spawned the label "ethnic cleansing" - only 59 war crimes suspects have been tried by the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serb campaign to "cleanse" much of the country of non-Serbs, remain free. So do scores of lower-level commanders and gunmen accused of crimes.

Indictment never issued

Even though accused in court and in print as a mass murderer, Boskic has never been indicted for the killings. The UN court, officially called the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, says it has such limited money and time that it can prosecute only the most prominent defendants, such as Milosevic. Under its UN mandate, the tribunal must end its investigations this year and wind up its trials by 2008.

Bosnia, which is now a federation of its Serb and Muslim-Croat republics, remains so bitterly divided that it only recently established a war crimes court that would have jurisdiction over Boskic's case. The court has not yet begun operations, according to Bogdan Ivanisevic, a researcher in the region for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.

The lack of a criminal indictment helped Boskic avoid klix by U.S. authorities. The Boston Globe quoted U.S. officials as saying the State Department failed to note published accounts of his role in the war when it vetted his application for entry in 1999. Claude Arnold, who heads the Department of Homeland Security's unit that investigates alleged human rights violators, said Boskic escaped notice in part because much of the U.S. investigators' work is based on the Hague tribunal, for which "Boskic is not a target."

'Some kind of justice'

U.S. officials say the investigation of Boskic, which ran for more than a year, began with a tip, but decline to say whether it came from the United States or Bosnia. U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan told the Globe that the reporting on Boskic by Globe correspondent Neuffer, "actually deserves a lot of credit for our investigation." Neuffer, who wrote in her book that she wanted "some kind of justice for Boskic," was killed last year in a car crash while reporting from Iraq.

A court affidavit filed by Sullivan said investigators identified Boskic as the man who served in the 10th Sabotage Detachment by comparing his photo with a video obtained from the Hague tribunal that showed him armed and in uniform at a military ceremony.

In the days before his arrest, Boskic seemed to know that something was up, friends said. "He was very nervous," said a neighbor, Arthur Liaperdos. "I saw him walking to his apartment, and stopping by the corner of the building to check the parking lot, like he expected someone to be waiting for him."

For a man with something to hide, he had trouble lying low. Police in Peabody, Mass., the suburb where Boskic lived, said they were called repeatedly to his condominium apartment in the past 15 months for fights, often between him and various girlfriends. He was charged three times each for assault and for motor vehicle violations, including an April crash in which he allegedly had been driving drunk.

Despite his volatility at home, he was calm at his job as a tile-setter for a Boston-area contractor, JAJ Co. "He was always in control and very respectful," said Vincenzo Penta, his supervisor. "If he couldn't make it to work, he always called me."

Boskic called Penta after the April crash. "Vinnie, I drink too much, and then I forget what I did," Penta recalled him saying. It was one of few times that friends in Boston recalled Boskic saying anything at all about himself.

Boskic was controlled, too, when he was with other Bosnians, said Ado Karo, owner of Klub Sarajevo. "When people get drunk, they say things they might be trying to hide, but even when he drank, Marko never said anything" about his past, the war or his alleged, once murderous enmity for Muslims, Karo said.

At Klub Sarajevo, the heavily Muslim crowd spends a lot of time talking about Boskic these days - especially about why he sought them out for friendship and help after having allegedly massacred Bosnians like them years ago.

"Criminologists have a theory that murderers return to the scene of the crime," said one man who asked not to be named. "Is that what he was doing with us? Or was he watching us, trying to think of a justification for trying to wipe out Muslims?"

In near-empty cafe, an interview yields few clues
August 27, 2004

The following account of an encounter with Marko Boskic, a Bosnian Croat and suspected war criminal, is taken from a book by the late Elizabeth Neuffer, who reported extensively on the war in Bosnia for The Boston Globe. The excerpted passage begins the prologue to the book, "The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda," which was published in 2001. Neuffer was killed in a car crash while reporting in Iraq in May 2003.


Let me begin as it began for me: glimpsing evil in a man's soul.

The man I've been expecting has just swaggered up to my table in this smoke-filled caf, followed by one of his henchmen and the aroma of cheap cologne. Like any city tough, his hands are jammed into his pants pockets and his muscular shoulders strain at the seams of his cheap black leather jacket. But when he looks at me, his eyes are as empty of expression as pure glass.

He pulls up a chair, summons the waitress, and sends her scurrying to get brandy, beer, more coffee, with the arrogance of a Mafia don. He sits down on my right, blond and mustachioed, and cocks his eyebrow. The war-hardened soldiers slouching at nearby tables, their cigarettes drooping from their lips, nod with approval. They believe this man, a fellow soldier, to be a hero. But I've been searching for him for six weeks because I believe him to be something else: executioner.

I am in the Bosnian-Serb half of Bosnia and Herzegovina and it is 1996. Peace is so newly minted here in the city of Bijeljina that civilians still don't venture onto the streets. Only a mere seven months have passed since this man and others in the Bosnian Serb 10th Sabotage Unit rounded up 1,200 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and led them to an abandoned, grassy meadow at a collective farm just down the highway from here. They ordered the men to turn their backs and kneel on the ground. Then, as their captives wept and pleaded for their lives, they shot them.

At the time, I'd been reporting from Bosnia for more than two years, and I still couldn't understand what turned neighbors of long standing into killers, rapists, torturers: whether it was ideology or hate or madness or history or blood lust that made civilization's constraints vanish.

I had wanted to talk to this man's commander, General Radislav Krstic. But Krstic has quit Bosnia for neighboring Serbia, where I was rarely granted a visa. So I had set out tracking down this young soldier instead, whose name I had gotten from Bosnian Muslim war crimes investigators. I've spent nights searching for him in drafty bars filled with grimacing thugs and pounding rock music, and days hunting him down . . . I've come too far now to turn back. Never mind that I am the only woman in the room, save for my translator, Alex, and the waitress; never mind that suddenly the interview karma doesn't seem quite right. Much later I would offer the typical journalistic defense: The interview had been my editor's idea. Because Marko "Macak" Boskic was not in a cooperative mood . . .

"Where did you get my name?" he demanded, leaning over the wooden table.

"From Erdemovic," I lied, naming a soldier from his unit, Drazen Erdemovic, who had recently confessed to the executions to international war crimes prosecutors in The Hague, Netherlands. In truth, Erdemovic would later identify Boskic as part of the massacre squad.

"That traitor," Boskic sneered. I took this as an opening.

"Look, I'd like to talk to you about Srebrenica-- I want to talk to you about your side of the story," I gushed nervously, referring to the massacres, which I had been told he participated in, that followed the fall of the UN safe area of Srebrenica and left thousands of Muslim men and boys dead. "Were you ordered to kill those men? Why did you do it?"

Silence. . . .

There comes a moment in every interview when you realize things are not going as planned; in this case, I'd just realized Boskic was not going to tell me why he had executed those men, after all.

Instead, a flush appeared on Boskic's cheeks . . . His hands, when he raised them, were trembling, even as he held them out toward my translator and me as if he would strangle us like chickens whose necks he'd break with a wrench of their heads.

"Would you like to get whacked?" he hissed. "I want you to forget this street and this restaurant. It doesn't exist anymore for you. Don't come looking for me any more. I cannot guarantee the safety of your lives."

And with that he stood up and strode from the restaurant, stopping only to point us out to several Bosnian Serb soldiers sitting at a nearby table, still carrying guns and clad in camouflage, despite the war's end. One winked at us. Another glared. The waitress arrived with more coffee. We drank it, wiser -- and yet no wiser -- than we had been before.

Perhaps I was nave in trying to interview Boskic, although I had known killers to brag about their exploits. Though I found out nothing new about the Srebrenica massacres, I did learn something else, something that had eluded me in the many months I'd spent reporting on one atrocity in Bosnia after another: why victims, particularly those who knew their tormentors, struggled so to put the demons of those memories to rest. Before I met Boskic, he was a name; afterward, he became a nightmare. Once you put a human face on evil, it will not let you go . . .

This young man had allegedly killed unarmed men who had surrendered -- a heinous crime, by any measure -- and yet he walked away from my table, free. The more I thought about the fact that Boskic had flouted society's rules with impunity, the more I felt a growing sense of injustice. . . .

What I realized was that there is an innate human need for some kind of reckoning, an accounting.

Like everyone I met in Bosnia, I wanted something that would assuage my guilt, answer my fears, and punish those who were responsible. I wanted order imposed on a world that would right the wrong that Boskic and his men had committed that day. I wasn't sure what outcome was best: Boskic on trial, Boskic forced to apologize for his crimes, Boskic forced to pay reparations.

But I did know this: I wanted some kind of justice for Boskic -- whatever "justice" meant.

Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Picador USA.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

PEABODY MAN WON'T FACE UN TRIBUNAL

Published on August 28, 2004
Author(s): Bryan Bender Globe staff and Brian Whitmore Globe
Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Despite eyewitness reports saying Marko Boskic participated in the executions of about 1,200 Bosnian Muslims nine years ago, the United Nations tribunal does not plan to indict him for war crimes, court officials in The Hague said yesterday.

A frontline checkpoint in Boskic's village, Gornja Obodnica, offered the 115th's soldiers "a great chance to smuggle people, cigarettes, food, etc., across the lines, all for money," in cooperation with nearby Serb fighters, Hadzic said. In 1993, pressed by the Bosnian government to submit to its command, the 115th instead dissolved itself.

When the soldiers dispersed, "the ones who had been involved in smuggling and crime joined the [Bosnian] Serb Army," Hadzic said. Boskic and another Croat, Drazen Erdemovic, wound up in the Serbs' 10th Sabotage Detachment.

Maverick_ wrote:Ovdje ima par mjesta, svi se zajedno skupljaju,sjede,piju... ...stvarno smo uzasan narod ...nasrecu ne svi