Date: Saturday, November 20, 2010, 3:07 AM
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4429136 Forced into war, Milenko Krstic, father of a Miss Oregon, could be forced out of U.S. Saturday, August 21, 2010 4:55 PM (Source: The Oregonian) tracking <http://content.yellowbrix.com/images/content/cimage.nsp?ctype=full_story&story_id=148898664&id=wallstreettools&ip_id=McClatchy-Tribune+Business+News&source_id=The+Oregonian&category=International> By Bryan Denson, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore. Aug. 21--On an overcast Friday in September 2005, two federal agents drove to Washington County and took a seat in the dining room of a soft-spoken Bosnian refugee named Milenko Krstic to question him about war crimes. Special Agent Ted Weimann, wearing a sweater over the handgun on his hip, told Krstic that he -- and possibly his wife and daughters -- might be deported because he lied on an immigration document about whether he was a soldier in a Bosnian Serb army brigade. Krstic's lower lip trembled so violently he clamped his mouth shut to stop it. His daughter, Aleksandra, interpreting the agent's words, had never seen her dad so scared. Five years later, Krstic's fear endures. He survived the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, joyfully adapted to U.S. culture with his wife and children -- daughter Danijela was crowned Miss Oregon in 2008 -- and now faces court dates that might send them all back to Bosnia. A federal judge will sentence Krstic on Friday for making a false statement on a government document, a crime that carries a potential prison term. Immigration officials are then expected to file deportation papers. Krstic (pronounced KRIS-tich) admitted to Weimann that in 1998, coached by immigration officials in Serbia, he falsified his U.S. refugee papers. But the 53-year-old mechanical engineer steadfastly maintains he took part in no war crimes, and a federal prosecutor said recently that the government is pursuing no such charges. As it turns out, Krstic was a peace activist whose homeland was torn to pieces by the brutal nationalist groups he opposed. He helped three villages of Serbs escape the tumult only to be forced by circumstance into the army. "I didn't come here hiding as some kind of criminal," Krstic said recently through an interpreter. "I came here to be protected from criminals. ... Regardless of what happens, this is my country." Suddenly in the news Krstic's troubles began as a private affair as lawyers wrangled over the legality of his criminal charge, which was briefly dismissed. But a March 2009 appeals court ruling reinstated his indictment, loosing a media tempest when reporters learned he was Miss Oregon's father. At the time, daughter Danijela was serving her final months as the first foreign-born Miss Oregon. She had already competed in the Miss America Pageant in Las Vegas, where her delighted dad had observed, "If you're good, you can be successful. This is the America I love." News of Krstic's indictment hit the airwaves and the front page of The Oregonian. He and his family were shamed by stories that seemed to link him to war crimes, mortified that news teams were asking neighbors for comment. Danijela had put her dental hygienist job on hold to serve as Miss Oregon, speaking to thousands of students. Now her appearances were being canceled. "For safety reasons," she was told. But she knew better. The Krstics wanted to explain that they were victims of Bosnia's war, too. But they felt too uncomfortable then to make their private torments public. The Krstics are telling their story publicly for the first time. They talked to The Oregonian for hours, and Krstic's legal team turned over witness statements gathered in Bosnia to corroborate the account. The newspaper also reviewed military records and independently verified translations of the documents. The Krstics' struggles began in the early 1990s as nationalists representing Bosnia's three main ethnic groups -- Slavic Muslims known as Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats -- sought political domination. Krstic, whose Serbian family had lived in eastern Bosnia for generations, joined a multiethnic peace group -- Grupa Za Mir -- in hopes of talking sense into people itching for war. But he realized those hopes were futile in 1992 when young men shouted down a plea for unity during a meeting in a nearby village. Krstic said he wept as he realized Bosnia's rolling green countryside was disintegrating into ethnic territories. Family flees violence With war in the offing, Krstic drove his wife, Branka, and their girls to neighboring Serbia for their safety. He returned to his home in Banovici, but soon found himself forbidden to enter the coal company where he worked -- Serbs were now banished -- and locked out of his family's condo to make room for refugees who belonged to the Bosniak majority. He drove five miles to his boyhood home of Zeljova (pronounced ZHEL-yo-vuh), a rustic Serb village of about 400. Fearing violence, Krstic and a few other men pleaded with local Bosniak officials to help them move the residents of Zeljova and two other Serb villages closer to Serbia. Police in a nearby town agreed to allow roughly 1,000 people, including Krstic's parents, to flee. They soon rolled out in a sad caravan of cars, trucks, even tiny tractors. But Bosniaks stopped them along the way, guns drawn. Krstic imagined how he might be remembered if bullets cut them down: "I am the one who brought them here to be killed." The gunmen turned them back to Zeljova unharmed. A few days later, on June 19, 1992, Bosniaks surrounded Krstic's village and unleashed a two-minute barrage of gunfire. Soon, as darkness fell, Krstic and a few other men gathered the villagers -- the old, the sick, young women carrying babies -- and hurried them through a driving rain into the woods. They trudged through clay mud so deep that some lost their shoes. Eventually they linked up with refugees from two other villages, making their way to the Serb-held town of Zvornik in northeastern Bosnia. Behind them, Zeljova was burned to the ground. An unfathomable soldier For three months, Branka Krstic didn't know what had become of her husband. When news reached her near Belgrade that a group of people from Zeljova had reached Zvornik, she caught a bus to the combat zone. She found her husband outside the sports hall in Zvornik but scarcely recognized him. He was so gaunt his shirt hung on him, and his black shoes were tied with white string. The handsome athlete she married 12 years before, who despised smoking, was puffing on a cigarette. Branka hugged him hard, happy to find him alive. But his spirit was broken. Krstic, his brother and their father soon were conscripted into the Bosnian Serb army, known as the VRS. For Krstic, signing on was a betrayal of his ideals. But men who failed to register were jailed, leaving their families with no Red Cross provisions, no medical coverage, no place to live. "I had all the time been trying to negotiate for peace," he recalled recently, "and now all those ideas fell into the water." Records show Krstic received the rank of soldier in the army's Zvornik Brigade. He spent most of his days acting as a liaison between soldiers and their families, getting them creature comforts such as wood for their stoves. But he also was part of a regular rotation dispatched to stand sentry at the territorial border, a trench four miles outside the city. In 1995, the war's final year, one of Krstic's army superiors, an old high school friend, recommended him for a desk job to keep him safe. As the friend later observed in an interview with Krstic's defense team, "He was a civilian stuck in the war." Krstic was working at his desk job in July 1995 when members of his brigade, joined by local police, overran a United Nations safe zone at Srebrenica, a city to the south. Serb forces rounded up Bosniak men and boys. They took them to a soccer stadium, a warehouse and other locales and shot as many as 8,000 of them to death. The Srebrenica massacre was Europe's worst atrocity since World War II, an act of genocide. Krstic recalled chaos and fighting during the week of the killing. But he said he did not learn of the slaughter until later, when he heard that bodies of executed prisoners were being dug up. This left him, he said, with "a terrible sadness." When the war ended in late 1995, Krstic went to work as a machine maintenance manager at a stone quarry in Serbia. A whirlwind to the U.S. The Krstics applied for refugee status in January 1998. A caseworker at the International Organization for Migration, under contract with the U.S. government, warned Krstic that he'd be denied entry to the U.S. if he listed his army service on his application. So he left it out. The next few years were a blur for the Krstics. The U.S. approved them as refugees, Catholic Resettlement Services flew them to New York and they moved into an apartment in the Portland suburbs. Krstic took a job with a Newberg company that makes parts for heating products, and Branka got a housekeeping job at Portland's Multnomah Athletic Club. Daughters Aleksandra and Danijela learned English at Sunset High School, and their parents bought a two-story house in Washington County's Bethany area. In September 2005, Special Agent Weimann, a Portland-based investigator for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, got a briefing on efforts to track down some of the roughly 11,000 military personnel who had some association with the Srebrenica massacre. ICE found that about 125 of them had immigrated to the United States and that the Organization for International Migration had assisted many of those men in crafting misrepresentations of their military service on refugee papers. Weimann learned that three of the former Bosnian Serb soldiers lived in the Beaverton area -- including Krstic and his brother, Ostoja Krstic, whose case is pending. The agent visited Milenko Krstic on Sept. 30, 2005. He pulled out a fuel receipt that showed Krstic's signature on a requisition for 500 liters of diesel in the waning days of the Srebrenica massacre. The implication was that the fuel might have been used to transport Bosniak prisoners to their deaths. But Krstic signed many documents crossing his desk at brigade headquarters. He recognized his signature on the diesel receipt, but it didn't specify what the fuel had been used for and he didn't know. Krstic explained to the agent that he took no part in war crimes. He has never wavered on that point. "If you find a single man who says I did something bad," he said, "I would like to see that man." Weimann walked away from his hourlong interview that day with a signed confession from Krstic that he had lied on his immigration form. Guilty In February 2007, Krstic was indicted for possessing a green card obtained by making a false statement on refugee papers. Conviction would have meant a prison term of up to 10 years and automatic deportation, said Chris Schatz, his court-appointed lawyer. That September, Schatz flew to Bosnia and Herzegovina with a veteran investigator from his office to retrace Krstic's steps. They spent more than a week gathering statements from an army superior of Krstic's, the Bosniak CEO of his former coal company and many friends and relatives. They described him as a modest, introverted peace activist and a textbook example of a man never meant for military duty. Schatz and Assistant U.S. Attorney David Atkinson argued for a couple of years about the appropriateness of prosecuting Krstic. But recently they came to an agreement. This past June, Krstic wore a black suit with an American flag pin on his lapel to face U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown. There he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: making a false statement on a government document. Before finding Krstic guilty, Brown asked the prosecutor whether the government planned to pursue war crimes against Krstic. "There are no plans," he said, "no hidden plans to prosecute the defendant in this district or some other district for anything other than these matters." Brown accepted Krstic's guilty plea. Because he has been a model citizen -- obtaining legal residency, paying taxes and otherwise avoiding trouble with the law -- federal sentencing guidelines suggest a punishment of probation and no more than six months in prison. Schatz engineered the guilty plea because admitting to the lesser crime allows Krstic to contest plans to deport him or his family. Krstic said he could imagine no worse punishment than being sent back to Bosnia, for it no longer resembles the Yugoslavian republic he knew. "We used to call it our motherland, and that mother left us," he said. "Actually, it didn't leave us. It died. And then God opened the pathways, and then I got my stepmother, America. Sometimes a stepmother can be even better than a real mother." -- Bryan Denson ----- To see more of The Oregonian, or to subscribe the newspaper, go to http://www.oregonian.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 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