New Yorker: The Painstaking Hunt for (Balkans) War Criminals in the United States

[TomSea]

The Painstaking Hunt for War Criminals in the United States
By Eric LichtblauJuly 22, 2018

Mike MacQueen has spent three decades tracking down war criminals who have been hiding in the United States. His job description is akin to that of a police detective.
Illustration by Brian Stauffer

A few years ago, Mike MacQueen, a historian working for the Department of Homeland Security, was at his desk combing through decades-old Bosnian military records, in search of war criminals who had eluded justice. The documents listed the names of top officers in a batallion implicated in the massacre of eight hundred Muslim prisoners at a schoolhouse and dam in eastern Bosnia, in 1995. He noticed that the name of one Bosnian Serb officer kept showing up in the logs: Ilija Josipović.

MacQueen had turned himself into an unlikely expert on the war that unfolded in the Balkans two decades ago, mastering the Serbo-Croatian language, making two dozen trips to the region, and becoming so well schooled in the war crimes that Bosnian prosecutors had flown him over repeatedly to testify at trials. He had familiarized himself with the names of many of the key figures involved in the atrocities, but he had never come across Josipović (pronounced yoh-SIP-oh-vitch). He made a note to himself to find out what happened to the Serb officer.

MacQueen, who is sixty-eight, has spent the last three decades tracking down war criminals who have been hiding in the United States. His role, first with the Justice Department and then with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been to find offenders who made it into America posing as refugees. His official title is senior historian, but MacQueen’s job description is more akin to that of a police detective.

Read more at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-painstaking-hunt-for-war-criminals-in-the-united-states