Ohio Man Who Hid Past War Crimes Involvement To Be Deported

An Akron man who hid his involvement in a military group that committed war crimes in the former Yugoslavia when applying for refugee status in the United States will be deported under an order handed down by U.S. District Judge Benita Pearson. Illija Josipovic, 59, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of immigration documents procured by fraud.

Pearson also placed Josipovic under house arrest for eight months, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio.

When applying for refugee status in 2002, Josipovic failed to disclose his military service in the 6th Battalion, Zvornik Infantry Brigade, Army of the Republic of Srpska, from 1992-1996, according to court documents. He used the fraudulent green card to obtain an Ohio driver’s license in 2012. The government said he used fraudulent documents to obtain another permanent resident card in 2014.

The international war criminal’s past caught up with him in January, when he was arrested by Homeland Security Investigations, a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Army of the Srprska used murder, forced deportation and other inhumane acts to create an ethnically pure Serbian race, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which indicted military leaders for war crimes in courts in The Hague. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed and 2 million people, more than half the population, were forced to flee their homes in the war-torn region.

According the United Nations, the worst atrocity of the conflict came under the leadership of Ratko Mladić, the leader of the Army of the Republic of Srpska. In the summer of 1995, “during a few days in early July, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed by Serb forces in an act of genocide. The rest of the town’s women and children were driven out.”

“This defendant hid the fact that he was a member of a unit involved in atrocities in the former Yugoslavia,” David A. Sierleja, the Acting U.S. Attorney for Ohio’s Northern District, said in the release. “He does not deserve the protections and rights of a U.S. citizen when his conduct flew in the face of our nation’s founding ideals.”

Steve Francis, the acting special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations of Detroit, said the United States “will never serve as a refuge for individuals seeking to distance themselves from their pasts.”

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