A Safe Haven, But for Whom?
The U.S. provides sanctuary for many of the world's most wanted
One evening last year, a 35-year-old Somali computer analyst was visiting a friend in a quiet Virginia suburb when he encountered a man whose name he had heard and cursed a thousand times but whom he had never expected to see--especially here. The computer analyst (fearing retribution, he asked to use the pseudonym Omer) says he was stunned. It turns out the other guest was Mohamed Ali Samatar. From 1971 to 1990, Samatar served as prime minister, vice president, and minister of defense under former Somali dictator Siad Barre. Barre's Darod clan has been accused by human-rights investigators of killing more than 50,000 northern Somali Issaks, among them, Omer's father and sister.
As Barre's top military man, Samatar himself is alleged by Somalis to have ordered many military atrocities against Issaks, including a devastating aerial bombing of the town of Hargeisa in 1988 in which tens of thousands of civilians died. In May 1997, after heavy rains in Hargeisa, forensics experts for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights uncovered more than 92 separate mass graves, many with wrist bound corpses.
In its report, the commission said the men, women, and children were killed by Barre forces in 1988. "If I were in Somalia, I have no doubt that I would have killed him," Omer says about his chance meeting with Samatar, who, he discovered, had not only obtained legal status in the United States but was practically his neighbor in Fairfax, Va.
Omer is not the only one who's angry. America has become a haven for hundreds if not thousands of suspected human-rights abusers loosely called "war criminals." The new arrivals range from foot soldiers to high-level military and government officials. They have been incriminated in numerous human-rights investigations, pilloried in the press, excoriated by their supreme courts and damned by their own people for torturing and killing millions. But they have escaped prosecution at home or by international tribunals. And they've come to the United States from all points of the compass--Haiti, Ethiopia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, to name just a handful of countries. "It's a problem for virtually all the major refugee and immigrant communities in this country," says Gerald Gray, executive director of the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability. Gray and others say the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the federal agency charged with policing the borders to keep out people of questionable backgrounds, is doing little about it. The alleged criminals come in as visitors, refugees, or asylum seekers, often with help from relatives, friends, churches, or even the U.S. government. Once here they tend to stay because the INS does not know who they are or move to throw them out.
'The new Nazis.' This could soon change. Some lawmakers, fed up with the INS's lack of action, are pushing for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which has successfully hunted down Nazis, to take over all war-crimes cases. "These are the new Nazis," says Sen. Patrick Leahy. The Vermont Democrat authored a bill, passed by the Senate last week, designed to plug a loophole that allows war criminals other than Nazis to reside in America. Under a law passed in 1978 and updated in 1990, the only war-crimes suspects who can be denaturalized or deported are those who committed genocide or were associated with the Nazis during World War II.
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