At the end of the war Artukovic fled from justice in postwar Yugoslavia. He first moved to that part of Austria occupied by the Western Allies, then illegally entered Switzerland, and finally made his way to Ireland. Traveling without a passport and using the false name of Alois Anich, he used an Irish Certificate of Identity to obtain a non-immigrant visitor's visa from the American consul in Dublin. On 16 July 1948 he thus illegally entered the United States as a "temporary visitor for pleasure." When his visa and two extensions expired in April 1949 and his application for permanent residence under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was denied, he nonetheless remained in the United States, along with his wife and his foreign-born and American-born children.
Protracted deportation proceedings against Artukovic began in the early 1950s. To summarize briefly, in May 1951 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ordered him to show cause why he should not be deported. In June 1952 an immigration hearing officer ordered him deported on the grounds that he had overstayed his visitor's visa and had entered the country illegally without valid passport or entry documents. He sought a suspension of this order from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) on the grounds that his deportation would impose economic hardships on the daughter born during his illegal sojourn in the United States. In April 1953 the BIA upheld the deportation order in an opinion citing his prewar role in the "extremist, nationalist Ustasha," his arrest in connection with the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in 1934, and his prominent role in the wartime Croatian "administration ... solely responsible for the conditions that existed in the concentration camps of Croatia, for massacres of Serbs, Jews and Moslems, and for the promulgation of laws setting up a government following the pattern of a dictator state." The BIA found it "difficult ... to think of any one man other than [the head of the Ustasha and chief of state Ante] Pavelic who could have been more responsible for the events occurring in Croatia during the period than was [Artukovic]."
Artukovic continued to reside in the United States. Yugoslavia did attempt to extradite him "for murder and participation in murder" but, as we shall see, Artukovic avoided extradition because the evidence presented by a communist state did not convince an American judge, and the INS did not move to deport him while extradition proceedings were pending. Further, in 1956 the INS notified Artukovic of his right to seek a suspension of deportation as authorized by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) if he feared "physical persecution" were he to be returned to Yugoslavia. He did so. In May 1959 an INS Special Inquiry Officer [now called an immigration judge] found that Artukovic's fears of physical persecution if he were returned to Yugoslavia were well founded and suspended his deportation "subject to revocation at any time." Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Artukovic continued to live in California with his family, undisturbed by threats of expulsion. Even Yugoslavia, which had vigorously pursued his extradition in the 1950s, gave up. But the waning of anticommunism and the growing concern about Nazi criminals made Artukovic's expulsion a more realistic prospect in the late 1970s...
On 16 October 1979 the Government, represented by the OSI, brought action in immigration court to revoke the 1959 stay of deportation. The immigration court held that it had no jurisdiction and that authority to act resided with the Board of Immigration Appeals. In the spring of 1981 the BIA revoked Artukovic's stay of deportation and once again ordered his deportation. Appealing this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Artukovic again succeeded in preventing deportation. The court of appeals ruled that the Government could not simply revoke the suspension of the outstanding deportation order; instead it would have to prove again that Artukovic had assisted the Nazi persecutions and was therefore deportable...
In July 1952 the district court granted Artukovic's petition for habeas corpus because, contrary to the findings of the Department of State, Yugoslavia could not be recognized as Serbia's successor under the 1902 [extradition] treaty. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, however, agreed with the Department of State and overturned the district court's decision. The case was returned to the district court for yet another hearing on the habeas corpus petition and the court again granted it, but this time because the offenses with which Artukovic had been charged in the Yugoslavian indictment were political. Like most extradition treaties to which the United States is a party, the 1902 treaty prohibited the extradition of fugitives for "offenses of a political character"...
In 1984 the attempt to extradite Artukovic followed a more conventional course than had the effort of the 1950s. When Yugoslavia submitted its request to the Department of State, that agency - in contrast to the evasions of the 1950s - followed established procedure and forwarded the request, along with the necessary documents, to the Department of Justice. Unlike the 1950s, when Yugoslavia hired its own attorney and the Department of Justice took no active part, in the 1980s the OSI vigorously presented the case for the Government...
The crimes of the Ustasha documented by the Zagreb indictment included the murder of hundreds of specifically named Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews; the creation of the Jasenovac concentration camp, where hundreds of thousands of individuals were killed; and the following specific cases of barbarism:
1. tying families by their hands with wire, forcing them into a pit, and cracking their skulls with sledgehammers;
2. operating a crematorium at Jasenovac into which persons were flung alive;
3. herding Serbs into their Orthodox churches ... and then butchering them with knives;
4. medical experiments into the perseverance of human organisms;
5. slitting open the bellies of pregnant women;
6. drinking blood from the slashed throats of the victims;
7. inducing cannibalism among camp inmates;
8. mutilation of the living and the dead;
9. raping schoolgirls before their mothers;
10. catching infants on bayonets;
11. inventing new methods of torture;
12. throwing burning lime on the living in execution pits;
13. feeding food laced with caustic soda to starving children...
One witness, a former official of the wartime Croatian state, testified that when he attempted to remove the chief of the Sarajevo police for drawing up a list of 200 intellectuals to be deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp, Artukovic restored this police chief to his post and reprimanded the witness for "hindering" rather than "assisting ... to send all undesirable elements to the Jasenovac camp to starve there."
A second witness testified that when he appealed a German order to "persecute and kill Serbs" to Artukovic, whom he had known when they were students, the Minister of Internal Affairs told him that "it is necessary to slaughter and kill Serbs even without Germans suggesting it to you." And later Artukovic appointed this witness as head of a local police force with the general directive to "slaughter all Serbs, one and all, as well as Jews and Gypsies..." This witness further testified that various other local police chiefs appointed by Artukovic had told him that they had received similar orders from the minister.
This second witness also testified that Artukovic had in 1941 personally ordered the incarceration of the former national deputy Jesa Vidic in the Danica concentration camp; when this witness presented Olga Vidic's pleas to exchange title to a piece of property for her husband's release, Artukovic replied "...I will kill him and take... the land," a threat which he carried out. This witness also testified that on another occasion Artukovic had boasted: "You see how I am solving the Jewish question. First I take what they have and then I kill them all off, and in that way, as you can see, in a few months I have solved the Jewish problem... and not like the Germans, who have prolonged the matter with the Jews for years."
A third witness, a former sergeant in the wartime Croatian army, testified that in October 1941, when he was serving as an escort for both Artukovic and Pavelic, he heard Artukovic order another soldier "to throw many Jews into the trucks," and later saw "some thirty to forty truckloads of Jews being taken towards Jasenovac accompanied by Artukovic." Later in the same year, when the witness accompanied a motorcade of "trucks full of arrested partisans, Jews and others, in my estimate some seven hundred people, among them many women and small children," he heard Artukovic order "that the back part of the autocade... be disposed of because it would be too much for the camp. So women, children and men were taken out of the trucks, in my estimate some 400-500 persons and by machine gun fire were killed..." This witness, who at times had served as Artukovic's driver, further testified about killings ordered by Artukovic in 1942 and 1943 and also about Artukovic's visits to Jasenovac concentration camp.
The fourth witness was a schoolteacher who had been deported during the war to several concentration camps, including one reserved for mothers with children under ten years old; she testified that in August 1942 Artukovic had inspected that camp in his Ustasha uniform, accompanied by Germans, shortly after 2,000 children had been gassed...
In addition the Government submitted the texts of wartime statements made by Artukovic and reported by the Croatian press, including one that "...the Croatian government wishes to resolve the Jewish problem in the same way as the German government did"...
Magistrate Brown emphatically rejected Artukovic's characterization of the mass killings in Yugoslavia during World War II as a political offense. Artukovic stood accused of having killed "for personal gain, racial or religious hatred, and/or impermissible vengeance upon disarmed enemy soldiers." Brown concluded: "Ridding a country of some of its population for such reprehensible reasons, as part of some larger political scheme, is not a crime of a 'political character' and is not thus covered by the 'political offense' exception to extradition"...
In his initial March 1985 order Brown certified Artukovic's extraditability on only one count: the murder of Jesa Vidic who, according to the testimony of the second witness, had been sent to a concentration camp and there killed on Artukovic's specific order. In his amended orders of May and August 1985, however, the magistrate held that there was probable cause to believe that Artukovic was responsible for the murder of:
1. Dr. Jesa Vidic;
2. between four and five hundred persons... by machine gun fire, after being removed by autocade... in 1941;
3. almost the entire population of several villages... by machine gun fire in early 1942;
4. approximately five thousand (5,000) persons... by rifle fire and otherwise... in 1942; and
5. several hundred persons... by machine gun fire and by being crushed under moving tanks... in 1943...
Artukovic petitioned the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California for a writ of habeas corpus, the only method of review open against an order certifying extraditability... On 6 February 1986 Judge Real rejected Artukovic's petition for a writ of habeas corpus and specifically adopted Magistrate Brown's amended opinion of 8 August 1985, entering it as the order of the district court.
Artukovic appealed Judge Reals's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and sought an emergency stay of his extradition... The court of appeals found the contention that war crimes was not an extraditable offense particularly "absurd and offensive," and held that the affidavits depicting "...an array of heinous crimes involving Artukovic," who was "said to have participated in countless acts of murder and genocide," met the standard of "any evidence of probable cause." Finding no reason to grant Artukovic's petition, the court of appeals on 11 February 1986 refused to stay the extradition order.
That night (11 February), Justice William Rehnquist denied Artukovic's application to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of extradition pending his habeas corpus appeal. The next day, 12 February 1986, 38 years after he had illegally entered the United States, Artukovic, escorted by U.S. marshals, was flown from California to New York and put on a plane for Yugoslavia.