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Shadows of doubt

A tightly knit Serbian community rallies to help five of its own who are being haunted by a past they would rather not revisit.

By Lane Degregory
Published January 7, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG -- That Sunday, the priest talked about the children. They are the heart of our church, he told nearly 200 people at St. Sava Serbian Orthodox. The children are our future.

They know nothing about our past.

Yet the children are the ones suffering right now, the Rev. Stephan Zaremba said later. They don't understand why their fathers are being dragged off in handcuffs. They don't want to know what happened years ago, in the war no one wants to talk about, in a country most of them don't remember.

The children see their fathers as their saviors. The dads helped them escape the fighting in Yugoslavia, freed them from refugee camps and brought them to a new country, somewhere safe.

Then, last month, immigration officials started knocking on doors. At least 40 Serbian men, all members of St. Sava, were questioned about their immigration papers - and about where they were during the war. Five were taken to jail. Among them, those men have 10 children.

The men's wives used their homes as collateral to post their $50,000 bail. All five men pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go back to court this month. If they're eventually found guilty of immigration violations, they face up to 10 years in prison. Or they could be deported.

So on that Sunday, Zaremba prayed for those men - with a congregation twice its normal size. "Everybody is afraid," said Natasa Bulatovic, 29, who was translating for about half the congregation who spoke only Serbo-Croatian. "Everyone lives in fear there will be a knock on their door."

After the service, after a lunch of bean soup and Heineken, the church president held a meeting to field questions and try to figure out what to do.

"This isn't just about five guys from St. Pete," said the president, Scott Raspopovich. "This is about our nationality, our entire community, our children."

Looking for answers

During the 1990s, civil war among Croatian Catholics, Bosnian Muslims and Christian Orthodox Serbs tore apart the former Yugoslavia. Men from all three faiths entered the fight, some willingly, some not.

Amid horrific attacks, many families escaped to refugee camps, where they waited, sometimes for years.

With the help of churches and relief agencies, 3,000 Serbs landed in St. Petersburg. Many settled close to St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church on 77th Avenue N.

Over the last decade, they married and had children. Many worked two jobs, saving for the down payment on a small house. Former doctors and engineers who couldn't speak English resorted to scrubbing floors, cleaning hotels.

The five Serbian men who were arrested in December are accused of serving in military units that were within 100 miles of a town called Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, when a reported 8,000 Muslims were massacred and dumped in mass graves by Serb fighters.

On their immigration papers, the men "did not report they were in those units," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald L. Hansen, who is prosecuting the cases. "We're trying to determine what they did in those units. Are these people we want to keep out of the U.S. because of prior activities?"

On their immigration papers, the men allegedly checked a box saying they had never been in the military. They say relief workers told them to because if they had been in the war - even if, as some say, they served against their will - they would not have been allowed to come to the United States.

"You've got a family sitting in a refugee camp, and the worker is telling you if you don't lie, you'll never get out," the priest said. "What are you going to do?"

A knock in the night

In front of the church hall, at a round table by the door, a pale young woman sat watching her mother. Branka Kordic had come from Gainesville to attend the church service. She wanted to find out how to help.

Branka was 4 when her family left its home in Yugoslavia. She remembers the door slamming shut behind them as they left, recalls running behind her big brother. Being so, so scared.

Branka's father, Zdravko, fought in the Serbian army, like most men. He never told her where he had been stationed, or what he'd done. She had never asked.

"He didn't want to remember that, or burden me with it. But I know whatever he did, it wasn't voluntary," Branka said. "If he had refused to fight, he would've been thrown in jail. He had two small children. What was he going to do?"

When Branka was 10, her family moved to St. Petersburg. She's 20 now, a student at the University of Florida. She was home last month, taking a break before exams, when police pounded on her parents' door. "We were all asleep. It was about 5 a.m. They asked me for my green card, then put my dad in handcuffs," she said. "They took him away like he was a criminal."

Branka's father has worked at the same manufacturing plant since he moved to Florida. He's never even gotten a speeding ticket, she said state records verify this. That morning, when four officers hauled him into a squad car, Branka tried to translate, tell him what was happening. But even she didn't really understand.

Supporting their own

The men need a lawyer, church president Raspopovich said at the meeting. The five men can't risk just using a public defender. They need someone experienced in immigration law.

"Yesterday, it was five of them. Tomorrow it might be another 50 of you," Raspopovich told the crowd.

"There are sacrifices we're going to ask everyone to make. Those of you who only work one job might think about taking on a second job to help with the legal defense."

Raspopovich said he had talked to 10 lawyers. He found one in Miami who seemed perfect, who would take their cases for a $50,000 retainer.

While Raspopovich answered questions, people pulled out their checkbooks. A man in a gray fishing hat gave $500. An unemployed man signed over $600.

"You need to really look at your wives, your children, and dig deep," Raspopovich said. "If we don't fight this thing right, they might lose you."

After three hours, he had enough money to hire the lawyer. Still, he worried, the money might not be enough. "We need to hire a PR firm, try to change the image of the so-called Serbs," Raspopovich said. "We need to find out why we're being singled out when Muslims and Croatians were involved in similar incidents, and checked the same box on their immigration forms. But we haven't heard of any of them being visited by immigration officials."

The children had stayed outside during the church meeting, dozens of kids in the parking lot, kicking a yellow soccer ball. When the door opened, and they saw their parents pouring out of the church hall looking scared, they stopped playing.

Lane DeGregory can be reached at (727) 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

For more information about St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church, go to www.stsavaflorida.org .

[Last modified January 6, 2007, 12:15:58]