Ray of Hope in Son’s Crusade : War crimes: Radoslav Artukovic, who has worked to clear his late father’s name, learns the U.S. is investigating alleged withholding of crucial evidence.

For the last seven years Radoslav A. Artukovic has waged a one-man war against the court of world opinion that has condemned his father as the so-called “Butcher of the Balkans.”

Artukovic, a stockbroker, has hired historians, lobbied Congress and hand-delivered hundreds of documents to the U.S. Justice Department as part of his unrelenting campaign to prove that his late father, Andrija Artukovic, was wrongly convicted of atrocities involving the execution of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Croatia during World War II.

Last week, Artukovic received his most encouraging news yet: The Justice Department was conducting an internal investigation into allegations that its Nazi-hunting squad--the Office of Special Investigations--withheld crucial evidence in his father’s favor.

But as he sat in his Rossmoor home Friday, Artukovic refused to claim even a small victory.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” he said, stoically. “They have only now begun to ask the questions they should have asked in the beginning, but they have a long way to go before they discover the truth.”

The latest development, he said, has only emboldened him to renew a private oath to prove that OSI solicited his father’s extradition to Yugoslavia, then used false evidence to convict him of the “fraudulent charges.”

Artukovic believes his campaign has recently received attention because of the controversy involving John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker. Demjanjuk is convicted in Israel of being Ivan the Terrible, operator of the gas chamber at the Nazis’ Treblinka death camp in occupied Poland.

“It is a hot political topic,” Artukovic said.

Extensive international attention recently has focused on Demjanjuk, whose death sentence for war crimes is expected to be set aside by Israel’s Supreme Court because of evidence that another man may have been Ivan the Terrible. A week ago, the U.S. appeals court in Cincinnati said Demjanjuk’s extradition may have been based on “erroneous information” and ordered the Justice Department to turn over any evidence it has that tends to show Demjanjuk is not Ivan.

Artukovic had raised similar questions as early as 1985 about his father’s extradition to Yugoslavia. He has repeatedly stated that the OSI used testimony it knew to be false from Bajro Avdic, a man who he said had been a military escort for his father.

Avdic’s three statements dating back to 1946 differ substantially in details and recollection. The OSI suppressed them for fear that they would damage his credibility, Artukovic said.

Radoslav Artukovic’s life was not always devoted to clearing his father’s name--not until federal marshals burst into his father’s Seal Beach home in November, 1984, and arrested him as he ate breakfast with his full-time nurse.

The elder Artukovic, then 84, was nearly blind and deaf and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and senility, his son said. He died in Croatia in January, 1988, while awaiting execution.

Andrija Artukovic served as interior minister of the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia during World War II. He was admitted to the United States in 1948 under an assumed name and for a short time he faded into obscurity in Seal Beach, working as a bookkeeper for his brother’s construction company. Questions about his Nazi past flared intermittently after his identity was discovered in the 1950s.

U.S. authorities have maintained that among other war crimes, the elder Artukovic had ordered the death by machine-gun fire of 450 men, women and children in late 1941 because there was no room for them in a concentration camp.

“This is not a true picture of the man I knew,” Radoslav Artukovic said, leaning back in an armchair and sipping a glass of water. “I remember sitting in his lap and him stroking my cheek. He was the man who played classical Austrian tunes for me on the piano . . . the man who helped me practice my catechisms.”

But people who know Radoslav Artukovic say he has shunned emotional appeals and instead focused on records to clear his family’s name. He points to reams of documents that suggest that while Andrija Artukovic was a minister in the Nazi puppet regime, he had no military responsibilities and ordered no deaths.

Radoslav Artukovic’s home near the Rossmoor Shopping Center has become the base for his battle with the Justice Department.

Rows of files, filled with documents obtained from libraries from California to Croatia, line the walls of an office in the house. Among them is one of Artukovic’s many booklets, “The Anatomy of a Fraud: A Case Study of Fraudulent Evidence Used in an OSI Investigation.”

A shortwave radio locked in to a Croatian band sits near a facsimile machine that spits out lists of all the war dead in the current battles in Croatia. Newspaper clippings of Demjanjuk’s case and the Justice Department’s internal review follow.

Radoslav Artukovic said his wife, Donna, who is a member of Los Alamitos Unified School District and president of the Orange County School Board Assn., has been extremely supportive in his tireless campaign.

Donna and the couple’s 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter cross their fingers when he visits Washington about three times each year to knock on the doors of congressional offices and to turn over the latest documents to Justice Department officials.

‘It’s a good sign that people are recognizing that an injustice has been done and that the government should do something about it,” Donna Artukovic said. “But there is no need for jubilation, just justice.”

Radoslav Artukovic said one of his best decisions was hiring Florida historian Henry L. deZeng IV, who last year went to the Croatian archives in Zagreb to research the case.

Two weeks ago, two Justice Department attorneys visited deZeng to inquire about his 1990 visit to Zagreb. DeZeng said he discovered affidavits that discredited the two main prosecution witnesses against Andrija Artukovic. The same documents were photocopied in 1983 by Patrick Treanor, an OSI historian, but the material had never surfaced in the Artukovic proceedings, deZeng said.

In an interview Saturday, deZeng said he was happy that Radoslav Artukovic’s complaint was finally being investigated. “His most outstanding characteristic is his relentless resolve to see this matter through to the conclusion,” deZeng said. “Most people would have given up. But Rad is committed to the idea of being objective and not to (use) the same zealousness” that OSI displayed.

Radoslav Artukovic said the Justice Department’s decision to review his case is an “affirmation that we live in the greatest country in the world.”

“Where else can I be critical of an agency of my government without facing some reprisal?” he asked. “But we have to keep government clean. People must always have a sense of belief in the justice system. There are many cases of injustice in this country, and this case is but one.”

“If I help to show that in the zealousness and hysteria, they wrongfully accused my old man, then I would have played my part to make our system better,” he said. “It does not matter if we succeed, but that we do the right thing.”