Serbian Seeking Asylum Makes Final Bid to Avoid Deportation : Immigration: Man arrested by INS says he was fleeing military service. But after eight months in a detention facility he is resigned to being sent home.

For the last eight months, a 24-year-old Muslim illegal immigrant from Serbia has been held in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in San Pedro while the legal system deliberates his fate.

He dare not let his name be publicized, he says, because he fears that Serbian authorities might see it and retaliate against his family in Sandjak, near the Bosnian border.

His odyssey, which started when he evaded a Serbian draft notice, took him halfway around the world on forged documents until he was arrested trying to enter California.

But his journey may be about to end because the Serbian seems resigned to being deported instead of being granted asylum in the United States.

“I would rather be in jail at home, when I know the reason why, than here, when I don’t,” he said in an interview at the detention facility.

He could be deported soon. An INS spokesman in Washington, said the agency routinely seeks documents that allow it to transport Serbian refugees who are in the United States illegally back to Serbia through Hungary. Sanctions against Serbian aggression in Bosnia prevent the agency from flying them directly home, he said.

The Serbian’s Los Angeles immigration attorney, Valerie Curtis, said she has launched one last motion to reopen his case. But, she said, she has been told by INS officials that her client will be deported immediately if the plea is rejected.

Judge Lauren R. Mathon already has ruled that the Serbian should not be granted asylum, but that was before the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council became interested in his case.

Salam al-Marayati, director of the council, said Friday that if the Serbian’s case is reopened and he is released from detention, members of the Bosnian-American community in Los Angeles will care for him.

“The reason I think he should be granted political asylum is that he comes from an area where genocide is taking place, and he has fled persecution from war criminals,” al-Marayati said.

Mathon said federal rules forbid her to discuss the case, and she would not say when she expects to rule on Curtis’ motion.

The Serbian admits that he broke rules to get here. But, he said, he is determined not to serve in the Serbian army because he probably would be fighting against fellow Muslims.

He said he fled from Serbia to Turkey, bought a false Canadian visa from a friend and traveled across the former Soviet Union to Vladivostok. There, he used the false papers to secure passage on a Russian freighter.

“But when the freighter approached Victoria, (British Columbia), the Canadians told the captain that they wouldn’t allow me to land and seek asylum here unless he paid a $7,000 fine for bringing me in illegally,” the Serbian said.

Because the captain didn’t have that much money, he placed the Serbian under detention, brought him to the next stop, San Pedro, and left him there, he said. That’s when he was arrested by the INS.

A spokeswoman for the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles confirmed that Canada levies a $7,000 fine in such circumstances.

Curtis said that INS authorities took the Serbian to their asylum office in Anaheim, but she said he never was properly interviewed about his application for asylum and may not have been represented well by his first immigration attorney.

It may have been too late by the time the Muslim Council heard of the case, Curtis said.

“The judge who’s hearing his case now ruled against him before, and even said Serbia is a sovereign state and has a right to draft people into its army,” she said. “He doesn’t want to go into an army which is committing war crimes against his own people.”

Vern Jervis, the INS spokesman, called the case “slightly rare.”

“But we seek to move them,” he said. “You have to have a travel document through Hungary, and then the Serbs must express a willingness to take him back.”

Curtis said INS officials have told her that such arrangements are almost complete. And the Serbian said he has little hope of staying here.