Man’s Plea for Asylum to Be Reconsidered : Refugees: Illegal immigrant ends hunger strike after deportation order is stayed. Draft-evader says he fled Serbia to avoid military service that could have entailed action against fellow Muslims.

A U.S. immigration judge has stayed a deportation order and agreed to reconsider granting political asylum to a 24-year-old Muslim illegal immigrant from Serbia who has been held in the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in San Pedro for nine months.

The decision by Judge Lauren R. Mathon prompted the immigrant to cease a hunger strike of several days and express hope that he will be paroled from jail while legal deliberations in his case continue. He asked that only his first name, Redjep, be used publicly, in order to protect members of his family in Serbia from possible government reprisals.

Mathon’s ruling was hailed by Salam Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, as “helping establish (the) responsibility of the Free World to shelter victims of ethnic cleansing.”

The council has championed the immigrant’s cause with demonstrations, petitions and the retention of an attorney.

Redjep is from the heavily Muslim Sandzak province in Serbia. He said he fled to avoid military service that could have entailed action against fellow Muslims. He made his way across Turkey, Russia and the Pacific on a forged Canadian visa, only to be taken by a Russian freighter on to Southern California when the Canadians rejected him.

Since his case was publicized last month, two State Department advisories to Mathon were disclosed, suggesting that some compromise might be found between granting Redjep asylum and deporting him.

“An applicant (for asylum) who is a draft-evader or deserter may be considered a refugee, provided it can be shown that he would suffer disproportionately severe punishment for his evasion or desertion on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion,” wrote Roger Dankert, director of the State Department’s Office of Asylum Affairs.

Dankert added, in his second advisory: “The judge might wish to consider, given the increasingly unsettled conditions in the applicant’s region of his country of origin, such administrative remedies as may be available.”

Although Mathon gave no reason in writing for ordering reconsideration of the case, her decision reversed her ruling last summer in which she rejected asylum and ordered deportation as soon as practical.

In Washington, the chief INS spokesman, Duke Austin, said there are several common alternatives to granting asylum to or deporting such an individual.

One of the most frequently used is to grant parole to the individual, releasing him to live freely until his case is reconsidered, Austin said.

He added that in such cases the release can last a long time, and in some instances the case is never reconsidered. “Some stay in the parole status for four or five years without further proceedings,” he said.

Other alternatives are a formal suspension of the individual’s case, or, if deportation is still considered advisable, a search for a third country to deport the immigrant to, a place where the individual would not be subject to persecution.

“Asylum is never a pure science,” Austin said.

The INS spokesman added that State Department advisories are not particularly popular with the INS. “It’s like telling us what we can do, when we are already aware what we can do,” Austin said. “We realize we have discretion.”

Mathon said she cannot comment further on the case.