A federal judge in Portland ordered a Beaverton woman’s naturalized U.S. citizenship be revoked for her role in the killings of unarmed Bosnians because of their religion and ethnicity during a Balkans civil war in the 1990s.

U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez ruled last Thursday that 46-year-old Sammy Rasema Yetisen, also known as Rasema Handanovic, obtained her citizenship illegally because she didn’t have “good moral character” required for naturalization and lied on her application forms. She was convicted of war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina after obtaining U.S. citizenship.

The revocation order stemmed from a denaturalization lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department last April against Yetisen and Edin Dzeko, another naturalized citizen who served in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina with Yetisen during the war.

Yetisen was born in the early 1970s in Bosnia and Herzegovina when it was part of Yugoslavia. By 1993, she was part of a special forces unit in the army.

Federal prosecutors said Yetisen and Dzeko participated in the April 1993 massacre of 22 unarmed Bosnian Croats, including women and elderly people, in the village of Trusina, located in what is now central Bosnia. Yetisen and Dzeko killed three prisoners of war and three civilians by firing squad-style executions.

Prosecutors said the people were targeted because of their Christian religion and Croat ethnicity. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered Dzeko, 46, have his naturalized U.S. citizenship revoked last August, saying he was responsible in two other killings as well.

After the war, Yetisen sought refugee status at the U.S. Embassy in Austria in 1995. Her refugee status was approved the next year, and she entered the U.S. She applied for naturalization in 2001 and was granted certification of naturalization in 2002.

Yetisen was arrested in 2011 based on a warrant from Bosnia and Herzegovina on suspicion of war crimes stemming from the ’90s killings. Yetisen was living in Beaverton at the time and was extradited to the European country later that year. She pleaded guilty in 2012 and was sentenced to more than five years and six months in prison.

Yetisen returned to Oregon after completing her sentence, Hernandez noted.

In court filings responding to the lawsuit, Yetisen argued that she didn’t know her actions in the 1990s were criminal until she was extradited and that it was unfair for the U.S. government to wait more than 20 years to challenge her citizenship, since she’d been in the U.S. for the majority of her adult life and had an adult son who is a U.S. citizen.

She wrote that she was a 20-year-old woman in a predominately male army in the midst of a civil war and that she was following the orders of her commander.

The judge noted in the order that Yetisen wrote in her application for refugee status that she was facing persecution for being Muslim and had nowhere to go in Bosnia after the war. She indicated in later sworn statements and applications that she didn’t participate in the persecution of others due to race, religion or political opinion, hadn’t committed a crime involving “moral turpitude,” and had no past military service, according to the order.

Yetisen’s assertion that she didn’t know she’d broken any laws “doesn’t save her from a finding of a lack of good moral character,” according to the judge.

Hernandez said Yetisen committed murder, which he described as a “serious crime involving moral turpitude,” and noted that she doesn’t contest her conviction or the underlying facts of it.

“The fact that she did not know that her actions technically constituted a crime is irrelevant,” the judge wrote.

Hernandez also said the amount of time that has passed doesn’t change the facts regarding Yetisen’s naturalized citizenship eligibility. He acknowledged that losing her citizenship could have “severe and unsettling consequences.”

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 |@EvertonBailey

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