The film Marathon Man is one of the great paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, infamous for the scene in which the Nazi dentist played by Lawrence Olivier drills through Dustin Hoffman's teeth into his live nerve below, repeatedly asking "Is it safe?" This is the stuff of Hollywood horror films, but another scene is more plausible: Olivier -- whose character is loosely based on S.S. doctor Josef Mengele -- ventures into New York's diamond district, where he is recognized by Holocaust survivors. One elderly woman, slowly at first and then with increasing hysteria, begins shouting at passers-by to stop him before he escapes.
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Like the woman in the film, many victims of modern-day atrocities have sought asylum in North America or Europe -- and so have their persecutors. More than once, the Marathon Man scene has played out in reality. Ethiopian refugee Edgegayehu Taye was working as a waitress at the Colony Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, when she saw her former torturer, a man who had supervised while she was whipped with a plastic cable, standing by the elevator in a gray bellhop's uniform. Eugenio de Sosa Chabau was tortured 14 times by a man named El Enfermero, "The Nurse," for his opposition to Castro's rule in Cuba. After 21 years of imprisonment, de Sosa finally managed to flee to Florida. Visiting his elderly aunt at a nursing home in Miami, he was startled to see El Enfermero there -- now wearing the white uniform of a real nurse.
Today, authorities estimate that there are at least 1,000 war crimes suspects in the United States, and the real number is probably much higher. British immigration officials have taken action against 513 suspects in the last four years. Just like refugees, oppressors often flee at the end of conflict. Disguised, flying under the immigration radar, they enter North America and Europe.
In Britain, Italy, and France, alleged Rwandan génocidaires have been found working as doctors, priests, and even once as a member of a government task force. After being convicted in absentia for his role in a massacre in 1994, Haitian Maj. Gen. Jean-Claude Duperval was eventually found operating tourist boats in Disney World. Another suspected perpetrator in the same massacre won $3.2 million in the Florida State Lottery in 1997 before being deported a few years later. Three years ago, the alleged chief interrogator at a torture center in Argentina was found running a genteel antiques shop in The Plains, Virginia.
Some of this may be inevitable: There are a lot of war criminals out there -- and, because the technology of mass murder has become less sophisticated in recent years, the number is growing. In the Nazi extermination camp at Belzec, it took 150 S.S. guards nine months to gas up to half a million Jews. Modern-day, low-tech mass atrocities, by contrast, involve hundreds of thousands of killers. In Rwanda, it is estimated that there were perhaps 200,000 génocidaires in the 1994 slaughter, while 20,000 Sudanese are thought to have taken part in atrocities in Darfur, Sudan.
Very few of these people have ever been brought to trial, especially when you look beyond the high-profile examples. Academics estimate that between 92 and 101 million people died in 313 conflicts since 1948. While the perpetrators of these deaths number in the hundreds of thousands, only 823 suspects have been indicted by internationalized tribunals and courts. Some of the rest have been brought to trial in their own countries, but many of them are still at large.
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