QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Meet one of Australia's most notorious war crimes suspects.

He lives in Belgrade and he's homesick.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: I do call Australia home.

I, uh -- feel that one day when I return back, that it will be back to Australia.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: He carries an Australian passport and the Australian Army trained him.

CHERIF BASSIOUNI, PROFESSOR OF LAW, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, US: He was a very well trained and, um -- capable commando officer who simply didn't abide by any rules.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: He's the new face on an old problem -- how to deal with war criminals who've become Australian citizens.

You're saying Australia's just turned a blind eye to the problem?

GRAHAM BLEWITT, DEPUTY PROSECUT0R, INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL (FORMER YUGOSLAVIA): I think that's right.

Yes.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Tonight on Four Corners -- is Australia serious about bringing war criminals to justice?

Is the Government hoping the problem will just go away?

And why are war criminals around the world still calling Australia home?

When former Nazi officer Konrad Kalejs flew out of the United Kingdom last month, the British resolve to get rid of him was matched by a worldwide perception of Australia's weakness in failing to prosecute him.

REPORTER: How does it feel to be back in Australia, Mr Kalejs?

Were you involved in the death of 30,000 people in Latvia?

WOMAN: That's enough.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: As he was driven off into the Melbourne night, a blanket over his head, he was a fugitive in his adopted country -- protected by his Australian citizenship, but pursued by a media convinced of his wartime guilt.

MAN ON LOUDSPEAKER: We will not tolerate war criminals in Australian society.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Konrad Kalejs is just the most famous name on a long list of former Nazis who've found sanctuary in Australia.

And now Kalejs himself is a lightning rod for worldwide condemnation of our record in dealing with war criminals.

BARBARA WALTERS (20/20 PROGRAM COMMENTARY): You might think that Nazi war criminals are now just a part of history.

But a '20/20' investigation reveals that, right at this moment, men accused of the most inhuman acts are living in comfort in a place you would never expect -- Australia.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Kalejs was discovered in the UK by America's '20/20' program.

When he fled, the country that couldn't legally turn him away was Australia.

And the Americans didn't mince their words.

ELI ROSENBAUM (20/20 COMMENTARY): Any Nazi criminal who lives in Australia, and there must be at least hundreds of them there, knows that he is home free, so to speak.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The '20/20' program and Kalejs's return reignited the debate about war criminals.

When the Special Investigations Unit was set up by the Hawke Government to look into war crimes, they studied nearly 850 cases.

But their hands were tied by the decision to restrict the historical scope to crimes committed in Europe during World War II, and to try war criminals, rather than simply deport them or strip them of their citizenship.

When three prosecutions failed, the unit closed, and with it, the will to resolve the problem.

JUSTICE MARCUS EINFELD QC: The thing started with a passionate and highly commendable but not very practical idea of trying Nazi war criminals in -- who live in Australia.

Unfortunately, the authorities did not really examine what was really possible to achieve.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The argument over whether to prosecute Konrad Kalejs and his fellow Nazis, decades after the event, divides lawyers and investigators.

Tonight on Four Corners, we examine five cases which continue to evoke moral outrage, but have had no legal resolution.

GRAPHIC: KONRAD KALEJS, Born: Latvia 1912 Arrived: Australia 1950 -- Australian citizen.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Konrad Kalejs lied to the authorities about his history when he came to Australia after the war.

Since then, he's spent as much time as he could living abroad -- first in the United States, then in Canada, then in the United Kingdom.

All three countries got rid of him once his war record became known.

Kalejs was an officer in the infamous Arajs Kommando, in Latvia, during the War.

The unit was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews.

The body of evidence against him is considerable.

Despite his denials that he ever committed war crimes, there are survivors who say otherwise.

DAVID BENEDIKT, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: I was an only child and, uh -- I was sent, still with my parents, in a trainload to Riga -- in a sealed train, under armed guard, for five days, no food, no water, and arrived on 20th January 1942 on a railway siding outside of Riga.

There, I was separated from my parents.

80-odd young males were set aside, selected away from the rest of the transport, and marched away into a camp.

And that was Salaspils.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: David, tell me what this map here shows us.

DAVID BENEDIKT: Little green lights show you the six most notorious camps.

The red lights show you 147 of the 5,000 camps that the Nazis established right up to Western Russia.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: David Benedikt was born into a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, and is one of a handful of survivors from the Latvian concentration camp at Salaspils, where Konrad Kalejs is alleged to have played a key role in executing prisoners.

Can you describe the conditions there?

DAVID BENEDIKT: Periodical executions, hangings, shootings -- and the shootings were done by a mobile execution squad.

And one of those execution squads was commanded by Konrad Kalejs.

It was general knowledge in the camp.

The situation in Riga that we encountered was the, uh -- presence of the Arajs Kommando, of which Konrad Kalejs was a member.

A, uh -- military unit of volunteers whose hatred for Jews was only superseded by their enthusiasm for killing them.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: As well as the victims, a fellow officer of Kalejs has testified against the Arajs Kommando Unit.

Haris Svikeris, who died after giving his evidence, was interviewed several years ago by an officer from Scotland Yard.

This extraordinary tape was acquired by Four Corners and broadcast by the ABC three years ago.

In it, Svikeris agrees with the Scotland Yard officer's chilling description of the unit.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: I'm just gonna go through that list with you.

That's robbing, raping, plundering, pillage, murder.

HARIS SVIKERIS: Yes.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: Mass execution.

HARIS SVIKERIS: Mmm.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: All carried out by members of the Arajs Kommando.

HARIS SVIKERIS: Yes.

Yes.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: Do you agree?

HARIS SVIKERIS: Yes. Yes.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: When asked by Scotland Yard to recall his fellow officers, Svikeris could remember only one.

HARIS SVIKERIS: One was also from the same year of the academy.

This was a two-star lieutenant -- 

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: Mm-hm.

HARIS SVIKERIS: ..named Kalejs.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: Can you spell his name for us?

HARIS SVIKERIS: Uh -- K-A-L-E-J-S.

SCOTLAND YARD OFFICER: Mm-hm.

What was his first name?

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Despite Konrad Kalejs having twice returned to Australia since that evidence was given, the case has still not been resolved.

This month, a Federal Police officer joined war crimes investigators from Israel, Canada, Britain, America and Germany, in the Latvian capital of Riga, to discuss further action.

It's extremely unlikely that Kalejs will ever be tried in Australia.

But the Latvians have now ruled that the evidence of dead witnesses like Haris Svikeris IS admissible in their courts.

The question now is, will Australia actively pursue the extradition of Kalejs to Latvia?

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE, MINISTER FOR JUSTICE: The Latvians have indicated they want to proceed with as much speed as is possible to establish a workable and practical extradition relationship with Australia.

And we're very pleased about that.

That's what we wanted to do in 1998 and we're happy to do it in the year 2000.

GRAPHIC: HEINRICH WAGNER, Born: Poland 1922 Arrived: Australia 1950 -- Australian Citizen.

TELEVISION (20/20 REPORTER): Our journey to find accused Nazi war criminals.

Mr Wagner?

Chris Wallace from American television.

You have been accused of crimes against humanity.

Are you guilty or not guilty of those?

HEINRICH WAGNER: Not guilty.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: On the outskirts of Adelaide, in peaceful obscurity, live Heinrich Wagner and his wife.

As America's '20/20' program demonstrated, he passes his time in comfortable retirement in this house on a quiet private estate.

Wagner is one of only three Australians ever to be charged for Nazi war crimes.

He was accused of taking part in the massacre of more than 100 Jews at the village of Izraylovka in the Ukraine in 1942 where he was a member of the local police.

He was also charged with the murder of 19 children.

BOB GREENWOOD QC, FORMER HEAD, SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT: We had an allegation in respect of his participation in the execution of the Jews of a Jewish village in Ukraine.

We went there and interviewed some local people who remembered the extermination.

Some of them were survivors.

RICHARD WRIGHT, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY: A grave was dug on a low hill something like a kilometre out of town and the locals were told that this was a dump for ammunition.

The Jews were rounded up and marched up there and shot.

BOB GREENWOOD QC: Late in the day, quite late in the day, they described how a farmer's cart came back to the village and was loaded forcefully -- forcibly loaded with a number of children.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: One of Wagner's collaborators told investigators he helped him carry out the massacre.

In court he said that Wagner had shot a young child in flight as it was thrown in the pit.

He told the war crimes team, "There were 12 to 15 boys and girls, aged between 7 and 12 years.

"At least one was so young that it couldn't walk."

He also told investigators that Wagner had wanted to shoot HIM for allowing a girl to escape.

The war crimes team of investigators went to extraordinary lengths to find the grave.

This unique record of the exhumation was filmed by the project's leader, anthropologist Professor Richard Wright.

PROFESSOR RICHARD WRIGHT: We resorted to old-fashioned manual techniques.

We got a backhoe with a bucket and we dug a trench.

We looked for discontinuities in the colour and texture of the soil, which we found.

Then we just developed that area until we found something that was clearly a filled hole, a very large filled hole.

And we started excavating that and then the first human remains that we found were those of a child.

And then we found more children -- I think 19 in all -- lying in a complete tangle.

Underneath 20-30cm of this -- underneath the children -- of soil we found the adults.

We didn't exhume all the adults.

We just took a sample.

But this was pretty stunning vindication of the eyewitness statements of what had gone on at that spot.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Wagner was charged and committed for trial.

It was due to take place in 1993.

And then, from the war crimes unit's point of view, disaster struck.

TELEVISION (20/20 REPORTER): Two cardiologists testified that Wagner had had a heart attack.

His trial, due to start early next year, could prove fatal.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The trial was stopped and all the work which had gone into building the case went to waste.

Doctors had told the court that the stress of the trial could kill Wagner.

But when the '20/20' program found him seven years later, in Adelaide, he was looking fit and well.

TELEVISION (20/20 REPORTER): And we saw him do all those chores.

HEINRICH WAGNER: Oh, no.

I'm not carrying the groceries.

(20/20 REPORTER) But of course we'd seen him do just that.

DR EFRAIM ZUROFF, SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE, JERUSALEM: I realised that he'd basically fooled all of us and that justice had been robbed, in a sense.

And if I were Amanda Vanstone, I would immediately initiate a medical investigation of Mr Wagner and determine whether he IS fit to stand trial.

And I would not be the least bit surprised if the results would be that yes, he IS fit to stand trial.

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: It IS shocking if there is any war criminal in Australia who has escaped.

But let me make the point -- no-one should be put on trial if they're not fit for trial.

That's not the Australian way.

I didn't make the assessment.

I don't know who did.

But I am satisfied that an appropriate assessment was made of his health at the time.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The decision to abort the trial, rather than simply suspend it, is one that still rankles with the two men who headed the war crimes unit, Bob Greenwood and his successor Graham Blewitt, who's now Deputy Prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

GRAHAM BLEWITT, DEPUTY PROSECUTOR, INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL: Had the case gone to trial, I'm confident it would've resulted in a conviction.

It was an extremely strong case.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Why do you believe the DPP took that decision, then?

Why did he make that judgment?

GRAHAM BLEWITT: I think there were political pressures at the time to finish this whole episode of war crimes.

It was something that the Federal Government of the day was keen to see finished.

So I can only assume -- I don't know -- I can only assume that there was sufficient political pressure on the DPP at the time to make that decision to terminate the case.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Could the case be resurrected now, do you believe?

GRAHAM BLEWITT: Um -- yes it could be.

GRAPHIC: ANTANAS GUDELIS, Born: Russia 1911, Arrived: Australia 1949.

Australian Citizen.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: In this peaceful street in Adelaide lives an elderly man who Nazi hunters have targeted as being implicated in crimes of mass murder.

Antanas Gudelis is alleged to have commanded a pro-Nazi police unit in Lithuania at a time when thousands of Jews were executed.

Efraim Zuroff is Director of the Israeli-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Since Australia's war crimes unit closed down, he's lobbied the Government to bring Antanas Gudelis to justice.

DR EFRAIM ZUROFF: You know that in Kaunas, which was the pre-war capital of Lithuania, on the day of October 28, 1941, over 9,200 men, women and children were rounded up in Democracy Square.

They were sent to the Ninth Fort and were murdered there.

That was a fortification outside the city of Kaunas.

And among the people who were involved in carrying out the murders themselves were the unit in which Antanas Gudelis was an officer.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The events in Kaunas recall images of mass killings from all over Eastern Europe.

DR EFRAIM ZUROFF: The murders took place alongside the huge pits that were dug beforehand.

And the men, women and children were taken to this site, were forced to undress.

And then teams of Lithuanians and Germans -- primarily Lithuanians, in this case -- stood at the site, not far from the victims, and shot them dead.

And the bodies fell into the pits.

And then more victims were brought.

And then in wave after wave, literally thousands of people on that day and the immediate aftermath, some 9,200 men, women and children were murdered.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Australia's war crimes unit concluded that although the allegations against Gudelis had substance, there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute him.

Last year, Lithuania filed genocide charges against Gudelis.

But despite the discovery of fresh witness statements, the case here appears to have been dropped.

DR EFRAIM ZUROFF: This is, in a sense, a very important case, because it proves how the closure of the SIU basically ended whatever hope there was of prosecuting Nazi war criminals in Australia.

And it's particularly unfortunate because, right after the SIU was closed, access was granted to archives in Lithuania, Latvia and other places, which could've considerably facilitated the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals living in Australia.

GRAPHIC: KARLIS OZOLS, Born: Latvia 1912, Arrived: Australia 1949 -- Australian Citizen.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Inside this Melbourne nursing home lives Karlis Ozols, officially Australia's highest-ranking war crime suspect.

As commander of a company of Latvian security police, he's alleged to have taken part in the slaughter of more than 10,000 Jews in Byelorussia.

MARK AARONS, AUTHOR & BROADCASTER OR AUTHOR, "SANCTUARY": Ozols, together with a significant number of other members of the Latvian Auxiliary Police, was posted to Furstenberg in Germany, near the Dachau concentration camp.

Furstenberg was, if you like, a university of killing.

Karlis Ozols was then dispatched to Minsk in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Minsk suffered heavy bombardment in the days leading up to the German occupation of 1941.

LEON SCHULKIN, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: The 24th of June, they bombed Minsk, starting in the morning, for hours, you know.

The whole of Minsk was burning.

The Germans themselves arrived on June 27th.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Leon Schulkin grew up in Minsk and, as a young man, was trapped there when the Germans invaded and Ozols's unit arrived.

Leon and his family were moved with other Russian Jews to the ghetto.

LEON SCHULKIN: They made a pogrom.

They came in in the morning.

They took all the Jewish people out of that area.

We were looking through the window as the people were putting into cars, beating them up, some of them hitting them over the head and they cleaned up the whole area.

That area was approximately -- I would say, 15,000-20,000 Jews were taken away.

My mother was killed, and my brother, little sister, and my nieces and nephews all were taken away at that time.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Leon Schulkin escaped the final slaughter only because the Nazis commandeered him for work outside the ghetto.

He returned to find a scene of devastation.

LEON SCHULKIN: I just collapsed, I fainted, 'till one of my sisters who was also working -- I didn't know that she's alive -- and she woke me up and says, "Leon, I think we're the only ones left."

And of course, we grab each other and we start crying.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The body of evidence linking Karlis Ozols with the killings in Minsk is substantial.

Mark Aarons, a former ABC journalist, helped the war crimes unit build up its case.

He went to Latvia to interview key witnesses.

They told him: "Ozols would personally appoint some 8 to 15 men to take part in shootings -- " Arnold Zuika "Ozols would receive a list of citizens to be shot from his superiors."

Arnold Zuika.

"Those doomed to die would be brought to the shooting grounds by lorries."

Janis Prieditis.

Key documents also name Ozols, including this one, known as the 'killing order'.

ON SCREEN: "on the 8th and 9th February, 1943 "the local command will carry out a resettlement in the town of Slutsk of the Jews there."

It gave the command to kill 2,000 Jews in the Byelorussian ghetto of Slutsk.

MARK AARONS: This was an occasion in which the entire Jewish ghetto in this town was emptied out, was taken to a nearby killing site, and all of the people in the ghetto were, on that day, exterminated.

We also know, from a specific order that the Germans gave, that Karlis Ozols was one of the key Latvian functionaries who carried out this extermination.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Despite the enormous weight of evidence against him, Karlis Ozols was never prosecuted.

The war crimes team passed its findings to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions who sought a second opinion on whether or not to proceed.

That opinion left no doubts.

It said: "The evidence establishes four counts of genocide -- " "Justice demands that the investigation be completed -- " But it never was completed.

PROFESSOR KONRAD KWIET, HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY: The Keating government insisted in 1992, on the closure of the SIU and on the closure of this Ozols case, and in doing so, there was no jurisdiction, no possibility anymore for the SIU to continue any investigation into alleged war criminals.

It was left up to the Australian Federal Police to do so.

But they didn't do it, of course.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: What proactive efforts are the Federal Police making now to go out and investigate and hunt down war criminals?

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: Well, the Federal Police will investigate any information that becomes available to them.

They will thoroughly assess that.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: And how many staff do they have working full-time?

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: We don't have a unit specifically allocated to that.

We did have the Special Investigations Unit which wasn't entirely Federal Police, as you know.

And that was disbanded.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: With the war crimes unit closed, the prospect of further trials died with it.

The consequence now is that Kalejs, Wagner, Gudelis and Ozols remain free men, protected by their Australian citizenship.

Their alleged war crimes remain unjudged in our courts.

The question of their innocence or guilt is unresolved.

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: Both the passage of time and our geographical location and the language difficulties made it extremely unlikely that we would be able to successfully prosecute such a war criminal in Australia.

The files remain open and we remain happy and very willing to contribute in whatever way we can.

But they're the plain facts.

PROFESSOR KONRAD KWIET: In hindsight, one could argue that the way Australians went, that is to say, to go for criminal prosecution, was a wrong one.

The legal problems, the adversarial system, the time factor, the problems of getting witnesses in who could recall after 50 years the events they witnessed and the historical fragmentation or the fragmentation of historical documents made it very difficult to come to a successful criminal conviction.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: In the United States, war criminals receive much higher public scrutiny.

When this former concentration camp guard was discovered living in Kansas, a media circus saw the situation get out of hand.

ELI ROSENBAUM, DIRECTOR OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS, US: There were television and print journalists camped outside his house, out on the street.

And, at one point, with cameras rolling, Mr Kornhoffer came to the front door and stepped outside waving a pistol.

WOMAN: I'm going to call the police.

ELI ROSENBAUM: The police arrived and they were around the house and suddenly Mr Kornhoffer came out again and this time he fired at the police.

That is a very foolish thing to do, of course, in any country.

And they returned fire, hitting him in the leg, and he subsequently died from complications of that injury.

As is more frequently the case in the prosecutions that we initiate the Grim Reaper beat us to the punch.

Time is, of course, our biggest enemy in the Nazi cases.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Mr Kornhoffer's summary end was not the desired outcome.

But the direct approach did reflect the Americans' desire for action on former Nazis.

They weren't seeking a drawn-out trial.

They wanted to deport him -- an option Australia has rejected.

ELI ROSENBAUM: The hope is that they will be transferred to a jurisdiction that has criminal jurisdiction to actually prosecute cases where there is sufficient evidence to do so.

So it is always preferable to get these people out of the United States.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: For 20 years, Eli Rosenbaum and his team from the Office of Special Investigations have pursued Nazi war criminals who have gone to live in the US.

In the 1980s, they began their own battle with Konrad Kalejs, who was himself forced to leave America.

ELI ROSENBAUM: We've put everyone in this country who took part in these crimes in any way on notice that it's no longer safe here.

And that if we find them, there's a good chance we will get the evidence we need through our investigation.

And if we take them to court, we will win.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The Office of Special Investigations has compiled an impressive list of nearly 70,000 names of suspected war criminals which they use to screen out people crossing their borders.

Altogether, they've deported more than 50 war crimes suspect and stripped 63 more of their citizenship for lying about their past.

The Americans think there's a lesson here for Australia.

ELI ROSENBAUM: One would hope that countries that have had setbacks in their effort would consider the possibility that their experience might not be so different from those of other governments that have managed to stick with the effort and record some successes.

And two countries come to mind.

Canada and the United States both suffered very serious defeats in the early years of their programs.

Enormous setbacks And, nonetheless, were able to turn things around and begin to win cases.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Another migrant nation, Canada, has chosen the American, rather than the Australian, route of deporting war crimes suspects rather than putting them on trial.

But they've also set a standard for the future by establishing the only national modern war crimes unit of significant size anywhere in the world.

CRAIG GOODES, SENIOR DIRECTOR, WAR CRIMES UNIT, CANADA: We've had a rough time in this country too over our prosecutions and we have not pursued prosecution as an option in recent years either.

I think at this point we have a model that we can share with other like-minded countries who are experiencing this problem.

I mean, we're still learning as we go.

But we do have a story to tell.

We have had some successes.

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: We've taken, I think, the proper approach.

It's that we have to show that YOU specifically committed THIS specific crime.

And unless we can show that, you won't be prosecuted.

If we do show that, you'll be put in jail.

The Canadians and the Americans have a more generalised approach.

What they have to prove is a lesser involvement than we would have to show.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Last year alone, Canada deported 23 modern war criminals and it actively investigates suspects from as far afield as Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor.

Much of the effort goes into screening out war crimes suspects before they arrive in Canada.

CRAIG GOODES: We have probably in the neighbourhood of 500 people from four, five dozen different countries whose background is of concern to us.

That's not to say that they're all war criminals.

But we're sufficiently concerned that we're taking a very serious look at their files and we will no doubt move to exclude some of those people from our refugee claims process.

We will no doubt move to remove them from the country.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: The war crimes issue didn't die when Europe's old Nazis began to pass away.

10 years ago, Europe suffered another terrible war in the former Yugoslavia.

As in World War II, there was ethnic cleansing, genocide and multiple crimes against humanity.

And here, as well, there were allegations of Australian citizens carrying out atrocities.

When Justice Marcus Einfeld went to Bosnia to monitor to conflict, he found witnesses who told him Australians were taking part in the killings.

JUSTICE MARCUS EINFELD QC: The sorts of things that I did see there were reminiscent of what happened in the early days of the Nazi Holocaust, before the systematic killing in the death camps.

I did interview many people who had suffered from appalling violence, including the murder of their menfolk -- husbands or fathers or brothers or sons.

And their identification of some people from Australia as being their killers or adherents of their killers, assistants of their killers.

Bosnia's only a small place.

People know everybody.

And they certainly identified people who were ex-Australians, or had come from Australia, and I passed the information on to the war crimes tribunal.

GRAHAM BLEWITT: To my mind, I don't think a lot has been done by the Australian authorities to ascertain whether or not any Australian citizens did participate in such crimes.

And in my view, Australia has an obligation to do so.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: You're saying Australia has just turned a blind eye to the problem?

GRAHAM BLEWITT: I think that's right, yes.

I would say that, I think.

There have certainly been enough allegations made that Australian citizens did this.

But I'm not aware of any concrete investigation undertaken to establish that.

GRAPHIC: DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC, Born: 1954, Arrived: Australia 1969.

Australian Citizen.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: One of Australia's most notorious recent war crimes suspects is this man, Dragan Vasiljkovic, known as Captain Dragan.

He lives in Belgrade where he runs a charity for disabled war veterans.

When Four Corners found him there, he happily posed in the zoo playing with a bear, the mascot of a Serb paramilitary group he commanded during the war with Croatia.

Dragan Vasiljkovic is a master self-publicist and a man who clearly believes his own publicity.

He was portrayed as a wartime hero by the Serb media.

There was even a comic book in which he starred.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: I got involved in the war.

I took a major part in that war and I became one of the major features of this war.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Captain Dragan has a long association with Australia.

He arrived here as a teenager, became a citizen and was trained in the Army Reserve.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: I served in a couple of units.

I was with the Prince of Wales Light Horse and I was with the 1RVR.

There was a lot of training and many years of good training and that training become very, very useful in what happened afterwards.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: When the war began in the former Yugoslavia, Captain Dragan went back and was recruited by the Serb secret service to train paramilitary troops to fight against Croatia.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: I set up a training camp and we went through the training.

And after the training, they saw a different army than they used to.

I was the head of this special task force in Krajina.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Some of the most serious allegations were published by a United Nations commission of experts.

They included intimidating civilians, orchestrating ethnic cleansing throughout Krajina, participating in the ethnic cleansing of Knin, along with Arkan and Seselj units.

International lawyer, Cherif Bassiouni, headed the UN team which drew up the report on Captain Dragan and his paramilitaries.

CHERIF BASSIOUNI, PROFESSOR OF LAW, DEPAUL UNIVERSITY, US: There were allegations that these groups, that this group in particular and that he in particular, engaged in acts that could be considered as war crimes.

There were allegations of him participating in torturing of people and in killings of people.

But these are reports that are made by individuals who did not give those reports under oath.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: It's a charge which Captain Dragan emphatically rejects.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: Well, not only that I wasn't mentioned in the war crime tribunal.

I was never mentioned even in Croatian media as a war criminal.

I would not tolerate any ill-treatment of prisoners.

That I would not tolerate any ill-treatment of civilians.

Every time we liberated or conquered -- again, depends which way you look at it -- a village or a town or a city, the very first thing I've done I immediately secured all the civilians, made sure they got all the food, medical treatment and security around them.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Captain Dragan's denial sits uncomfortably with the fact that the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has investigated the UN's allegations.

CHERIF BASSIOUNI: I cannot make a conclusive judgment as to whether or not he is a war criminal or he has committed war crimes.

I can only tell you that from the published material there is enough indications there, enough suspicion, for the prosecutor to investigate and eventually to return an indictment.

GRAHAM BLEWITT: It was felt that if we could locate this Captain Dragan, he could certainly assist our inquiries.

So were we looking for him at the time with a view to interrogating him.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: But despite his profile as a war crimes suspect, Captain Dragan is proud to be Australian.

He openly boasts of contact with the Australian Embassy and of meeting the ambassador.

Captain Dragan says one day he wants to come back to Australia.

DRAGAN VASILJKOVIC: And I think the only real free country in this world is Australia.

I do call Australia home.

I feel that one day when I return back, it will be back to Australia.

GRAHAM BLEWITT: If Captain Dragan turned up in Australia, he could not be prosecuted because there's no legislation in place which would enable that to happen.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: What would happen?

GRAHAM BLEWITT: If we wanted to pursue him ourselves we would issue a warrant, have it sent to Australia, and we would expect Australia to apprehend him and surrender him to The Hague to be dealt with by the War Crimes Tribunal there.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: When Captain Dragan was last believed to be in Australia, investigators from The Hague asked the Federal Police to track him down.

He wasn't here, but even if he had been, he couldn't have been put on trial in Australia for war crimes.

Mr Kalejs, how are you doing?

I'm an Australian journalist.

I would like to -- 

An Australian journalist.

KONRAD KALEJS: Australian journalist?

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Australian, yes.

KONRAD KALEJS: You have to talk to my lawyer.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: Konrad Kalejs and the other ageing Nazis also seem safe from prosecution in this country.

And war criminals from more modern theatres of war appear to regard Australia as somewhere they can return to with impunity.

CRAIG GOODES: There is an increasing recognition that this culture of impunity, the idea that people can get away with these kind of atrocities, are part of the cycle of atrocities.

And if you're going to break that cycle, you've got to attack impunity.

SENATOR AMANDA VANSTONE: The prospect of people who committed these crimes, any of them, dying without facing a court, is not a prospect that anybody would welcome.

But the want to do that, the very strong desire to do that, doesn't wipe away the difficulties that Australia faces.

QUENTIN McDERMOTT: But what would you like to see happen?

DAVID BENEDIKT: I'd like them to get rid of the whole bunch and put them all on trial in their countries of origin and find them guilty.

It is not necessary to lock them away for life or execute them.

What is necessary is that they should be found guilty in front of the whole of watching humanity.