A Captive in Her Own Nightmare : Abduction: Shayna Lazarevich’s ex-husband ran off with their children to Serbia. And despite support from the courts and U.S. diplomats, she can’t get them back.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  While police were supposedly searching for Shayna Lazarevich’s kidnaped children in the provincial Serbian town of Nis, the young captives were being sported around in a 1978 black Corvette with California license plates.

Local police and social welfare workers claimed they couldn’t find Dragisa Lazarevich, the California woman’s former husband, to bring him to justice on charges of abducting the children. Nor, they claimed for months, could they locate 8-year-old Sasha or 5-year-old Andre to reunite them with their distraught mother, whose legal award of custody by Los Angeles Superior Court had been upheld by Yugoslav and Serbian judges.

The evasions and roadblocks erected by local authorities, who close ranks around their own people in clannish Serbian regions like Nis, have made Lazarevich’s life an agonizing nightmare since her children were spirited away 18 months ago. U.S. diplomats in Belgrade have offered a modicum of sympathy and have kept the paper mill in motion with official government-to-government dispatches. But they note that foreign envoys can do nothing to force a host country to obey its own laws.

Against the backdrop of chaos now consuming Yugoslavia, Lazarevich has come to fear that the torment she has endured for a year and a half may go on forever.

“It’s not as though my children were dead, where you grieve but you eventually move on,” explains Lazarevich, her voice controlling but not concealing her despair.

“My children aren’t dead. I can’t say goodby to them. There comes a time in most situations where you just have to say, ‘Stop. I can’t go through this anymore.’ But in this situation, when it’s your children, you can’t ever let go.”

Lazarevich, now 29, met her former husband, a Yugoslav 14 years her senior, shortly after finishing high school in Santa Monica. They married in 1982, settled in suburban Downey and had two children over the next four years. But Lazarevich says she soon tired of the rigidly traditional lifestyle her husband insisted upon, which kept her at home throughout the seven-year marriage.

The Lazareviches divorced in the spring of 1989. Los Angeles Superior Court granted joint custody; the children lived primarily with their mother.

Then one weekend in September, 1989, just after Lazarevich had moved into campus family housing at UC Santa Cruz to study anthropology on a full regents scholarship, Dragisa Lazarevich picked up Sasha and Andre for an outing that has yet to end.

Phone calls to former neighbors in Downey disclosed that her ex-husband had sold their home. Lazarevich had safeguarded the children’s passports to prevent her former spouse from taking them abroad, but he had obtained duplicates by claiming that the documents had been lost.

It took her a month to discover her ex-husband had taken the children to Yugoslavia, a volatile alliance of six republics that is threatened with civil war. He could not be located for comment on the case.

Shayna Lazarevich sought the help of a lawyer specializing in international abductions, who secured U.S. indictments of Dragisa Lazarevich on charges of kidnaping. Upon the advice of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy here, she also obtained legal aid in Belgrade and began the arduous process of winning Yugoslav and Serbian recognition of her right to custody.

The California Supreme Court had awarded full custody to the mother after the abduction, and that judgment was endorsed in Yugoslavia. Federal and Serbian republic courts also issued warrants for the arrest of Dragisa Lazarevich and the transfer of Sasha and Andre from his home to their mother.

Serbian social workers finally responded to a request by the U.S. Embassy for a “welfare and hereabouts check” of the missing children--more than six months after the diplomats asked for it.

“It was insane,” Lazarevich says of the ostensibly independent report on her children’s circumstances. “It was a page and a half regurgitating claims by my husband that I was a lowly student, that I was unhygienic, that I traveled too much and that my children had begged to be taken away. It didn’t address their situation at all.”

The report had been carried out by caseworkers loyal to Dragisa Lazarevich, on whose home turf his ex-wife repeatedly encountered brick walls.

Local authorities in Nis showed through the welfare and whereabouts report that they were in contact with the father. Yet repeated attempts by Lazarevich to get local authorities to enforce the custody transfer orders were met each time with claims that police couldn’t find him.

“The people there seem to be afraid of him,” says Lazarevich. “They said for months that they didn’t know where he was. I saw him drive by once myself while I was in Nis, in the black 1978 Corvette he’d had shipped over from California. A car like that, with California license plates, is really conspicuous in the city of Nis. But the police claimed they couldn’t find him.”

When Lazarevich staked out the school where a private detective had discovered her daughter was enrolled, she had her first contact with the 8-year-old last June, nine months after the abduction.

“It was an extraordinary nightmare, a really devastating experience,” Lazarevich recalls of the schoolhouse scene. “He (Dragisa) had told them I didn’t want them anymore, that I only wanted to go to school, that I had poisoned their dog. It was unbelievable.”

While Lazarevich extracted from her stunned and emotionally torn daughter the disturbing details of what their father had told the children to justify their departure from California, the school principal had quietly summoned the father and “Dragisa’s police.”

The mother was forcibly evicted from the school grounds and warned by her ex-husband not to come back. The U.S. Embassy advised her to pursue the legal channels, professing to be helpless to do more than register official complaints once the children’s whereabouts had been pinned down.

Lazarevich got Serbian prosecutors to file criminal charges against her ex-husband, although related orders for his appearance in court were initially ignored. She also won the support of Rep. Helen Delich Bentley (R-Md.), whose close ties to the Serbian community have exerted more pressure on local authorities to conform.

After months of evading numerous arrest warrants, Dragisa Lazarevich last fall appealed the Yugoslav courts’ recognition of his ex-wife’s custody award, indefinitely tying the case against him in legal red tape.

“No Yugoslav agency can act to enforce that order (granting custody to the mother) until the appeal is decided,” explains U.S. Consul General Robert Tynes.

Tynes says the embassy has pressed for speedy resolution of the appeal and has been insisting, through the same clogged court channels, that Lazarevich be allowed to visit her children in Nis.

“But the U.S. government cannot force any government of a sovereign state to enforce a U.S. court decree or even to enforce its own decrees,” Tynes says.

Stymied by the bureaucracy, Lazarevich says she has despaired of always doing the right thing.

“As an American, you’re brought up to be a good girl, to do things according to the law,” she says. “I’ve been trying to go about this in what I was told was the right way, and it’s gotten me nowhere. I haven’t even gotten to see my kids.”

In the months she has spent in Belgrade pressing for justice from a crumbling system, Lazarevich has been befriended by many Serbs who see the behavior of Nis officials as the kind of lawlessness giving Serbia a black eye in international circles.

“I’m being told by my Yugoslav friends that I will have to abduct my kids back if I ever want to get them. Now I’m starting to believe that’s the only avenue I have left open to me,” she says, visibly torn over matching criminal actions with more of the same.

She believes that the embassy has let her down by advising her to go through legal channels they probably know will lead to a dead end. Yet she is hesitant to criticize the diplomacy that is her only legal recourse to reunion with her children.

“It would be a lot less traumatic for them if uniformed police could just go and calmly bring them to me. I don’t understand why someone can’t make them do that,” Lazarevich says.

Asked if she has any confidence that justice will prevail, given Yugoslavia’s protracted turmoil, Lazarevich seems to struggle against resignation.

“We had that opportunity last summer. Now it’s gone,” she says, referring to the ignored arrest warrants and obstructions. “That’s when the embassy should have pushed a little harder. They are pushing harder now. But there were problems in Yugoslavia before, and now there’s total chaos.”