Biljana Plavšić

Dr. Biljana Plavšić (Serbian Cyrillic:Биљана Плавшић) (b. 7 July 1930, Tuzla, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a former Bosnian Serb politician and university professor currently serving a sentence in Sweden as a result of a conviction of the ICTY for war crimes. She was the president of Republika Srpska for two years from 1996 through 1998.

She was indicted by the ICTY for war crimes committed during the war in Bosnia in 2001. She plea bargained with the ICTY. Before her political engagements, she taught biology at the University of Sarajevo and acted as Head of Department of Biology. She is a Fulbright Scholar, and as such she had spent two years at Boyce-Thompson institute at Cornell University in New York doing botany research. She then specialized electronic microscopy in London, and plant virology in Prague and Bari. A highly accomplished scientist, she published over one hundred scientific works and papers which have been widely cited in scholarly literature and textbooks.^[1]

Besides being the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb politician to be sentenced, she was also known for her fiery nationalist statements during the War in Bosnia, against the SDS, and, later, her remorse for the crimes against humanity she admitted to have been responsible for as a high-level politician. ^[2]

Biljana Plavšić was renowned throughout the 1990s as an uncompromising apologist for ethnic cleansing. The self-styled "Serbian Iron Lady" once defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs as "a natural phenomenon" not a war crime.

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Political career

Plavšić was a member of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS). She was the first female member of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, serving from 18 November 1990 until April 1992 after having been elected in the first multy-party elections in 1990 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

From 28 February 1992 to 12 May 1992, Plavšić became one of the two acting Presidents of the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thereafter she became one of two Vice-president the Republika Srpska and from circa 30 November 1992 she was a member of the Supreme Command of the armed forces of the Republika Srpska.

The Dayton Agreement, signed in 1995, banned the then President of the Republika Srpska Radovan Karadžić from office and Plavšić was chosen to run as the SDS candidate for President of the Republika Srpska for a two-year mandate.

Due to a growing isolation of the Republika Srpska after the peace was signed, she severed her ties with the SDS and formed Srpski narodni savez (Serbian Popular Alliance), and nominated Milorad Dodik, the then member of the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska whose SNSD party had only two MPs, for Prime Minister.

This marked the beginning of political reform in the Republika Srpska and the cooperation with the International Community. She lost the 1998 election to the joint candidate of the SDS and the Serb Radical Party of the Republika Srpska Nikola Poplašen. She was a candidate of the reform "Sloga" coalition. Her political career was in decline until the release of the indictment by the ICTY, after which it was completely terminated.

During her time in prison, she released a book called "Witnessings" (Svjedočenja), revealing many aspects of the political life of the war-time Republika Srpska and casting an especially dark shadow on the then President of the Republika Srpska Karadžić, another ICTY indictee.

ICTY indictment and sentence

She was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia together with Momčilo Krajišnik and Radovan Karadžić for the "creation of impossible conditions of life, persecution and terror tactics in order to encourage non-Serbs to leave the area, deportation of those reluctant to leave, and the liquidation of others".

The Indictment charged Biljana Plavšić as follows:

• Two counts of genocide (Article 4 of the Statute of the Tribunal - genocide; and/or, complicity to commit genocide)
• Five counts of crimes against humanity (Article 5 thereof - extermination; murder; persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds; deportation; alternatively, inhumane acts)
• One count of violations of the laws or customs of war (Article 3 thereof - murder)

She voluntarily surrendered to the ICTY on January 10, 2001, and was provisionally released on September 6.

On 16 December, 2002 she plea bargained with the ICTY to enter a guilty plea to one count of crimes against humanity for her part in directing the war and targeting civilians and expressed "full remorse" in exchange for prosecutors dropping seven other war crimes charges, including two counts of genocide.

Plavšić's statement, read in her native Serbian language, repeated her admission of guilt. It said she had refused to believe stories of atrocities against Bosniaks and Croats and accepted without question the claims that Serbs were fighting for survival.

However, in an interview she gave in March 2005 to the Banja Luka Alternativna Television, she admitted to having lied because she couldn't prove her innocence, as she was unable to find witnesses who would testify on her behalf.^[3][4]

She was later sentenced to 11 years in prison. She is currently serving her sentence at the women's prison Hinseberg in Örebro, Sweden (since 26 June 2003).

References

General references

• Simons, Marlise. "Bosnian Ex-Leader Sentenced To 11 Years for Her War Role (article preview)", The New York Times, March 28, 2003. 
• "Biljana Plavsic: Serbian iron lady", BBC News, February 27, 2003. 
• FitzPatrick, Patrick. "It Isn't Easy Being Biljana", Central Europe Review, June 5, 2000. 
• ICTY's page on Plavšić case
• Article in Serbian in Glas Javnosti
• BBC Profile On Biljana Plavšić
• Article and video in Swedish on Sveriges Television's website.