Plavsic, who died this week, was the only high-ranking woman political leader prosecuted for mass atrocities by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. She expressed sorrow for these acts in court – but then changed her mind. Biljana Plavsic, who died this week aged 96, came from a well-educated, urban, affluent family in Tuzla, where she was born in 1930. Her father, Svetislav, was a prominent biologist, director of the natural science department at the Sarajevo Museum and custodian of its botanical collection. Her grandfather, Dionisije, was a successful merchant. Her mother was a housewife.
As a child in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, Plavsic was only 11 when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941. Her teenage years were marked by harrowing events. Some of her relatives were killed or deported to concentration camps by the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist movement, or expelled to neighbouring Serbia. Plavsic witnessed some of these events firsthand.
This left a strong imprint on her identity. When I interviewed her for my book, Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavsic, Serbia’s Iron Lady, she told me her determination to enter politics was to prevent the “extinction of the Serb people”. Serbs were killed en masse in World War II in concentration camps together with Jews, Roma and others. Plavsic said she feared such massacres would happen again, when the Bosnian war started in the 1990s.
Before the war, Plavsic was a dean of the University of Sarajevo’s science faculty, a Fulbright Scholar who had spent two years in New York conducting botany research, and an author of more than 100 scientific papers. She entered politics in 1990 as a member of the Serbian Democratic Party.
Saw ethnic cleansing as ‘natural phenomenon’
Biljana Plavsic kisses a Bosnian Serb Army flag at an army training camp in Manjaca, October 1998. Photo: EPA/DRAGO VEJNOVICWhen Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992, a move opposed by the party, Plavsic joined other party members in proclaiming a separate entity, the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. During the Bosnian war, she served as its vice-president under Radovan Karadzic, later to be convicted of crimes including genocide and now serving a life sentence.
She defended the wartime purge of Bosnia’s non-Serbs, chiefly Croats and Bosniaks, as “a natural phenomenon”, justifying the policies of ethnic cleansing, mostly carried out by Serb paramilitaries with theories of ethnic and racial superiority.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, convicted her in 2003 of crimes against humanity, “the permanent removal of ethnic population by force”, and sentenced her to 11 years in prison. She was the only woman among 161 people indicted by the ICTY, and the highest-ranking woman ever prosecuted for mass atrocities before any international criminal tribunal.
Over many hours of conversation for my book, she told me her version of the war: what led her to take part in it, why some events happened, according to her, and how. As I wrote elsewhere, humanising someone convicted of crimes against humanity sits uncomfortably with many, as it risks diminishing the gravity of their crimes and their culpability.
These concerns should not be downplayed. Still, understanding how women such as Plavsic, a professor and dean of the university, could be convicted of the most serious crimes matters, if we want to learn how to prevent them in the future.
Although I knew deep down that it was naïve, I had hoped that, by the end of our years-long conversations, she would express some regret. But there was none. Indeed, Plavsic told me she didn’t want to sit through a trial to “listen to all fake witnesses and their lies”.
Plavsic was released early in 2009. When deciding on her request for early release, the court took into account that Plavsic expressed remorse for her crimes and demonstrated overall good behaviour in prison, such as “participation in the institution’s walks” and “baking and cooking”.
Regretted words of repentance
Then Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic flashes the Serbian three-finger sign as she greets supporters during an election campaign rally in Banja Luka in November 1997. Photo: EPA/DRAGO VEJNOVICThe Serb political elites do not recognise the legitimacy of the ICTY and believe, as Plavsic did, that the court was set up “to prosecute Serbs”. Lack of recognition of the court as a legitimate, bipartisan institution has led to many high-ranking war criminals returning to Serbia and being welcomed as heroes, and/or buried with the highest state honours.
Plavsic never changed her convictions. In her now infamous statement of guilt at the ICTY, she apologised for the persecution of “thousands of non-Serbs” during her sentencing hearing in 2002. “I have now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people were the victims of an organised, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territory claimed by Serbs,” she said.
“Although I was repeatedly informed of allegations of cruel and inhuman conduct against non-Serbs, I refused to accept them or even to investigate. The knowledge that I am responsible for such human suffering and for soiling the character of my people will always be with me,” she added.
But, two years later, in an interview from her prison cell in Sweden, Plavsic withdrew her expression of remorse, saying she had done “nothing wrong”. Her denial of any responsibility for the crimes she was convicted of was met with outrage on behalf of victims’ organisations and the international community.
Although Plavsic may be buried with honours in Republika Srpska, she remains a controversial figure among some Serbs because she was the only high-ranking Serb leader who expressed remorse. Some have not forgiven her for this move.
“She should have never apologised and admitted that Serbs committed crimes,” I was told by some of Plavsic’s close acquaintances during my research. I think the backlash Plavsic received from Serbs after her infamous statement of guilt made her adamant in denying it and ultimately withdrawing her remorse. My impression was that she had a strong urge to go down in history as unrepentant.
To regain the image she had lost because of her unpopular expression of remorse, she repeatedly insisted that she did not regret anything she was accused of. On the contrary, she told me on many occasions, “I would do the same again. I had to protect my people. If I contributed anything in establishing Republika Srpska, our Serb state, and I know I did, there is nothing to regret.”
But although she has been called one of the “founders of Republika Srpska”, Plavsic is no longer a household name for the post-war generations of Serbs like her compatriots Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – who never apologised for their crimes.
Olivera Simic is a professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Australia. She is the author of the book ‘Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavsic, Serbia’s Iron Lady’, published by Hurst, 2025.
The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.