Bosnian Serb Wartime Leader Biljana Plavsic Dies Aged 96

Biljana Plavsic at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, January 2000. Photo: EPA PHOTO/POOL REUTERS/JERRY LAMPEN. Biljana Plavsic, a senior wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, died on Thursday aged 96 in Belgrade, where she had been living since release from prison, the public broadcaster of Bosnia’s Serb-led entity, Republika Srpska, RTRS, reported. As vice-president of the Serb-led Republika Srpska entity during the 1992-5 war, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison in on February 2003 by the UN tribunal in The Hague after pleading guilty to the persecution of Bosniaks, Croats and other non-Serbs. In June 2003, she was transferred from The Hague to Sweden to serve her sentence and she released in October 2009, having served two-thirds of her sentence. She then returned to Belgrade, where she lived a reclusive life and was not politically active. She was divorced and had no children, RTRS wrote in its report on her death. Plavsic was born in 1930 in the Bosnian town of Tuzla. She was the only woman to be indicted and convicted of wartime crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in The Hague. But she later told Swedish magazine Vi that she only admitted guilt to get the other charges against her dropped, and had “done nothing wrong”. She told BIRN in 2019 that she could not remember expressing remorse in court for causing suffering during the war. “I try to forget that period,” she said. A former biology lecturer, Plavsic became the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency from November 1990 until December 1992. She was later one of the vice-presidents of the newly-founded Republika Srpska, under Radovan Karadzic. After the war, in 1996, she became Republika Srpska’s second president, a position she held until November 1998. The Hague prosecution charged her alongside Momcilo Krajisnik, Republika Srpska’s speaker from 1991 to 1996. Krajisnik was found guilty of deportation and forced displacement; he died in September 2020 due to the consequences of COVID-19. Since her release from prison, though not active in public life, Plavsic sometimes gave interviews to nationalist, pro-government, pro-Russian or far-right media.