In December 2002 Biljana Plavšić, a former president of Republika Srpska, stood before the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal and pleaded guilty to persecution as a crime against humanity. Years later, after her release from a Swedish prison, she took that admission back.
Plavšić died on October 1, 2026, in Belgrade. She was 96. She is to be buried in Banja Luka on October 6.
The scientist
Plavšić was born on July 7, 1930, in Tuzla, and moved with her family to Sarajevo at four. She became a biologist, studying electron microscopy in London and plant virology in Prague and Bari, and was a Fulbright scholar at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. At the University of Sarajevo she was a professor and dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and published more than 100 scientific papers.
Into politics
In 1990 she joined the Serb Democratic Party, led by Radovan Karadžić, and became the first woman on the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When Bosnia went to war in 1992 she joined the leadership of the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic, as acting president early that year and then as vice president from December 1992.
She made statements during the war about Serb “ethnic-racial superiority” and described ethnic cleansing as a “natural phenomenon”. She worked with the paramilitary leader Željko Ražnatović, known as Arkan, during operations in Bijeljina.
After the war she became president of Republika Srpska in July 1996, serving until November 1998, a period in which she broke with Karadžić.
The Hague
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted her, and she surrendered voluntarily on January 10, 2001. On December 16, 2002, under a plea agreement, she pleaded guilty to one count of persecution as a crime against humanity. On February 27, 2003, she was sentenced to 11 years.
She served her sentence at Hinseberg women’s prison in Sweden and was released on October 27, 2009, after two-thirds of her term. In interviews in 2005 and 2009 she retracted her guilty plea.
Before 1990 she was known as a scientist. She is remembered for what came after.