Biljana Plavšić, former president of the Republic of Srpska and one of the most prominent political figures of the Bosnian Serbs during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, died in Belgrade at the age of 96, the Radio-television of Republika Srpska announced. The funeral should be held in Banja Luka.

Plavsic is in front of International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pleaded guilty to persecution on political, racial and religious grounds. In 2003, the tribunal sentenced her to 11 years in prison.

She was released in 2009, after serving part of her sentence.

Years later, however, she retracted her guilty plea. In an interview with the Swedish magazine “Vi”, she claimed that the confession was part of a strategy by which she wanted to avoid a longer trial.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity so that I could negotiate the other charges,” Plavšić said at the time, explaining that the trial, due to her age, would be unacceptably long for her.

From a professor to the top of Republika Srpska

Before entering politics, Plavšić had a university career. She was a professor and dean of the Faculty of Science and Mathematics in Sarajevo, and she studied biology and was a doctor of science.

In the first multi-party elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990, she was elected as a member of the collective Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the same time, she was the president of the Council for the Protection of the Constitutional Order of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In April 1992, on the eve of the outbreak of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she resigned from both positions and joined the political leadership of the Bosnian Serbs.

She left Sarajevo on May 20, 1992, and then became one of the two vice-presidents of Republika Srpska.

In September 1996, Radovan Karadžić, the then president of Republika Srpska, under pressure from the international community, transferred the presidential powers to Plavšić. In the elections of the same year, she was elected president of the Republic of Srpska.

She remained in that position until the 1998 elections, when she lost to Nikola Poplašen, the candidate of the Serbian Radical Party.

Conflict with SDS and the new party

Plavšić was expelled from the Serbian Democratic Party in 1997. Soon after, she founded the Serbian People’s Union and was elected its president.

In the elections and political confrontations that followed, she found herself on the opposite side of the part of the former leadership of the Republika Srpska. After the defeat in the local elections in 2000, the extraordinary assembly of the SNS voted no confidence in her.

Plavšić then continued her political activities with a group of delegates under the name “Serbian People’s Alliance – Biljana Plavšić”.

At the end of 2000, she retired from political life and resigned from the post of deputy in the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska, explaining that she was doing so for health reasons.

The Hague verdict

The most important part of her later biography is related to the proceedings before the Hague Tribunal.

In 2001, Plavšić pleaded guilty to persecution as a crime against humanity. In 2003, the tribunal sentenced her to 11 years in prison.

Her verdict and subsequent withdrawal of the confession remained the subject of different interpretations, especially due to the fact that during the proceedings she accepted responsibility for one of the counts of the indictment, while she later claimed that the confession was the result of negotiations with the prosecution.

After her release from prison in 2009, she lived mostly in seclusion in Belgrade and did not actively return to politics.

Plavšić was born on July 7, 1930 in Tuzla, and grew up in Sarajevo. She graduated in biology, received her doctorate in botany and spent part of her professional training abroad as a Fulbright scholar.

Her death closes the life path of a person who rose from being a university professor to the very top of the political leadership of Republika Srpska, and then became one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb political officials convicted before the Hague Tribunal.

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