Biljana Plavsic, a Bosnian Serb biologist and ultranationalist political leader during the Balkan wars of the 1990s who expressed remorse and pleaded guilty to one count of crimes against humanity but later recanted and said she “would do the same again,” has died in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. She was 96.
The death of Ms. Plavsic was announced on Thursday by Serbian state media. No other details were provided.
Ms. Plavsic, a former professor at Sarajevo University who studied in Zagreb, New York, London and Prague and wrote more than 100 scientific papers, became notorious in the 1990s for applying biology to politics when the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia disintegrated. She declared Bosnia’s Muslim population “deformed genetic material” and railed against mixed marriages, common before the war, as leading to “the degeneration of Serb nationality.”
Often coldly indifferent to the suffering of non-Serbs, she was known as the Iron Lady of the Balkans, a nickname inspired by Soviet descriptions of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. But the name Ms. Plavsic relished most was a tribute that Serb fighters daubed on the side of their tanks: Empress.
“She was educated, a professor but a real hard-line nationalist,” recalled Laura Silber, the co-author of “The Death of Yugoslavia,” who interviewed Ms. Plavsic several times during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. “She was prim and proper — school marmish in demeanor — so it was especially shocking to hear the ugly nationalist rhetoric coming out of her mouth.”
Olivera Simic, an Australian scholar from Bosnia who interviewed Ms. Plavsic for hundreds of hours in her later years, remembered her as highly intelligent but often blind to the suffering of non-Serbs. “She was not a monster and would express from time to time that she felt sorry for everyone — and then quickly start talking about Serb victims and cry over them,” Ms. Simic said in a telephone interview.
For nearly four years, Ms. Plavsic served as vice president of Republika Srpska, a Serb enclave in Bosnia that declared itself a separate state in 1992 and began a program of ethnic cleansing aimed at driving out Muslims, Croats and other non-Serb residents. In that role she worked closely with Radovan Karadzic, the self-declared state’s president, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by a United Nations tribunal.
She rejected the term “ethnic cleansing” in her interviews with Ms. Simic, a law professor at Griffith University in Australia, describing the separation of different peoples as a “natural process.” According to Ms. Simic, Ms. Plavsic believed that “everyone should live with their own tribe” and, as a result, “willingly turned a blind eye” to the suffering this caused when ethnic groups were separated at gunpoint “because she was only interested in protecting her own tribe.”
Testifying as a witness at The Hague trial of Serbia’s wartime leader Slobodan Milosevic, Vojislav Seselj, the founder of a far-right Serb political party, who was also charged with war crimes, said that Ms. Plavsic “held very extremist positions during the war, insufferably extremist, even for me, and they bothered even me as a declared Serb nationalist.”
After the war ended, Ms. Plavsic muted her anti-Muslim fervor, broke with Mr. Karadzic, accusing him of corruption, and in 1996 took over as president of Republika Srpska with support from the West, which viewed her as a partner for peace.
She was for a time hailed as a symbol of reconciliation after she expressed remorse during a 2002 sentencing hearing in The Hague. “I have now come to the belief and accept the fact that many thousands of innocent people were the victims of an organized, systematic effort to remove Muslims and Croats from the territory claimed by Serbs,” she said.
Serbs, driven by “an obsession to never become victims,” had “allowed ourselves to become victimizers,” she told the court.
Despite her strident ethnonationalism during the war, Ms. Plavsic later won plaudits in Washington and other Western capitals for supporting a peace settlement brokered by the United States in 1995.
Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of state during President Bill Clinton’s second term, praised Ms. Plavsic at her sentencing hearing for breaking with Bosnian Serb leaders who opposed the peace deal. “She stood up for that at times when it was very difficult, when there were those who wanted to destroy the Dayton Accords,” Ms. Albright said at the 2002 hearing.
Ms. Plavsic was the only woman among more than 150 people indicted by the international court for war crimes in former Yugoslavia. In 2003, she received an 11-year sentence for persecution, a crime against humanity, as part of a plea bargain that allowed her to avoid a trial on charges of complicity in genocide.
In contrast with Mr. Karadzic, who went into hiding for more than a decade and, after his arrest, boycotted parts of his trial in The Hague, Ms. Plavsic surrendered voluntarily and cooperated with the tribunal.
After initially pleading not guilty, she later pleaded guilty on one count, acknowledging that Serb forces had committed crimes and her own responsibility for these. “The knowledge that I am responsible for such human suffering and for soiling the character of my people will always be with me,” she told the court.
The judge said that Ms. Plavsic had not conceived or planned the violent Serbian campaign of ethnic separation that killed tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats and expelled many more from their lands with “great brutality,” but that she had embraced, supported and contributed to it. “This is a crime of utmost gravity,” he said.
Victims of the war and some human rights groups criticized her sentence as too lenient. But others said the major issue in Ms. Plavsic’s confession and guilty plea was that they would make denials by other Serbian leaders more difficult.
“In a region where denial and revisionism are central and where the tribunal is seen with skepticism, Ms. Plavsic’s gesture is striking,” Alex Boraine, a member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told the court.
Fellow Serb nationalists, appalled by the confession in The Hague, denounced her as a traitor for deviating from the narrative that Serbs were innocent victims. They embraced her as a hero when she later recanted and declared herself and Serbs blameless.
The grip that the narrative of innocence still holds on many Serbs was on ghoulish display in September when thousands, including Serbian government ministers and the son of President Aleksandar Vucic, turned out in Belgrade for the funeral of Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide and known as the Butcher of Bosnia.
Ms. Plavsic’s contrition, if ever more than a ploy to avoid a lengthy trial and escape genocide charges, did not last long. Released early from prison in 2009 for good behavior, she settled in Belgrade and quickly retreated from what Ms. Simic, the author of the 2025 book “Madam War Criminal,” concluded was “fake remorse” in The Hague.
Divorced with no children, she lived alone in a modest Belgrade apartment decorated with Orthodox Christian icons and a wooden cross made for her by a fellow inmate convicted of genocide for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
“She believes she sacrificed herself for ‘her people’ and did not show any ability to critically reflect on her actions but persistently justified and rationalized her behavior, which she always perceived as highly ethical, moral and legitimate,” Ms Simic wrote in her book. “She told me on many occasions during our conversations that if the circumstances would arise again she would most likely respond the same way.”
Ms. Plavsic’s case in The Hague “raised fundamental questions about the delivery of international justice,” said Philippe Sands, a British human rights lawyer. He represented Croatia, also formerly part of Yugoslavia, in an unsuccessful genocide claim it brought against Serbia.
“On one level, justice was done,” he added. “She was convicted and did time.”
“But at another level the fact that justice was done catalyzed a whole other set of frictions, which nobody really thought through when the system was created,” Mr. Sands said, referring to the codification of genocide as a separate crime under international law after World War II.
The classification of certain crimes as genocide but others in different categories of criminality, he said, “ends up with a sort of Champions League of horrors” that leaves communities angry and resentful if horrors they suffered are not judged as “genocide.”
The debate rages in former Yugoslavia, where the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica has been legally recognized as genocide but atrocities committed by Serb forces against Croats in Vukovar in 1991 and by Croats against Bosnian Muslims in Mostar during a 1993-94 siege have been classified as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Biljana Plavsic was born on July 7, 1930, in Tuzla, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. She grew up in Sarajevo, to which her affluent family moved when she was 4. Her father was a prominent scientist who had been educated in Vienna, and she was raised on books and stories celebrating an infamous relative — Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist who precipitated World War I in 1914 by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo.
Eleven years old when Nazi Germany invaded Bosnia in 1941, she witnessed Serbs being executed in the street and lost dozens of relatives to brutal ethnic purges carried out by the Ustashe, a Croatian fascist group that led the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Germany formed during World War II.
After the defeat of the Nazis, Bosnia became one of six republics in the newly declared Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Despite her family’s hostility to communism, Ms. Plavsic, who never joined the party, embarked on a highly successful academic career focused on plant virology. This included two years of botany research in the 1970s at Cornell University.
A popular biology professor in Sarajevo, she had a reputation as an exacting but fair-minded scholar who held all students, no matter what their ethnicity, to the same high standards. Elected dean of Sarajevo University’s faculty of natural sciences and mathematics in 1987, she turned to politics in 1990 when she became the Serb member of a collective, multiethnic presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, then still part of Yugoslavia.
When Slovenia and Croatia, two other Yugoslav republics, broke away to declare independence in 1991, Bosnian Muslims began demanding their own state, too — a prospect that terrified Ms. Plavsic and many other Serbs.
In interviews with Ms. Simic, the Australia-based scholar, before her death, Ms. Plavsic often referred to 1991 as “the continuation of 1941,” a replay of the World War II conflict between Nazi-aligned Croats and antifascist Serbs that, she believed, “never finished.”
Convinced that conflict between different ethnic communities in Bosnia was inevitable after a March 1992 attack on a Serb wedding procession outside an Orthodox Church in Sarajevo, she left Sarajevo for Pale, a predominantly Serb town in the nearby mountains that served as the capital of Republika Srpska, the newly declared Serb statelet.
From there she helped organize what she called “humanitarian work” that aided refugees but also Serb soldiers and paramilitary gangs involved in clearing non-Serbs from ethnically mixed areas and in shelling Sarajevo, which was clamped in a siege that would last more than three years. Among those she worked with was a notorious gangster and soccer hooligan turned paramilitary leader known as Arkan, whose Serb Volunteer Guard, known as Arkan’s Tigers, committed multiple atrocities.
She told Ms. Simic years later in Belgrade that everything she did was motivated by a desire to avoid “the extinction of the Serb people.” Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats all suffered and, Ms Simic said, Ms. Plavsic’s obsession with crimes against her own people was part of a bigger problem across former Yugoslavia.
“Everyone talks about their own victims, never their own perpetrators — no one,” Ms. Simic said. “This is the problem. Everyone wants to talk about their victimhood, never their perpetrators. They think nobody acknowledges crimes done against them, no matter how big or small.”
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