Biljana Plavšić

Biljana Plavšić (1996)

Biljana Plavšić ( Serbian - Cyrillic Биљана Плавшић ; born July 7, 1930 in Tuzla , Kingdom of Yugoslavia ) is a former politician and convicted war criminal in the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina .

Life

Biljana Plavšić studied at the University of Zagreb and was a professor of biology (focus: plant morphology) and dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Sarajevo . She is the aunt of the Yugoslav and Serbian journalist and diplomat Miroslav Lazanski . As a member of the Serbian Democratic Party, founded in July 1990, she was the only woman to be elected to the Bosnian Presidency in the first multi-party elections; she held this office from November 1990 to April 1992.

Later in 1992, she became Vice President of the Republika Srpska and a member of the High Command of the Armed Forces of the Republika Srpska. She ordered ethnic cleansing. She described Muslims as “a genetic error in the Serbian body”. She vehemently contradicted this claim that this statement was made by a journalist and was fictitious. After the President of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić , resigned in 1996 under international pressure, she became his successor. She increasingly distanced herself from Karadžić, which led to a power struggle. Plavšić left the then capital of the Republika Srpska, Pale (near Sarajevo), and carried out the business of government from Banja Luka . She was expelled from the Serbian Democratic Party and then founded the Srpski Narodni Savez party (SNS, Serbian People's Union). In the 1998 presidential election, Plavšić was replaced by Nikola Poplašen .

Biljana Plavšić was initially considered a radical nationalist, but during her tenure as president she paved the way for reforms and nominated Milorad Dodik, then considered moderate social democrat, as prime minister.

Charged with crimes against humanity (assisting in planning and executing evictions) before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia , she presented herself in January 2001. She had been sentenced to 11 years in prison since 2003 in Hinseberg Women's Prison in the Swedish province of Örebro . According to an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau , she was portrayed as a war criminal on the one hand, but on the other hand she was certified as having a good character and the prospect of mitigating her sentence if she testified against Slobodan Milošević . In a conversation with journalists in early 2009, however, it became clear that the reduction in sentences was the main motive for their repentance ("The knowledge that I am responsible for such human suffering and for polluting the character of my people will always be with me") is what the journalist also confirms: “She admitted that she only expressed regrets about her past actions because she wanted to receive a shorter prison sentence. She told me that she still hated Muslims [...] ”. She also disliked Swedish society because of its equality and freedom of the press.

On October 27, 2009, after serving two-thirds of her sentence, Plavšić was released early from prison for good conduct. The Swedish government took the decision to release the prisoner on October 22, 2009 after two appeals for clemency had previously been rejected. Contrary to Swedish practice, Plavšić should not be monitored for the remainder of the original sentence.

On the day Radovan Karadžić was convicted by the ICTY , she gave an interview to the Serbian branch of the Russian media portal Sputnik in which she again deviated significantly from the statements made in her confession of guilt before the ICTY. She questioned the legitimacy and impartiality of the international criminal court and expressed the view that without the Republika Srpska and the Organization of the Serbs in Bosnia the war crimes against Serbs from the Second World War would have been repeated. The journalist found the Dayton peace treaty to be unfair to the Serbs, to which Plavšić replied that she only regretted not being able to enter “her beloved Sarajevo”. The siege of Sarajevo , which played a role in her conviction, and the other victims of the Bosnian War were not mentioned in the interview. She insisted on a refuted position, which had been brought up again and again by politicians of the Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War , according to which the Bosnian Muslims had intended to found a state of God . She regretted the increasing shrinking of the state of Serbia (which she called “little mother”) after the declarations of independence from Montenegro and Kosovo and compared the shrinking of the territory to “mice that nibble on all sides”. She compared the trial against herself with that against Albert Speer during the Nuremberg Trials and stated that she was treated worse than him during her imprisonment. In this context, she raised allegations against female guards who had treated her inhumanly during her detention, and stressed that this was particularly done by Muslim women.

Fonts

• Svedočim. Knjiga pisana u zatvoru. ( I testify. A book written in prison. Autobiography), 2004, ISBN 99938-753-1-7

literature

• Yugoslovensky savremeni. Ko je ko u Jugoslaviji? (Yugoslav contemporaries. Who is who in Yugoslavia?) 1970.
• Carl Bildt : Peace journey: The struggle for peace in Bosnia. 1998, ISBN 0-297-84131-9 ).
• Biljana Plavšić , in: International Biographical Archive. 18/2003 of April 21, 2003, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible).
• Slavenka Drakulić : Nobody was there. War crimes on trial in the Balkans. 2004, pp. 168-176.

Web links

• Presentation of the Plavšić case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (German)
• Overview of the Plavšić case before the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (English; PDF; 135 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http ://www. Republikainfo.com/vijesti/1488-ekskluzivno-prenosimo-nin-ov-intervju-biljana-plavsic-mladicu-preuzmi-krivnju-i-oslobodi-srbe.html
2. ↑ ICTY - Case Information Sheet (English; PDF; 212 kB)
3. ↑ Plavšić at large. FAZ.net , October 27, 2009.
4. ↑ Dagens Nyheter : Krigförbrytaren Plavsic släpps
5. ↑ [1]