The most important male figure in the life of Biljana Plavšić (1930–2026) was Svetislav Plavšić (1891–1949). Her father. Not because being the daughter of a biologist employed at the National Museum had greatly facilitated and enabled her academic career at the University of Sarajevo – a career she forged for herself, rising through the academic ranks from assistant lecturer to dean – but because she herself skilfully portrayed his transfer after the Second World War from the Museum (where he had worked as a curator after serving in Ogulin, Trebinje and Tuzla) to a Sarajevo grammar school as a repressive measure taken by the new authorities against political dissenters. She would later successfully weave the circumstances of her father’s death into the contrived narrative of victimhood constructed by Serbian nationalist elites, which also carried her into the highest offices of the party and the republic in the early 1990s. Her father Svetislav never heard the intentions of his daughter Biljana, who, at a session of the assembly of the Serb people on 11 March 1992, declared that, as a biologist, she would undertake the task of separating and demarcating territories:
‘[...] the most important thing now would be to concentrate on separating the territories. We must commit ourselves fully to this; we must draw these boundaries properly, because that task lies ahead of us.’
Her exemplary ‘pedigree’ as a supposed victim of the communist repressive system, a Serb woman, a devout Orthodox believer, an unassuming professor and scholar would open the way for her political engagement within the broad national movement gathered around the Serb Democratic Party. In Jovan Rašković (1929–1992), the tribune of the people and charismatic leader who founded the SDS in Croatia, she saw a kindred spirit. In him and his work, she sensed the cultivation of moral, national and political qualities. In the early 1990s, Rašković, in his own words, stoked ‘emotional fires among the Serb people’ and ‘laid the groundwork for war’. This third man (not necessarily in this order) also succeeded in lighting within her the fuse of Serbhood – a collective national identity to which he ascribed categories of collective morbidity (‘The Serbs are a mad people!’) and of sanctity, which were used throughout the 1990s to justify the slaughter, burning, penetration and roasting of everything that was, and still is, designated as the Other. The neuropsychiatrist died before he could see how Biljana the biologist played with the fire he had lit:
‘We have now been brought into a state known in biology as sporulation, [...] For the time being, we cannot live as a wheat plant but must live as a grain of wheat. All the functions within that seed remain; they have not been destroyed but reduced to a certain minimum. Yet if that seed finds itself in favourable conditions, if you cast it into moist soil, it sprouts; for that seed to sprout and live as a plant, it must contain substances of the highest quality. I believe we possess that quality substance and must preserve it carefully, because if that seed comes out, then that seed will never germinate [...]’
The fourth man in Biljana Plavšić’s life, not necessarily in this order, was the Shakespearean Nikola Koljević (1936–1997), who took his own life. To spare her a lonely struggle for good, Koljević invited Biljana Plavšić to join the Serb Democratic Party. Together, as Serbs, they entered the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the 1990 elections. From there, they earnestly sought to impose a state of emergency, secure a greater presence of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and, at all costs, keep Bosnia and Herzegovina within the political framework of what we affectionately call ‘rump Yugoslavia’. In doing so, they revelled in the chaos Milošević had unleashed by breaching the country’s monetary system, falsely denouncing the newly elected republic’s institutions as incompetent. In the scorching summer of 1992, Marko Vešović, Darinka’s son, banished these political pygmies in the service of the bloodthirsty butcher from Durmitor from the City that had given them jobs and careers. He did so with a letter that ended as follows:
‘This Serb who pounds us mercilessly from our hills has only a terrifying abundance of shells. What the Bosnian has – I shall not tell you. I shall tell you only that he still knows how to love.’
A man Biljana Plavšić found particularly appealing was a football supporters’ leader, a petty criminal but a major war criminal, and a recipient of the Order of Karađorđe’s Star, Third Class. Commander Pavle’s knight honoured the university professor with the title of Serbian empress. She was greatly taken with his ‘praetorians’ – ‘truly such impressive young men to behold’ – whom he lined up before her during her visit to Bijeljina in April 1992, after massacring non-Serb civilians. Biljana Plavšić thanked ‘Mr Arkan’: ‘Thank you very much for listening to me. It would have been terrible had anything happened to those people, God forbid. Thank you very much.’ They even managed to exchange a kiss. Biljana Plavšić, the Serb member of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Željko Ražnatović, the arbiter of life and death in the small town in north-eastern Bosnia. They kissed as they stepped over corpses, joking with Fikret Abdić about his liquidation and telling him that a single telephone call from Biljana Plavšić had kept him alive. In her address to the Second Congress of Serbian Intellectuals in late April 1994, Biljana Plavšić expressed admiration for Serb soldiers on the front lines, pointing to the cowardice of the men gathered at Belgrade’s Sava Centre and goading the potential warrior in each of them into action to create a Greater Serbia. She expressed the hope that the defeatism and pessimism of individuals who ‘work to lull the Serb people to sleep by telling them that the time is not yet ripe for unification, that these aspirations are still distant, that we must wait, that we must defer to someone. This may give a false impression of the wishes of the majority of the Serb people and disappoint our fighters, who willingly risk their lives to fulfil the Serbs’ age-old dream of living in one state and […] creating a democratic, progressive and united Serbian land.’
The war criminal known as Arkan did not live to see Biljana Plavšić surrender. To the court. After being allowed an idyllic family Christmas celebration, the ‘Serbian Iron Lady’ was not arrested. She was taken to a prison suite, from which she would arrive for her trial impeccably dressed. She wore a small cross around her neck. Polished, proud, arrogant, disdainful. She was the very opposite of the illiterate, uncouth, corrupt men who, like her, were on trial in The Hague for grave crimes. Persecution, extermination, killing, deportation, genocide, crimes against humanity. Journalists readily interviewed Biljana Plavšić while she was serving her sentence, and she readily shared her constructions of events with the public.
We can still only speculate about the full cruelty of Biljana Plavšić’s false admission of guilt. In her 2005 memoirs, she retracted her most significant admissions and reiterated and elaborated on the very views she had held before and during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There can therefore be no question in this case of repentance, rehabilitation or a change in political stance. This confirms that she is fully aware of everything she did during the 1990s and that she would commit those crimes again. She deceived the court with astonishing ease. Because she was a woman? Because she was elderly? Because Madeleine Albright, Carl Bildt and Elie Wiesel testified in her favour?
In her statement of repentance before the Court, she pointed to inconsistencies and departures from the supposed teachings of Saint Sava: the doctrine of the Serb as a superior being, a Übermensch, a god-man. It was precisely in the abandonment of this ideology that she saw the reasons for the defeat of Greater Serbian politics in the wars of the 1990s. Accordingly, in her ‘repentance’, she called for a return to Svetosavlje, an ideology that is, at its core, a totalitarian ideological construct fashioned on the fascist model during the 1930s. Biljana Plavšić’s deception, which generated new pressures on the ICTY and further delegitimised it – as Jelena Subotić concludes in one of her studies – embodies the horror and the full extent of the damage her trial inflicted on the process we affectionately call transitional justice. Her renewed public presentation of past events through revisionism and falsification, repeating the very ideas and lies this court was meant to combat, could not be punished again by the ICTY.
The second man in Biljana Plavšić’s life, not necessarily in this order, was Žarko Banjac. This Sarajevo lawyer’s second wife was Biljana Plavšić. They were married during the years of ‘newfound prosperity’, in the golden age of Yugoslav socialism, which Biljana Plavšić damned so vehemently throughout her life. Damn you all! Damn you! Damn everything that is yours!