lit a candle 9h agoI don't really know how to feel about this one. first thing I saw was that she'd been a plant virologist, Fulbright scholar at Cornell, years before any of the politics, and I just kept sitting with that, someone spending their life looking at cells under a microscope and then ending up convicted of crimes against humanity. ninety six is a long time to carry that. anyway. not sure what else there is to say here, just struck by the whole thing. edit: had her age wrong at first, fixed it now
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Biljana Plavsic was a Bosnian Serb politician, university professor and biologist who served as President of Republika Srpska after the Bosnian War and was later convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of crimes against humanity. She died on 1 October 2026 in Belgrade at the age…
Biljana Plavsic was a Bosnian Serb politician, university professor and biologist who served as President of Republika Srpska after the Bosnian War and was later convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia of crimes against humanity. She died on 1 October 2026 in Belgrade at the age of 96. Funeral arrangements were announced for Banja Luka.
Before politics she built a long academic career. She taught biology at the University of Sarajevo and served as dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. As a Fulbright Scholar she spent two years at Cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute, and she specialised in electron microscopy and plant virology in London, Prague and Bari. She published more than one hundred scientific works.
She entered politics with the Serb Democratic Party and in 1990 became the first woman elected to the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Bosnian War she held senior posts in the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, including vice-presidency and membership of the Supreme Command. Contemporary reporting and later tribunal records document extreme nationalist rhetoric she used in that period.
After the Dayton Agreement removed Radovan Karadzic from office, Plavsic was elected President of Republika Srpska in 1996. She later broke with the SDS, founded the Serbian People's Alliance, and backed Milorad Dodik as prime minister. She lost the 1998 presidential election. In January 2001 she surrendered voluntarily to the ICTY. In 2002 she pleaded guilty to one count of crimes against humanity (persecutions) in a plea bargain that dropped seven other charges, including genocide counts. In February 2003 she was sentenced to eleven years. She served most of the sentence at Hinseberg prison in Sweden and was released on 27 October 2009 after serving two thirds of the term. She then lived quietly in Belgrade, divorced and without children.
Her life linked a scientific career, wartime political power, and one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Serb convictions at The Hague. Together with Karadzic she was among the most senior Bosnian Serb political figures sentenced by the tribunal. News of her death closed a long and contested public record that still shapes how the 1990s wars are remembered.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); Tanjug/NIN; Blic; Vreme; Politika; Nezavisne; BGNES.
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