How could a university professor and internationally established scientist become a war criminal? This question prompted me to spend hundreds of hours interviewing Biljana Plavšić, now 95, at her home in Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
Plavšić, a former biologist, senior Bosnian Serb political leader and president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, is the only woman of 161 people to have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She is the first female high-ranked politician to be prosecuted for mass atrocities.
More than 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war from 1992–95. At least 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army in the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995.
