New Bosnian Serb Leader a Stern, Strident Nationalist

Ines Milicic remembers the telephone conversation well. It came at the start of the Balkans war, when fierce fighting between Serbs and Croats had erupted in Croatia.

Biljana Plavsic, then a Serbian member of the collective multiethnic presidency in Bosnia-Herzegovina, called her Croatian friend with a somber warning: Go visit your son in the United States. And don’t come back, for you might be harmed.

“She said, ‘Why don’t you leave? Get out of Croatia,’ ” recalled Milicic, whose husband had been Plavsic’s academic advisor in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and longtime collaborator in the field of biology.

“I said, ‘Why should we leave? We don’t want to leave. This is where we have always lived. What are you trying to do to us?”

It was the last time Milicic heard from Plavsic, who was named de facto president of the Bosnian Serb republic this week in a deal between Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Carl Bildt, the international mediator in Bosnia.

It was also one of Plavsic’s last known acts of friendship toward a non-Serb. In the intervening five years, the botany professor-turned-politician has emerged as one of the most strident Serbian nationalists in the former Yugoslav federation, severing ties with non-Serb friends and insisting that Serbs live apart from Muslims and Croats--regardless of the human toll such a separation might entail.

“I would compare [the future of Serbs] to the life of Israelis in their state,” Plavsic said during the height of the 43-month Bosnian war. “They are doing their business with a rifle always at their side. That is our destiny.”

Early in the conflict, she reportedly sternly warned a group of grieving Serbian women, who had lost their soldier sons and husbands in the fighting, to save their tears.

“Don’t weep,” she has been quoted as saying. “This is only the beginning.”

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Although it is still uncertain whether the transfer of presidential power to Plavsic is genuine, she has come forward as the new public persona of the Bosnian Serb leadership.

It is a position she will probably hold at least through countrywide elections in Bosnia in September. A popular Karadzic ally, she has also been selected by the ruling Serbian Democratic Party as its presidential candidate in the elections, according to officials here in the Bosnian Serb headquarters near Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

The new face of the Bosnian Serbs is etched with the chronic scowl of a no-nonsense academic, who spent 14 months as a Fulbright scholar in New York in the early 1970s. After years of teaching botany at Sarajevo University--Plavsic is an expert in plant diseases--she earned a reputation as a dedicated but austere public servant.

For the self-described “iron lady” of Bosnian Serb politics, pleasantries have little meaning.

“She is as cold as hell,” said one international official who has dealt frequently with the Bosnian Serb leadership. “The others are always cordial, but she won’t even shake your hand if she doesn’t like something you said that day.”

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Plavsic fled her Sarajevo home after the war spread to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, the last Serb nationalist leader to abandon the capital. As the chaos of the war overwhelmed Sarajevo, she hastily instructed Bosnian Serb troops to hold a convoy of fleeing Muslim children as hostages until her brother and his family were safe.

Meanwhile, across town, her elderly mother made it down 17 flights of stairs only with the help of a Muslim neighbor, who carried her while Plavsic hurriedly packed suitcases for their escape. After being briefly detained, mother and daughter fled in an armored vehicle provided by French peacekeepers from the United Nations.

Once out of Sarajevo, Plavsic joined Karadzic and a handful of others as ringleaders of the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic, spending most of the war in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and the northern Bosnian Serb stronghold of Banja Luka. Although there was some conflict between her and Karadzic, particularly when she complained about his war-profiteering friends, she ultimately settled into the role of devoted deputy.

“She is a simple, loyal soldier,” said Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic, a Muslim who served with Plavsic in the collective presidency before the war. “You are looking for a person where there is no person. She does what Karadzic tells her.”

Relatively unknown in the West, Plavsic quickly developed a reputation in Bosnia and across the former Yugoslav federation.

At the start of the war, she laid a kiss on the cheek of the notorious Serb paramilitary leader Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic after his troops conducted one of the first ethnic sweeps of a Bosnian town.

She said this week that the gesture was meant as a sign of gratitude because days earlier, Raznjatovic had honored her request to release several high-level Muslim and Croatian prisoners, including a fellow member of the collective presidency.

But in an earlier explanation to a prominent Belgrade journalist, she said that she was so impressed with what she saw in Bijeljina, the “ethnically cleansed” town, that “I immediately envisioned that all of his actions are like that.”

“I always kiss the heroes,” she went on to explain.

As the war progressed, Plavsic remained an open proponent of “ethnic cleansing,” although she objects to the terminology as “having been planted” by Westerners to discredit Serbs. She said ethnic purity is a “completely natural thing,” at one point saying she would like to “cleanse eastern Bosnia” of all Muslims but realized it was not practical to leave them with nowhere to live.

One Western diplomat said Plavsic was the lead cheerleader behind the massive exodus of about 80,000 Serbs from Sarajevo in February and March, when Serb-held suburbs of the Bosnian capital were turned over to government control under the Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement.

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Throughout the war, Plavsic delivered nationalistic pep talks across the breakaway mini-state, where admiring soldiers greeted her with calls of “Empress Biljana” and “Serb Empress.”

“I don’t consider my radicalism as negative,” she once told a Serbian interviewer. “I think that the situation is extreme, that the existence of the Serbian nation in Bosnia is in question, and solutions have to be radical.”

Her popularity among soldiers has known no bounds. The Bosnian Serb army named a tank and an armored vehicle after her. She once complained to a Western official that she dreaded visiting the front line because she was always being mobbed.

Divorced after a brief marriage to a Serbian lawyer many years ago, the 66-year-old Plavsic was born in Tuzla, north of the capital, but spent most of her life in Sarajevo. Her father was a biologist and her grandfather a successful merchant. Her brother played professional soccer. She has no children.

A high school friend who went on to study with Plavsic at Zagreb University described her as pretty, intelligent and completely uninterested in politics as a young woman.

“She was serious and ambitious, and there was always some distance about her,” said Nada Mitin, who last saw Plavsic before the war. “She was a little not necessarily proud, but cold.”

Plavsic never belonged to the Communist Party, becoming active in politics only in 1990, when the party’s grip on power had loosened considerably. She won the most votes of any Serbian candidate in the 1990 election to Bosnia’s seven-member presidency, but she resigned because of the war.

Since taking over Karadzic’s presidential duties this week, she has softened some of her caustic rhetoric, apparently aware that her words are being more carefully scrutinized by international officials and that her new role is to calm the stormy seas around Karadzic, an indicted war crimes suspect who is prohibited from holding public office.

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In recent months, she has even patched up relations with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who once banned her from Serbia for refusing to cooperate with international peace efforts.

She was the first Bosnian Serb leader to publicly break with Milosevic, branding him a traitor for abandoning his quest for a Greater Serbia, a single state for all Serbs in the former Yugoslav federation.

“There are some encouraging elements to her political makeup,” said a Western diplomat in Sarajevo. “We are hoping if she were elected she would somehow evolve in a positive direction.”

But other Western officials said they doubt she is capable of such a fundamental change.

“Karadzic affects the mad professor business, whereas she seems to be the genuine article,” one official said.