Bosnian Serb Charged With War Crimes to Stand Trial

Biljana Plavsic, once Washington’s leading Serbian ally in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, will stand trial on charges of genocide and other war crimes, the U.N. tribunal in The Hague confirmed Wednesday.

Plavsic, the first woman to be indicted by the war crimes tribunal and the most senior Bosnian Serb leader to stand trial there, will plead not guilty today, her lawyer, Krstan Simic, said in The Hague.

Plavsic, 70, was a hard-line deputy to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic during Bosnia’s 3 1/2-year war and an enthusiastic supporter of the Serbs’ murderous “ethnic cleansing” of Croats and Muslims. The Bosnian Serb fighters who carried out the alleged genocide revered her so much that they named their tanks after the “Iron Lady” of the Balkans.

But Plavsic renounced extremism after the war ended in 1995, a move her critics said was a traitorous ploy to get power. In 1996, Karadzic chose her to replace him as the president of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb half of the nation.

In less than a year, Plavsic had denounced Karadzic and won open support from Washington by promising to back the re-integration of Bosnia, only to be defeated at the polls by an ultranationalist in 1998.

On Tuesday, Plavsic flew to the Netherlands on a Bosnian Serb government plane to turn herself in after receiving a summons from the tribunal. Local reports said a U.S. diplomat escorted her to Banja Luka airport, along with Republika Srpska’s caretaker prime minister, Milorad Dodik.

As a sworn enemy of Karadzic and ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, both of whom have been indicted by the tribunal, Plavsic could prove valuable to the tribunal’s effort to prosecute them and other top Serbian officials and aides who have not been publicly indicted yet.

The Bosnian Serb newspaper Nezavisne Novine, which had predicted more than a week ago that Plavsic would surrender, reported Wednesday that she took wartime documents with her.

At a joint news conference, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, and defense lawyer Simic said Plavsic went to The Hague without a plea bargain. The tribunal named her in a sealed indictment April 7.

“She is aware that this is the only place she can legally prove her innocence or her guilt, and that’s something she deeply believes in,” said Simic, who described Plavsic as a “firm, brave and determined woman, and she is feeling well, bearing in mind the situation she finds herself in.”

Del Ponte insisted that there was “no negotiation at all. The only contact was because she wanted to voluntarily surrender.”

Plavsic met Del Ponte for brief formalities before being transferred to the tribunal’s detention center at nearby Scheveningen, Reuters reported from The Hague.

She stands accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws and customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Bosnia in 1991 and 1992, Del Ponte said.

Karadzic, her former mentor, is believed to be still on the run somewhere in Bosnia or Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

The tribunal has to prove Plavsic’s “true responsibility and whether she was able to prevent the war crimes,” argued Branko Todorovic, a leading Bosnian Serb human rights activist. “People like Karadzic were not giving nationalist statements like hers. But in practice, they were doing the worst things.”

He called on the tribunal to continue going after the guilty in all three of Bosnia’s ethnic groups.

In an interview with Bosnian Serb radio, lawyer Simic described Plavsic, who studied in the U.S. as a Fulbright scholar, as a floral decoration in Karadzic’s wartime headquarters.

At the time, Plavsic was one of two deputies to Karadzic when Bosnian Serb forces were trying to carve out a separate state with a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is also wanted on war crimes charges.

She publicly called ethnic purity a “completely natural thing”--and said she would like to “cleanse eastern Bosnia” of all Muslims but suggested it wouldn’t be practical to leave them with nowhere to live.

Before Yugoslavia’s bloody disintegration, she was a biology professor at the University of Sarajevo, specializing in plant viruses.

Her virulent nationalism later rallied Bosnian Serb fighters as she denounced one peace offer after another--even railing against Milosevic in 1993 when he tried to force Bosnian Serbs to accept a U.S.-backed peace plan.

Plavsic branded him a traitor to the cause of a “Greater Serbia,” a nationalist rallying cry that Milosevic had once exploited for political gain but was forced to abandon when he signed the Dayton peace accords in 1995.

She is said to have planted a kiss on the most notorious Serbian paramilitary commander, Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic, when she visited eastern Bosnia in April 1992 as part of a delegation sent by Bosnia’s Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, to investigate the first reports of ethnic cleansing.

“I always kiss the heroes,” Plavsic explained later.

Arkan was killed a year ago in a hotel in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, after reports that he was trying to negotiate a plea bargain with The Hague tribunal. Del Ponte denied those reports.

In June 1997, Plavsic accused Karadzic and his cronies of making millions of dollars as smugglers while ordinary Bosnian Serbs slid deeper into poverty. Although Plavsic has never renounced Serbian nationalism, Washington saw her as the best hope for moderation.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made Washington’s backing clear in the middle of the 1998 election campaign by flying to Bosnia to meet with her.

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Special correspondent Zoran Cirjakovic in Sarajevo contributed to this report.