(MENAFN- The Conversation) 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.

During the war, Plavšić defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs (chiefly Croats and Bosniaks) as“a natural phenomenon”, justifying her policies of ethnic cleansing, mostly carried out by Serb paramilitaries, with theories of ethnic and racial superiority.

Women from Srebrenica hold banners showing pictures of some of those who died in the massacre. Fehim Demir/AAP

Described by Western media as the“Serbian Iron Lady” and by Serb soldiers as a“Serb Empress”, Plavšić pleaded guilty in 2002 to a crime against humanity, persecuting non-Serbs for religious, political and racial motives. In exchange, the court dropped further charges of murder and genocide.

After serving six years of an 11-year sentence, she was released in October 2009, returning to Belgrade in a fur coat to meet her supporters.

At the time of her conviction, Plavšić had expressed remorse. This, and her acknowledgement of guilt, were celebrated as milestones for both the tribunal and the Balkans, and hailed as a step towards reconciliation.

However, two years into her prison sentence, Plavšić told a Swedish magazine she had“done nothing wrong”. In our conversations, she told me she had pleaded guilty to avoid other charges and a long trial:

Plavšić, regarded as a hero by many Serbs (she receives regular fan letters), seems unconcerned about her role in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims.“They [the tribunal] think that it is something terrible,” she told me.“I can freely say I did not pay attention to that at all. Simply, I did not care much about it [...]”

Given her subsequent lack of remorse, Plavšić's plea bargain risks making a mockery of justice. Under such a bargain, the defendant can avoid trial and bypass the rigorous examination of evidence and witness testimony. In this way, victims are denied the opportunity for their voices to be heard and acknowledged.

Biljana Plavšić with a UN guard at the start of her sentencing hearings at the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, December 2002. Fred Ernst/AFP via Getty images First meeting

I was born in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I remained until mid-1992. I watched my close, non-Serb friends leave our hometown, Banjaluka, from April 1992 due to persecution by Bosnian Serbs. My friends left some of their belongings with me, thinking, as I did, they would return in three months or so.

They never returned. At that time, I did not know what I was witnessing was, in fact, the ethnic cleansing of my city. I didn't have the language then to describe it in those terms.

I was aware of Plavšić. She was constantly in the media calling on Serbs to join the army and fight. I would find out many years later that my late aunt and uncle had befriended her after she fled Sarajevo, her hometown, and came to Banjaluka with her elderly mother in 1994. (My uncle, a doctor, had treated Plavšić's mother.) They remained close to Plavšić for the rest of their lives.

I would much prefer the Bosnian war had not happened, that I had met Plavšić merely as an iron-willed, single-minded person, perhaps ruminating on the margins at a family meal. However, her views became central to the shaping of appalling historical events. Hence it is our responsibility to try and understand how these views developed, and how they fell on so many receptive ears.

The first time I went to see Plavšić was particularly stressful. I was apprehensive and felt totally unprepared. After ten hours of speaking with her over the phone from Australia, there I was standing in front of her door in Belgrade, which had a fake surname on the buzzer.

My anxiety built until I felt it could burst out through the ceiling above me. I took a few deep breaths and knocked. As the door opened wide, I was bracing myself, my heart thumping, my palms sweating. Plavšić stood tall before me. Our eyes met. She was clearly pleased to see me.

Feeling overwhelmed, I stared at her and apprehensively muttered,“Dobro jutro (Good morning)”.

She stretched open her arms as if we had known each other for a long time, took a step back and studied me from top to bottom. A light, blue cardigan hung loosely from her shoulders. She was beaming.

We went inside. I found myself sitting, almost in a state of shock, talking to someone who was convicted for masterminding so much of the Bosnian war.

I ultimately spent hundreds of hours, across eight years, talking to Plavšić, both face-to-face and on the phone. I had to separate this process, as a legal academic, from her friendship with my late aunt and uncle.

I also gained access to Plavšić's massive private archive, which contained hundreds of letters, newspaper clippings, original wartime documents and even a handwritten set of three notebooks – diaries she wrote in prison. I had to persuade her to speak with me, and gradually build trust. She would not share anything unless she felt her words were being treated with respect.

Biljana Plavšić addresses the media as Bosnian Serb president in 1997. Radivoje Pavicic A Fulbright scholar

Plavšić, who is divorced and has no children, comes from a well-educated, urban and affluent family; her father Svetislav was a prominent biologist, a director of the natural science department at the Sarajevo Museum and custodian of its botanic collection. Her mother was a housewife.

As a child living in Yugoslavia, Plavšić was only 11 when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Her teenage years were marked by harrowing events such as her relatives being killed or deported to concentration camps by Ustaša (a Croatian fascist movement) or expelled to neighbouring Serbia.

This marked her identity and, as she would tell me many times, she entered politics to prevent the“extinction of Serb people”. Serbs were killed en masse in the World War II concentration camps together with Jews, Romany people and others. She feared, she says, this would happen again to Serbs when the Bosnian war started in the 1990s.

Before the war, she was a dean of the University of Sarajevo's science faculty, a Fulbright Scholar who spent two years in New York conducting botany research, and an author of more than 100 scientific papers.

She entered politics in 1990, as a member of the Serb Democratic Party. When Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992 – a move opposed by the party – Plavšić joined other party members in proclaiming the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. During the Bosnian war, she served as vice president under president and leader Radovan Karadzić (a convicted war criminal now serving a life sentence for crimes including genocide). From 1996 to 1998, she was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska).

Over many hours of conversation, she told me her version of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina: what led her to take part in it, why some events happened, according to her, and how.

I was hoping she would express some regret and remorse. But there was none. Indeed, Plavšić told me she had not wanted to sit through a trial to“listen to all fake witnesses and their lies”.

She has never changed her convictions.

It is human nature to want to see war criminals as“monsters”, different to us. But Plavšić is not a pathological individual. Rather, she is a highly educated and clinical ultra-nationalist who believes in the supremacy of Serbs over non-Serbs.

Ultra-nationalist Serbs consider Bosnian Muslims ethnic Serbs who converted to the Islam faith as a means of survival during the Ottoman Empire's rule. Such claims that Muslims are not a genuine nationality are deeply offensive to Bosnian Muslims who have practised Islam for centuries.

Plavšić rejects, as do many other nationalist Serbs, the legal term genocide in relation to Srebrenica massacre. She described the killings to me as a“crime” but“not genocide”.

Gravestones at the Potocari Memorial Center and Cemetery, in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Fehim Demir/AAP

At times when I confronted her with some legal facts and evidence, she would snap into a scolding-professor mode, frowning at me. One time, without skipping a beat, she snapped,“I've already told you what I think of it”. I quickly realised that no matter what I said, she will never change her convictions, and that my job was not necessarily to try to do so.

I found it hard to stomach much of what she ardently still believed, but I buried my emotions so I could wind my way through it all. It was hard to strike the balance and know how far I could go interrogating Plavšić. I regret not questioning her more, but I was nervous she would have stopped talking if I probed and poked too much.

Plavšić not only feels no guilt about her actions, but remains utterly convinced of their righteousness.“No, there is nothing to regret,” she told me in one of our last in-person meetings.“I had to protect my people.”

Her lack of remorse makes Plavšić's early release from prison all the more painful for the families of her victims.“They [the tribunal] don't think about the blood of so many of our children, whom we are still digging out of mass graves,” said Kada Hotić, a mother who spent two decades searching for a son who went missing in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Hotić lost her son, husband and two brothers in the genocide.

A warning

Plavšić's historical revisionism and staged remorse in the face of established facts is of course deeply offensive to her victims. Some may find it wrong even to give her space to express her views. Still, Plavšić's“storytelling” provides an insight into why leaders choose to commit war crimes and invite armed conflict rather than peaceful negotiation.

Over all these years of writing a book about Plavšić, based on our interviews, I have come to accept that, no matter how I wrote it, I would always be at risk of being accused of sympathising with her. There seems to be one common experience among researchers studying perpetrators: they find themselves endlessly defending their work. In some circles, including academic ones, there remains a stubborn lack of understanding as to why researchers talk to and listen to perpetrators.

Put simply, we do it to comprehend the motivations of war criminals so we can prevent mass atrocities in the future. There is no doubt genocide and crimes against humanity are morally repugnant. However, when we approach the study of those who commit such acts primarily through moral condemnation rather than analytical enquiry, we risk hindering our understanding of perpetrators and their motivations.

Perhaps Plavšić's scholarly profession is what makes many academics both uncomfortable and fascinated with her. Plavšić is a reminder that higher education does not necessarily mean one is immune to committing crimes.

Hurst

Interviewing Plavšić and writing a book about her was the hardest project I have done in my career. I am glad it is over but the politics of extreme nationalism in the region are not. Today, there is a revisionism of history and the government and political elites in the Republic of Srpska hold dearly Plavšić's views.

Plavšić's case may serve as a warning to both our present and future. She is a highly intelligent and articulate woman. She was not someone who merely followed orders, but rather someone who gave them: a high-ranking perpetrator who preached extremist views.

This makes her story especially pertinent, as we are witnessing a rise in female participation in extremist ideologies around the world, most of which reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal systems. A female populist such as Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, speaks out against“global elites”, evokes fascist rhetoric, and clings to Mussolini-era slogans such as“God, homeland, family”.

It is important to understand Plavšić's motivations also because today in the Balkans, war criminals such as General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader serving a life sentence for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, are treated as heroes.

Serbian political elites do not recognise the legitimacy of the ICTY and believe, as Plavšić does, that the court was set up“just to prosecute Serbs”. Many high-ranked war criminals returned to Serbia and were welcomed as heroes, as Plavšić was.

Towards the end of our project, Plavšić became increasingly eager to know when the book I was writing would be published and why it had taken me so long. She was disappointed and worried she would die before she could see it.“You could have written an encyclopedia by now!” she scolded me in one of our last conversations.

Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavšić, Serbia's Iron Lady by Olivera Simić is published by Hurst.

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