THE HAGUE: The war in Bosnia turned a biology professor in Sarajevo into a war criminal. Eve-Ann Prestice in Belgrade profiles Biljana Plavsic
Biljana Plavsic is widely known in the Balkans as the woman who refused to shake the hand of Mr Slobodan Milosevic when he visited the Bosnian Serb stronghold at Pale towards the end of the war there in the mid-1990s.
The former Yugoslav president, currently defending himself against war crimes charges in The Hague, must today be wondering whether the woman who showed him such hostility will go on to testify against him now she has pleaded guilty to charges of persecution. Many here believe that she cannot but be tempted to spill the beans about his role in the Bosnian conflict.
If she does speak out against Mr Milosevic, it will be against a background of deep animosity between Plavsic and the communists, who dominated Serbian politics in the 1990s.
In the topsy-turvy world of Balkan plots and counter-plots, all was not what it seemed to the outside world at the time of the Bosnian war, when all Serbs were generally believed to be united in their fight against Muslims and Croats.
Plavsic, now 72, was a biology professor from Sarajevo University, and came from an old Orthodox Bosnian family which detested communism. Yet Serbs from all backgrounds were thrown together when they found themselves increasingly isolated and shunned by the rest of the world as the Balkan wars in Croatia and then Bosnia marked the break-up of Tito's old Yugoslavia.
Plavsic, who never married, found herself in the limelight when she was effectively sponsored by the former US secretary of state, Ms Madelaine Albright, as the choice to lead the presidency of the Bosnian Serbs after the Dayton agreement ended the conflict. She replaced Dr Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader now on the run from Hague prosecutors.
During the conflict, Plavsic and Dr Karadzic presented a united front to the world as two key leaders of the Bosnian Serbs, and they both felt betrayed when Mr Milosevic imposed a hard-hitting embargo on the Serbs of Bosnia in an attempt to hasten progress towards the Dayton agreement. At the time, Mr Milosevic was being hailed by the US as a Balkan peacemaker.
But all was never really well between Plavsic and Dr Karadzic, not least because Dr Karadzic's wife, Liljana, and daughter, Sonija, constantly vilified her.
One of Plavsic's toughest times came when she was likened to the Nazi Josef Mengele for reportedly proclaiming that it did not matter if six million Serbs perished, because there would still be another six million left. The quote was widely reported by members of Mr Milosevic's Socialist Party, and was a deliberate misrepresentation of what she had said, according to sources close to Plavsic who were then present.
"What she really said and meant was that life was not worth living for the Serbs during the war and, if half of them - meaning the nationalists - had to die before life improved, then at least the survivors would benefit," said a former close associate yesterday.
Plavsic also tried to curb the battlefield excesses of warlords like former Bosnian warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan and who was gunned down by assassins in Belgrade in 2000.
"During the Bosnian war she was known as someone who tried to stop the worst, and she was known as someone who was a most vigorous opponent of Milosevic," said Mr Stevan Niksic, a senior commentator for the independent Belgrade magazine Nin yesterday.
Plavsic, who now faces a possible sentence of life imprisonment, has been living quietly with as brother at a modest apartment in central Belgrade since surrendering to the Hague tribunal in January last year.