The thoughts of former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic can only be guessed at while she listened yesterday to former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speaking on her behalf at The Hague Tribunal.
Plavsic, who has pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity had, when she was deputy to Serbian President Radovan Karadzic, shown no mercy or concern for the plight of the Bosnians and Croats who were being butchered by her regime. Yet here was a former adversary from the US, stating in mitigation, that Plavsic had at least possessed the political courage to push through the terms of the Dayton Agreement, which finally led to an end of the blood-letting. She had been indicted for the more serious crime of genocide, which charge had been reduced because of plea bargaining. As her trial draws to a close and sentencing approaches, UN prosecutors will still be exploring using her as a prosecution witness against Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of Serbia’s genocidal policies.
There will, however, be outrage, and understandably so, if this 72-year-old Serbian nationalist’s punishment is slight. She faces a maximum of a life sentence. Some reasonable time in prison, over and above the period she has been held during her trial, is important. Commuting any sentence will make a mockery, not just of the UN war crimes process, but also of all those in Bosnia who grieve for the thousands of lives that her actions destroyed. However, the prize of convicting Milosevic could prove too overwhelming and it may already be that a deal has already been struck. Thus the appearance of someone as high-level as Albright as part of her mitigation plea.
It is already to Plavsic’s credit that she has not used the scoundrels’ defense of Nazis after World War II, that they were only carrying out orders and were powerless to change the wicked policies upon which their government was embarked. She has admitted that she was an active member of the Bosnian Serb government and she has said, with apparent conviction, that she now sees that what she did was utterly wrong.
Any leader confessing to crimes and showing remorse is also having an effect upon the nameless thousands who shared and supported the regime’s policies. Some Bosnian Serbs, for sure, see Plavsic as a traitor, who, when she became president, sold out their cause. But for the majority of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia, and maybe for many other Serbs, their tacit support for the disastrous and wicked policies that filtered down from Belgrade is now a matter of shame. Plavsic’s confession and remorse can thus express their own feelings.
There is unfinished business for the Hague tribunal, not least the capture and trial of Karadzic and others of his group. There is also unfinished business for the ordinary people of the former states of Yugoslavia. Reconciliation is their only way forward. In acknowledging and regretting the awful truth of what happened, Serbs everywhere are taking the first steps towards that healing. Their victims will find forgiveness very hard indeed, but all the communities have to learn to live together again and slowly rebuild the relations that were shattered so horrifically when in 1992 Bosnian Serb guns opened up for the first time on Sarajevo.
