Madam War Criminal

Biljana Plavšić, Serbia's Iron Lady

A tale of violent terror and chilling unrepentance, from the only woman convicted of crimes against humanity in the Bosnian War.

A tale of violent terror and chilling unrepentance, from the only woman convicted of crimes against humanity in the Bosnian War.

Olivera Simić has written a book that refuses the comfortable distance most of us want when studying people who order ethnic cleansing. She sat across from a woman in her nineties, unrepentant and free, and let her speak. Simić lets the reader hear the cadence of her sentences, the justifications that still feel rational to her, the small, ordinary moments that somehow coexisted with mass murder. That is something rare. That is the willingness to hold complexity so tightly it bruises. Most books about war criminals are written from the outside looking in. Simić’s is written from the chair opposite the only woman convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She stayed with her long enough to observe the inner architecture of her thinking.

Biljana Plavšić remains the only woman ex-president and high-ranking politician in history convicted of crimes against humanity before international tribunals. Simić never tries to solve the mystery of how a biologist becomes a nationalist, then a convict, then a free woman again. She just presents the mystery in full, without varnish, and trusts the reader to sit in the discomfort. That takes courage. Seven years of interviews, archival documents, and court files. The ethics of bringing such a story to life are mind-boggling since Plavšić was not an outlier. She was a biologist, an academic, a dean of a university and then a political leader who participated in and justified ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. That matters. Because it disrupts the convenient narrative that violence at this scale is only carried by men, or only by those outside systems of knowledge.

Simić’s work offers the proximity—time spent with someone who embodied these contradictions. And that proximity matters, because it allows us to examine not just guilt and responsibility, but how a human being comes to align with systems capable of tearing communities and entire countries apart beyond repair.

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