Plavsic Dishes the Dirt

Anyone fascinated by the foibles of wartime Bosnian Serb politicians - including Radovan Karadzic’s habit of cleaning his ears with a pen – will struggle to put down his onetime deputy Biljana Plavsic’s recently published memoirs.

But those hoping to gain an insight into how and why Plavsic and her colleagues orchestrated a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, or are searching for a hint of regret concerning the tragic consequences, would be better off looking elsewhere.

“My Testimony”, written from the Swedish prison cell where Plavsic is serving an 11-year sentence for crimes against humanity, is a political testament of sorts. But the book, which was launched at a promotional event in Banja Luka on January 18, offers few real insights.

Analysts believe that Plavsic’s only aims in the book are to make excuses for her own role in Bosnian politics of the Nineties, dissociate herself from the all-permeating corruption that the Bosnian Serb leadership was famous for during the war, and wash away the “traitor” label that resulted from her decision to surrender to the Hague tribunal.

Plavsic became president of Republika Srpska, RS, in 1996 after former president Karadzic was forced to withdraw from public life when the Hague tribunal’s indictment against him was made public.

Karadzic, who has been on the run ever since and is one of the tribunal’s most wanted fugitives, has nevertheless managed to keep in touch with his literary agent and has published four collections of war letters and documents, a book of children’s verse and a comic play in the past decade.

In contrast with Karadzic’s literary pretensions, Plavsic limits herself in her new book to reflecting on the time she spent as a member of his Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, and as a senior figure in RS in the early Nineties.

Her role in that period earned Plavsic a tribunal indictment for genocide against the area’s Bosnian Croats and Muslims. But the most serious charges against her were dropped after she surrendered to the UN court in 2001 and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of persecution - a crime against humanity.

The only Bosnian Serb leader to admit to crimes before the tribunal, Plavsic was widely criticised by her former colleagues and amongst the Bosnian Serb public. Many thought that by acknowledging her own guilt she had exposed the whole Serbian nation to blame, and the most outspoken critics labelled her a “traitor”.

This new book gives Plavsic a chance to put her side of the story.

The first among those she turns on is Karadzic, a former psychiatrist who she claims had a poor work ethic and used to sleep all day and constantly miss the daily 11 am presidency meetings.

“I often asked myself how he could work in the [psychiatric] clinic at all,” she writes.

Besides a disquieting technique for cleaning his ears, Karadzic also apparently revolted her by biting his nails and shaking blizzards of dandruff from his famously bushy mane of hair.

“It’s inadmissible for an ordinary man to be that …oblivious of his own surroundings, never mind for a president,” Plavsic writes. “It caught many people’s attention... it could be a manifestation of some serious [mental] disturbances.”

Worse than being just physically revolting, the former Bosnian Serb leader comes across as corrupt, too.

Karadzic, she writes, was “fascinated” by people who “disobeying the law and using the war and their people’s tragedy by smuggling humanitarian aid, became millionaires within two to three months”.

Plavsic describes at length the Mercedes with built-in TV and a bar that Karadzic ordered for himself, and describes him as one of the few people during the Bosnian war who instead of losing his home, managed to actually acquire a new house in the Bosnian Serb capital, Pale – free of charge.

And having described how his daughter Sonja steamrollered her way onto a helicopter that was supposed to be used to transport the wounded, Plavsic writes, “I thought to myself, ‘What is this insanity, where did I end up, what sort of people are these around me?’”

Plavsic also claims Karadzic is a “traitor” who has been supplying falsified minutes from the Bosnian Serb presidency meetings to prosecutors in The Hague.

“[The documents] reveal a person who is in constant contact with the tribunal,” she writes. “The people should know this. Everything will be known one day and, God willing, the Serb people will then know who the real traitor is.”

Prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann flatly denied the accusation this week, saying, “We would have been happy to be in contact with Karadzic in order to arrest him.”

Dragan Jerinic, editor of the Banja Luka daily Nezavisne Novine which is publishing excerpts from the book, told IWPR that Plasvic’s work is interesting because it provides a personal perspective on Bosnian Serb politics of the Nineties.

“It sheds light on the workings of the presidency before the war... meetings, conversations, how they behaved,” he said.

Nezavisne Novine owner and director Zeljko Kopanja added that Plavsic wants to show she wasn’t entirely aware where her involvement with Karadzic’s party would lead her.

Plavsic always admitted to being a Serbian nationalist, he said, and that was clearly what attracted her to Karadzic’s politics – but she couldn’t reconcile herself with the level of corruption on which his party was based.

But other analysts told IWPR that, focusing as it does on niggling, gossipy details, the book is in fact disappointingly superficial.

“The writing is more about personal impressions and situations that, when they stand alone, do not lead to war, the planning of war operations, murder, or ethnic cleansing,” said Tanja Topic, an analyst with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Banja Luka.

She added that it was “politically naïve” of Plavsic to try to portray herself in a flattering light now, when everyone remembers her incorrigible nationalism in the Nineties.

“According to what Plavsic is writing now, she saw that [Karadzic and his cohorts] were dishonest, that they were criminals, that they were interested in money. But for years she was broadcasting their ideas and led the same policies”, Topic said.

Banja Luka publisher Trioprint has 2,500 copies ready to go on sale later this week, and company head Rajko Vasic has revealed that My Testimony is the first volume of a planned trilogy.

Bosnian Serb Helsinki Committee chief Branko Todorovic told IWPR that many more such books are inevitable, “A lot of very important political and military leaders will do the same, and the intention will definitely be to justify the severe crimes that happened.

“But we can’t forget that these people were involved in violating the rights of others, and that their crimes caused the deaths of [many].”

Beth Kampshror is an IWPR contributor based in Sarajevo. Gordana Katana also contributed to this article from Banja Luka.