Global Policy Forum

By Marlise Simons

Biljana Plavsic, the former president of Bosnia and the only woman among more than 80 people indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, was sentenced to 11 years in prison yesterday for persecution, a crime against humanity.

"No sentence which the trial chamber passes can fully reflect the horror of what occurred or the terrible impact on thousands of victims," said Judge Richard May, speaking from the high dais in the courtroom of the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mrs. Plavsic, 72, who had acknowledged guilt and had shown remorse for her role in Bosnia's 1992-95 ethnic war, stood silently, as if frozen, while receiving her sentence. The judge said Mrs. Plavsic had not conceived or planned the violent Serbian campaign of ethnic separation that killed tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats and expelled many more from their lands with "great brutality," but that she embraced, supported and contributed to it. "This is a crime of utmost gravity," he said.

But the three-judge panel had decided on a reduced sentence, he said, because Mrs. Plavsic had voluntarily come to the tribunal, pleaded guilty and expressed remorse. They also took into account her age and her postwar actions, when she played a crucial role in carrying out the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

The sentence was immediately criticized by victims of the war and by some human rights groups as being too lenient. But others said the major issue in Mrs. Plavsic's confession and guilty plea was that they would make denials by other Serbian leaders much more difficult.

"In a region where denial and revisionism are central and where the tribunal is seen with skepticism, Mrs. Plavsic's gesture is striking," Alex Boraine, a member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told the court earlier.

That gesture continues to go unmatched. In the same courtroom used for the sentencing yesterday, Slobodan Milosevic, widely held to be the instigator of the war, continues almost daily to deny any responsibility for the genocide and war crimes for which he is on trial.

On Wednesday, one of Serbia's most hard-line nationalists, Vojislav Seselj, appeared in the same court for the first time after getting a hero's sendoff in Belgrade. He was going to the tribunal, he told reporters, not to be tried for war crimes but to defend his 10,000 Serbian fighters — a band of volunteers with a reputation for cruelty. He intended "to destroy the evil tribunal, an American instrument against the Serbs."

Mrs. Plavsic changed her plea to guilty in October, almost two years after surrendering to the court. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the genocide charge against her, the gravest accusation she faced. Although prosecutors had asked for a sentence no less than 15 years, a spokesman said yesterday that they would not appeal.

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