America’s Unlikely Champion in Bosnia

TESLIC, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Biljana Plavsic strolled into the auditorium of the Kordial Hotel and Spa, giving rise to a timid standing ovation from about 250 supporters and would-be supporters. She smiled and waved coolly as the Teslic city choir, made up of freshly scrubbed teenage boys and girls, offered a somber rendition of the Republika Srpska anthem.

“God save and defend,” they sang, “the Serbian people, the Serbian lands. All Serbs pray to you, oh God. . . .”

On this frigid autumn afternoon, Plavsic, the 67-year-old president of Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, traveled to what should have been unfriendly territory and opened the newest branch of her dissident political party. The mayor joined her, as did the hotel manager--both, until that moment, unapologetic apparatchiks in the political party of war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.

Teslic is a militant Bosnian Serb city that was expelling Muslims and Croats months after the war in Bosnia ended and where Karadzic supporters, under the direction of a rabid priest, remain in charge. But in Teslic, as in other parts of Republika Srpska, Plavsic forges ahead in her campaign to take power from Karadzic and his associates.

To the stunned disbelief of veteran Bosnia watchers, Plavsic, hawkish priestess of Serbian nationalism, has emerged as a pivotal figure in the West’s efforts to bring peaceful stability to Bosnia.

The former biology professor and specialist in plant disease toiled away as a like-minded figurehead for Karadzic before and after she was elected Republika Srpska president in September 1996.

But her anger at Karadzic’s illicit wealth, resentment at the snobbery of her male colleagues and pragmatic awareness that her substate was sinking into an abyss all prompted her to rebel.

On June 24, she turned on her predecessor and mentor, accusing Karadzic and his inner circle of making millions of dollars in a booming smuggling enterprise while the Bosnian Serb population grew poorer by the day.

Few gave Plavsic a chance of surviving such a dare. At the least, Karadzic’s cronies would marginalize her; at the extreme, she was in physical danger.

But the West saw an opportunity in the intensifying political clash and sided with Plavsic. Despite her past enthusiasm in promoting ethnic warfare and her continued belief in Serb superiority, diplomats decided to tell themselves and the world that Plavsic could be trusted to cooperate on enforcement of the Dayton peace accords.

President Clinton, at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit this summer, said that while he disagreed with Plavsic on many things, he appreciated her “stated adherence” to the peace pact.

In the months that followed her defiance of Karadzic, U.S.-led NATO forces handed her police stations and television transmitters and thwarted at least one coup attempt.

Not Yet Powerful but No Longer Powerless

Today, Plavsic, who once labeled “ethnic cleansing” a natural phenomenon and praised notorious war criminals as heroes, is not yet powerful, but she is no longer powerless.

“We are realistic,” she told the audience in Teslic, enunciating her words slowly and studiously as though she was lecturing pupils. “The international community is a reality, and we have to deal with it. Within the existing, difficult circumstances we have to find the best accommodation. In a year, in two years, you will see progress. You will live better.”

“Biljo! Biljo!” the audience chanted, using her nickname.

Plavsic, and the Western policy backing her, faces a major test this weekend when elections are held in Republika Srpska to replace the Karadzic-controlled parliament that she dissolved. It will be the first chance to formally gauge the strength of her new political party. Plavsic is looking to the vote to finally break the Karadzic grip, even though she privately concedes that her party will not win a majority.

By most accounts, Plavsic’s quest has allowed one important development: Many moderate Serbs who never dared to speak out now feel safe--encouraged, in fact--to do so.

If, however, her Western supporters expected her to fulfill Dayton pledges of surrendering suspected war criminals and bringing home minority refugees, then they must be sorely disappointed. Except for the split with Karadzic, she has not really parted from a history steeped in the intellectual and spiritual justification of violent ethnic nationalism.

Plavsic is, to say the least, an unlikely champion for democracy.

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Born July 7, 1930, into a well-to-do family, Plavsic grew up near Sarajevo, in the town of Visoko, and followed her father’s career path into biology. She spent a year in the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, capped by a two-month U.S. bus tour.

Most of her father’s family was killed in World War II concentration camps run by Ustashe, the Croatian fascists who served as puppets of the Nazi regime, and from him Plavsic received her earliest lessons in Serbian nationalism.

Attending a liberation rally in Sarajevo celebrating the end of World War II, Plavsic and her family were delighted to see for the first time the legendary Josip Broz Tito, who would form Yugoslavia as a multiethnic state. But they were appalled, she recalls, when they heard his anti-Serb sloganeering.

Plavsic’s father reacted angrily, refusing to join Tito’s Communist Party--and losing his job as a consequence. He died a broken man a few years later, paying the ultimate price for his nationalism, she says.

Aloof and formal, Plavsic taught at the University of Sarajevo and eventually became dean of the school of math and natural sciences. Her students and former colleagues remember her as a competent though not innovative teacher. In fact, her speaking style today much more resembles that of the droning professor than the exciting pulpit-thumper.

Regarded as a striking beauty in her younger years, the red-haired Plavsic was married briefly to a prominent Serb attorney. There were no children. Speculation on her love life is frequently the topic of local gossip. A few years ago, she denied that she was having an affair with Prince Tomislav, brother of Yugoslavia’s last king and her frequent companion until he left for Britain to become a farmer.

“Do you know how old I am?” she asked a Belgrade interviewer who inquired about the prince. “At my age, one does not have such interests. I merely pay respect to his ancestors.”

She made no secret of her admiration for the monarchy, a sentiment that continues today for her and many anti-Communist Serbian nationalists.

By the end of the 1980s, as Bosnia’s political elite coagulated into ethnic-based nationalist parties with the collapse of communism, Plavsic was recruited into the Sarajevo circle of Bosnian Serb academics and politicians who founded the Serbian Democratic Party.

In the critical months leading up to the war, she stumped the countryside as part of a propaganda campaign to whip up pro-Serb sentiment, laying the groundwork for fighting that would pit neighbors against each other and shred decades of relatively peaceful coexistence.

“We had to force the idea of ‘Serbianship’ to people whose heads were filled with ideas about brotherhood and unity,” Plavsic told Serbian writer Ljiljana Habjanovic-Djurovic in a 1994 biography, “Empress of a Suffering People.”

In Bosnia’s only prewar election, in 1990, Plavsic was one of two Serbs elected to the multiethnic, seven-seat presidency. From the start it was clear that she opposed the idea of Bosnia as an independent state.

Stjepan Kljujic was a Bosnian Croat member of the presidency who usually sat next to Plavsic. He said she suffered from a touch of vanity and, at the same time, an inferiority complex, because the men in the Bosnian Serb leadership were often dismissive of this woman in their midst. She put on airs, wearing big fur coats and using Croatian words to sound superior, Kljujic recalled.

“She loved to be called ‘Miss,’ which was a little ridiculous for her age,” said Kljujic, who remained loyal to the Sarajevo regime after Plavsic and the other Serbs quit and set up an alternative government in the nearby ski resort of Pale.

“Most of the others in that circle were . . . arrogant and looked down on her. Her status was inferior, but she was the only woman they had, so they dragged her everywhere. . . . She was feeling constantly neglected and unsatisfied. I think she was always waiting for her chance. Maybe now she has it.”

The Last Bosnian Serb Leader to Flee Sarajevo

Plavsic was the last Bosnian Serb leader to abandon Sarajevo as war began to engulf the country.

Bosnian Serb paramilitary gunmen laid siege to Sarajevo, encircling and shelling the capital from surrounding hills. Escaping to the Serb side by then, in April 1992, meant evading both errant Bosnian Serb sniper fire and Sarajevo’s armed Muslim gangs who terrorized and sometimes killed Serbs they considered suspicious.

Plavsic’s brother and sister-in-law were fleeing in a United Nations armored vehicle when they were detained by one gang. Plavsic secured their release by ordering Bosnian Serb gunmen to hold a convoy of fleeing Muslim children hostage, without water or food, for 24 hours.

On one of her last nights in her apartment, she heard Muslims in the hallway yelling for her to remove the Cyrillic lettering from her door. In response, she opened her door and blasted the floor with a tape of Serbian war songs.

“Then I sat with a pistol on my lap,” she told her biographer. “I was determined not to be caught alive.”

It was finally time to leave for Pale, and a Muslim neighbor helped by carrying Plavsic’s 92-year-old mother down 17 flights of stairs. Plavsic grabbed her purse and, to avoid Muslim sniper fire, ran zigzag through a no man’s land until reaching Bosnian Serb lines. A Bosnian Serb ambulance managed to pick up her mother.

During the war years that followed, while Karadzic and other Pale leaders traveled to European capitals as part of protracted and fruitless peace negotiations, Plavsic visited the trenches and rallied the troops. Negotiation, to her, was weakness; she urged rejection of every peace accord that materialized. The troops loved her, writing poems in her honor and emblazoning their tanks with her name.

Probably the most oft-recounted story about Plavsic tells of her visit to the front lines where the notorious Serb paramilitary commander Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic was viciously expelling thousands of Muslims. She saluted him with a huge kiss.

“I always kiss the heroes,” she said later.

Those who know the Balkan cast of characters point to a key difference between Plavsic and other proponents of Serbian nationalism. Where, for example, Karadzic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic--the real mastermind behind the war--used nationalism as a way to secure power, Plavsic was and is a true believer.

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The West began to woo Plavsic early this year, hinting that she would receive money and other assistance if she cooperated. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came calling June 2, planting the idea, according to Plavsic, that marginalizing Karadzic instead of arresting him would satisfy world leaders.

Days later, Plavsic struck, speaking out against a corruption that she admits she always knew about but had not acted to halt. Thus she became that familiar figure in U.S. policy, a person of unsavory viewpoints who nevertheless is the convenient tool of the moment.

“She’s a more complex animal than the primitives in Pale,” said a senior Western diplomat based until recently in Sarajevo. “She may not like Dayton, but she understands the future of the Republika Srpska has to be with the West. . . . You deal with what you have to deal with. You don’t deal with hypothetical people. And she’s the best available.”

With the corruption theme hitting a raw nerve among dispirited, unemployed Serbs, cities in northern and western Republika Srpska began to fall in behind Plavsic. But the once-prosperous factory town of Teslic is one of several strategic places where loyalties are still up for grabs.

Police in Teslic still take their orders from the Karadzic faction. A Serbian Orthodox priest, Savo Knezevic, once opened fire on a gathering of political dissidents, according to witnesses, and regularly goes on local television to urge Serbs to take up rifles and get ready to attack. As recently as a few months ago, townspeople lived in what they described as terror.

Plavsic chose Teslic, nevertheless, to establish the 23rd local branch of her new party, the National Serbian Alliance. Working-class and professional men and women threw caution to the wind and attended the rally. Young people lined the city streets afterward to get a glimpse of the president, who traveled with bodyguards and loyal police. A few U.S. soldiers and British and Polish officers from the United Nations were also visible.

A Catalyst for Change

“Things are starting to change under Madam Plavsic,” Rade Pavlovic, manager of a wood-processing factory in Teslic, said after the meeting, seated in the cafe of the Kordial hotel. “But we have to change the rest of the leadership. They are terrorists, and we have to remove the terrorists.”

Pavlovic paused to consider his words.

“I couldn’t have said that a year ago,” he said. “I would have been arrested.”

Pavlovic, a fair-haired man in his 50s, showed rare courage last year when he ignored pressure from the Pale forces and refused to fire about 110 Muslims and Croats who worked at his factory.

It is the economy now that may ultimately force him to dismiss workers. Most factories in Republika Srpska are idle or producing at a fraction of their capacity; the average income in Teslic is one-tenth what it was before the war.

“Before Biljana spoke out, you could not mention Karadzic in a negative context, or in the night you or your house would disappear,” Pavlovic continued.

“Now the economic situation is so bad people feel like they have nothing to lose. And the presence of the international community has helped people feel safer too. I think Biljana will be successful, but only with the support of the international community. Without that, she has no chance, for sure.”

There were others in Plavsic’s Teslic audience, echoing a sentiment heard elsewhere, who were disappointed at seeing the president’s new party as nothing but a repackaging of Karadzic’s SDS. Indeed, Plavsic in her stump speeches is careful to praise the SDS program, one that promotes the cause of ethnic purity, criticizing instead Serb leaders’ failure to carry it out.

In the printed program of her new party, copies of which were distributed at the Teslic rally, the first three points speak of Republika Srpska as a “state” and set forth the goal of achieving independence and sovereignty for this state--language that definitely runs counter to the vision of Bosnia sanctioned by the Dayton peace accords.

Mentions of democracy and the rule of law come in fourth.

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For the last year or so, Plavsic has made her headquarters in the northern city of Banja Luka, the largest in Bosnian Serb territory. About 40 miles northwest of Teslic, Banja Luka was purged of most of its Muslims and Croats and its mosques destroyed.

She lives modestly in a four-story renovated apartment building a few blocks from the pale yellow Austro-Hungarian presidential palace where she works and where all the wall clocks have stopped working for months, maybe years.

“I have arguments on my side, and I have a clear conscience. With this I am not scared of anything or anybody,” Plavsic said in an interview, explaining how it felt to take on the likes of Karadzic. She wore on a necklace her customary large Orthodox cross encrusted with red gemstones.

Plavsic is often called the Bosnian Serbs’ Iron Lady for her tough veneer and haughtiness. She sometimes exudes an unrealistic optimism about her ability to achieve certain things, and over the months she has grown increasingly confident and relaxed in her newfound position. A decision to meet Milosevic--with whom she has long shared mutual disdain--in Belgrade in October surprised Plavsic’s Western backers. And it ultimately showed her to be just as cynical as the Bosnian Serb politicians whom she attacks: She signed an agreement to hold presidential elections that she clearly had no intention of heeding.

“She is acting more and more on her own instincts and ideas,” a senior Western diplomat said. “That’s good and bad.”

This is a typical week for Plavsic in Banja Luka: A steady parade of Western diplomats, foreign dignitaries, church patriarchs and NATO commanders roars up in fancy cars to the presidential building, passing an unusually polite contingent of elite police for seemingly endless meetings with the president. The U.S. ambassador says he sees her weekly. The British foreign secretary comes calling, as do any of several Clinton administration envoys.

The meetings are important to bolstering Plavsic’s status, credibility and legitimacy. And often the visitors bring promises of the money she desperately needs.

Plavsic has surrounded herself with a small circle of advisors, including a couple of equally strident nationalists: a Serb from that American-Serb stronghold, Chicago, and respected economist Rajko Tomas.

Tackling the Problems One at a Time

Seated in his office down the hall from Plavsic, Tomas told an arriving visitor to keep her coat on. His government, he explained, could not afford to heat much of the presidential headquarters.

Therein lies one of the most serious immediate problems facing Plavsic. Most tax revenue and utilities fees from Banja Luka are remitted to Pale, which in turn controls the purse strings on a wide range of government expenses, including salaries.

Pale is paying the miserly wages, with delay, of teachers and hospital workers. But not, significantly, of police. Plavsic’s people recently had to beg restaurants for potatoes to feed cadets at the Banja Luka police academy.

Long electrical outages are a daily event. Unpaid air traffic controllers went on strike last month, on almost the same day Western officials were announcing the long-awaited reopening of the Banja Luka airport. Throughout the city, people are hoarding wood for the winter.

“I don’t know when the people of Banja Luka will have heating,” Tomas said. “We are solving one problem at a time.”

No one believes that Plavsic has changed fundamentally from her basic philosophy of chauvinism. She is seen as pragmatic and probably more politically savvy than generally given credit for.

International officials based in Bosnia doubt that she will come through with the central, complex elements of the Dayton accords, such as the return of expelled non-Serbs or surrender of indicted war crimes suspects. Case in point: Her dispute with Karadzic has nothing to do with allegations that he directed genocide against Muslim populations.

A small number of Croats and Muslims have returned to Banja Luka in recent months, emboldened by the presence of international peacekeepers and the West’s partnership with Plavsic.

Anton Kasipovic is a Croat who remained in the city throughout the war and managed to keep his job as marketing director of the Bosnian Serb newspaper, Glas Srpski, or Serbian Voice. He suffered the discrimination and ethnic opprobrium that were typical of the day, learning simply to keep a low profile. Now he is nearly buoyant at what he sees as the new climate in Banja Luka.

“I feel as though I have been cured of leprosy,” he said. “For the last six years I had the signs of this terrible disease. It drove people away from me. Now the signs of this terrible disease are gone.”

He was seated in his second-floor office, where he was planning a trade fair for the end of this month, in which 100 largely Muslim companies from Sarajevo will appear in Banja Luka to drum up business. Such an exchange was unthinkable just a few months ago, he said.

Another Croat in Banja Luka, Roman Catholic priest Pero Ivan Grgic, is less optimistic.

Though born in the Bosnian city of Orasje, and having lived in Banja Luka for the last five years, Grgic is still barred by local authorities from registering as a legal resident. He, therefore, cannot vote, obtain a driver’s license or live as anything but a second-class citizen. Grgic said Plavsic, in a meeting with senior Roman Catholic officials, gave little cause to hope for more than token returns of expelled Muslims and Croats.

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Anton Josipovic, also a Croat, would have even less cause for hope. A boxing champion who won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Josipovic returned to his Banja Luka hometown earlier this month for the first time since war forced him into exile. He was promptly gunned down and seriously wounded--allegedly by a former police officer from the Karadzic faction.

A European ambassador, in one of his regular meetings with Plavsic, urged her to make an important gesture of reconciliation: Build a mosque, he told her.

She recoiled physically at the suggestion, sitting back in her chair and drawing long and hard on her cigarette, the ambassador recalled. We’ll talk about such things later, she told the ambassador. Maybe after the elections.

Perica Vucinic is a Serb who edits Banja Luka’s new, fiercely independent newspaper, the Reporter--another product of glasnost under Plavsic.

Like many moderate Serbs, Vucinic credits Plavsic but says she has too much wartime nationalistic baggage to last. He predicts that she will be “our Noriega”--like the Panamanian strongman, sustained by the U.S. and its allies until no longer useful.

“For now, she is the protector of Serb interests,” he said. “But I do not really think she is the future of Republika Srpska. She is a short-term solution.”

Her principal enemy, Momcilo Krajisnik, a Karadzic proxy and his alleged smuggling partner, rails against her at rallies and did so on television, until NATO pulled the plug.

Outlook on Future of Republika Srpska

“Biljana Plavsic’s lack of firmness, her empty radicalism and her enthusiasm for foreigners have done a terrible disservice to the Republika Srpska,” Krajisnik, who is the Serb member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency, told a Belgrade magazine this month. “I must say I pity Mrs. Plavsic. . . . She is now in the clutches of masters both foreign and domestic.”

Plavsic waves a dismissive hand at the men scheming against her.

“We survive, fortunately, because the United States, for its own prestige, is interested in the survival of Dayton, and therefore Republika Srpska is a priority,” she said.

“But if the international community gives up on us, they will do the thing that is most simple for them and most fatal for us. They will simply submerge us in some kind of unified Bosnia-Herzegovina. To avoid that catastrophe, I will use all means available to me.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BACKGROUND

The war in Bosnia began in April 1992, when Bosnian Serbs, backed by the Yugoslav army, rebelled against Bosnia’s Muslim-led push for independence from a crumbling Yugoslavia. In what became Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, an estimated 250,000 people were killed or are missing, and more than 2 million people were displaced. Atrocities were committed on all sides, but Muslims suffered the greatest losses. On Nov. 21, 1995, after arduous negotiations steered by the United States, the warring Muslim, Serbian and Croatian leaders meeting in Dayton, Ohio, initialed peace accords that ended the war formally on Dec. 14. The Dayton agreement ushered in more than 60,000 NATO-led peacekeeping troops embarking on the Atlantic alliance’s most ambitious mission. Warring armies returned to their barracks, but other elements of the Dayton accords have yet to be fulfilled: Most alleged war criminals indicted by an international tribunal remain at large; 400,000 Bosnian refugees have gone home, but very few have been able to return to towns where they are now in the minority; joint governing institutions designed to re-integrate the nation are not functioning; essential police reform is far behind schedule.