Madam War Criminal

In 2001, Biljana Plavi made history. Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, she became the only female political leader ever prosecuted for mass atrocities. By the time the Tribunal closed in 2017, after 24 years in operation, she remained the only woman among the 161 people it had indicted. Charged by the Tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity, Plavi's plea bargain made her the first woman to be convicted by an international court since Nuremberg. The only comparably senior Bosnian Serb politician to be sentenced was Radovan Karadi himselfPresident to Plavi's Vice-President in Bosnia's autonomous Republika Srpska, a role she then took over after the Bosnian peace. Yet until the Yugoslav Wars erupted in 1991, Plavi had been an internationally renowned scientist and faculty dean at the University of Sarajevo, with over 100 journal articles to her name. Now in her 90s, and a free woman, Plavi is also the Tribunal's oldest convicted defendant. Olivera Simi's gripping book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with a stridently unrepentant war criminal, recorded over seven years. How did this biology professor end up running a vengeful ethno-nationalist movement that killed tens of thousands?