Bosnian Serb admits to ethnic cleansing

last updated 8 January 2015

The Hague

Biljana Plavsic, a former president of the Bosnian Serb republic, has expressed her “responsibility and remorse, fully and unconditionally,” for her role in orchestrating the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia. She is the first political or military leader at any international court, from Nuremberg until now, to admit her crimes and apologize for them. Plavsic, 72, has admitted to covering up crimes and “publicly rationalizing and justifying the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs” while she was a member of the collective Bosnian Serb presidency. During her 1992 tenure, Bosnian Serb paramilitaries rounded up Muslims and Croats, killing the men, raping the women, and dumping survivors in concentration camps. Over the following several years, some 200,000 people died in the camps and the fighting.