Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

Olivera Simic: 0:00  She always looked to me very scary. She was always very strong-willed, strong-minded, and all these stories around her were really, you know, and the rhetoric and what she was saying in her talks was just shocking. So, I just couldn’t imagine myself and maybe justify to myself how I’m going to sit and talk to her and what I am going to talk to her about.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Narrator: 0:37  This is Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg.

Stephanie: 0:45  All rise. Hi, Janet.

Janet: 0:47  Hi, Steph.

Stephanie: 0:48  So, I’m really excited about this episode. We’re back in the former Yugoslavia and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and we have as a guest, Olivera Simic, who’s a professor at Griffith Law School in Brisbane, Australia. Hi, Olivera.

Olivera Simic: 1:05  Hello. Hi.

Janet: 1:07  So, Olivera, you’re with us because you’ve written a book about the former Bosnian Serb president, Biljana Plavsic, who was the only woman to be convicted by the ICTY and also the only former high-ranking Bosnian Serb politician to plead guilty.

Stephanie: 1:26  Yeah, Plavsic served her time in a Swedish prison and was later released to Serbia, where she moved into my Belgrade neighbourhood of Vračar when I was living there, and I also heard that she shopped at the local Kalenić market, and I always wondered what I would do if I ran into her, but I never did.

Janet: 1:43  I need more of a Stephapedia here about Plavsic herself to understand what we’re talking about.

Stephanie: 1:49  Plavsic, she is a former biology professor. She was an ultra-nationalist who turned to politics. She was known for visiting the front and also famously having some pretty eugenic views about Bosnian Muslims as inferior. Of course, we are talking here about the war in Bosnia, which ran from 1992 to 1995. Most people will know the siege of Sarajevo and, of course, the Srebrenica genocide. Plavsic was part of the presidency or the leadership of the Bosnian Serb Breakaway Republic, Republika Srpska, and after the war was over, she was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Janet: 2:32  But what for? I mean, you say she went to the front, but presumably she wasn’t the one with the gun, so what exactly was she held responsible for?

Stephanie: 2:40  She wasn’t the one with the gun, but she was the one kind of supporting the soldiers and embracing the soldiers. She was charged with a lot of things, including genocide counts, but eventually she pled guilty to one count of persecution of Bosnian Muslims. She served her time, but she returned to the former Yugoslavia fairly unrepentant.

Janet: 3:01  I know that we could sort of cover more about exactly what she did, where and when, but maybe apart from the book, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, Olivera, we can focus on her relationship with the ICTY, because that’s pretty interesting to plead guilty and then to go away. Just remind us, Steph, what is the book actually called? And tell us a bit more about it, because you’ve read it.

Stephanie: 3:25  The book is Madam War Criminal. I read it with gusto. I really enjoyed it.

What really spoke through this book is that this is also your lived reality of the Balkans and Bosnia. But maybe you want to explain your connection to Plavsic.

Olivera Simic: 3:43  So I was born in the former Yugoslavia. I was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina and grew up there, and I spent time in the first year of the war in Bosnia. I really witnessed as my best friends, non-Serb friends, had to leave my hometown Banja Luka overnight, starting in April, May 1992 and onwards. And this was time when they would leave, they would leave some of their artifacts and souvenirs with me, thinking that, like I thought at that time, that they would all return in three months or so, because that’s what we thought that war would last that much, or, you know, we didn’t really have an understanding of what war meant. But we thought if something happens, that would be over pretty soon. No one really believed at that time, and I’m sure you all heard that from other people from former Yugoslavia, that we will go into full-scale war, that it was possible at that time. These friends never returned. And at that time, I didn’t know that what I was witnessing was in fact the ethnic cleansing of my city. I didn’t have the words, the terminology to describe those events in 1992. I was 19 years old at that time.

I was about to also to go to study in Sarajevo when war started, and because war started, I had to stay in my hometown in Banja Luka. My 22-year-old brother was drafted into the Serb army, since our parents are Serbs. So I was also about to be drafted into what was called back then territorial defense. So together with my father, I went into local council to pick up uniform and boots. And this is a less known story. I think there are a lot of stories still to be uncovered about women’s participation in war, not just as a combatant, but also in these other roles. And we don’t know much about it. And I know people are often surprised when I say that I was also, I received uniform and boots, and I was about to go to that territorial defense unit. I never went because my parents just freaked out, and they sent me on the first bus outside of the country. 

So I ended up being in Serbia, in south of Serbia, in Niš, and was there more or less throughout the war. I would just occasionally come back to my hometown to visit my parents. At that time, of course, Plavšić, I knew who Plavšić was, as we all knew, because we would see her on TV screens, inviting Serb men to go and fight for the Serb cause. But I didn’t know at that time that she befriended my late aunt and uncle. And they became kind of friends in 1994, when Biljana Plavšić came with her 94-year-old mother in Banja Luka, and my uncle was a doctor who treated her mother. So that’s how that friendship started. And they were very close friends throughout the war. 

After the war, when Biljana was convicted, they would talk to each other over the phone, when she was in jail, and so forth. So I knew some of this stuff, but I didn’t know that many details about this. And I didn’t want to know, I have to say this. I was not ready to listen to these nice stories, I guess, about Biljana Plavšić, because Biljana Plavšić was, from my teenager perspective, together with all other warlords, responsible for making a chaos of my life and the life of my friends, because life would never be the same again. So I would learn more about this relationship between my late aunt and uncle, and Biljana Plavšić, when I expressed my interest to talk to her, which was only in 2017, when my colleague and friend, Professor Barbora Hola and I decided to do a special issue on the ICTY of war criminals as celebrities. And I told Barbora that, I just told her kind of, look, my aunt knows Biljana Plavšić, what do you think? And she was like, what? Of course, you should do something about it. But I really struggled to make that decision, because I was just nervous of thinking, what am I going to do with Biljana Plavšić? Do I really want to sit and talk to her? And obviously, I didn’t use that opportunity for, you know, how many years that I knew about this friendship. But, you know, I started to think about it, that maybe I could, you know, sit and do an interview with her, maybe just two hours for the purpose of writing that article for our special issue. And then that’s how it all started. I called my aunt and I said, what do you think, whether Biljana Plavšić would like to talk to me?

Janet: 8:49  I really enjoy hearing, you know, how you got there. I can only imagine how difficult it was to make that decision. But I wonder, because you’ve written previously about, I would say there’s a feminist streak in the different books that you’ve written. And, you know, you very clearly look at some of the different roles that women have in war. I wonder if it was her femaleness as such, because she’s one of those rare, relatively rare female perpetrators. Was that also what made you say, okay, I really need to look at her?

Olivera Simic: 9:25  Yeah, I mean, definitely as a feminist, I’m interested in all sorts of women’s experiences with war. And I wrote a lot about, particularly about women survivors of war crimes in Bosnia war, but I never interviewed women as a perpetrator. So I did some research, but it was a desk research that didn’t involve really talking to women perpetrators or male perpetrators. So definitely that was an interesting aspect to maybe look whether there is some gender perspective and how she, as a woman, operated in that circle with these male warlords.

But there are other aspects at all that are, of course, fascinating that she was the first woman, highest ranking, you know, ex-president of the country, prosecuted, the oldest detainee in the ICTY, the only woman prosecuted by the ICTY. So there are a lot of these first, first, and then of course she was a female, but she also had this nickname, Iron Lady. So she always looked to me very scary. She was always very strong-willed, strong-minded, and all these stories around her were really, you know, and the rhetoric and what she was saying in her talks was just shocking. So I just couldn’t imagine myself and maybe justify to myself how I’m going to sit and talk to her and what I am going to talk to her about. 

So I decided to talk to her about after release. So how was her time after she was once released from the jail and, you know, came back, returned to Belgrade. So that was the focus of this two hours interview. But then after two hours, I called her again because I asked my aunt, can I call her again? And again, she said, yes. And then after I think six hours of us talking over phone, me from Australia calling, she said, why don’t you come to Belgrade? And that’s how it started. So that was the first time I went there because she said, I want to show you documents, artifacts and other stuff. But it was a difficult decision. Yeah, because I’m not trained. I mean, you are not really trained to interview victims as well or survivors, but she was to be my first perpetrator to be interviewed.

Stephanie: 11:36  A lot of the book is also a bit about your struggle on whether you should interview her. And in your introduction, you come down to kind of deciding that by dehumanizing war criminals and not trying to tell their story and their personality, you put them in the same categorizing process that helped them commit the crime, because we see them the same way they saw their victims as less than human or only evil and monsters. Now that this book is about to come out, you also maybe get some pushback from other historians about interviewing perpetrators. How do you feel now that it’s all finished?

Olivera Simic: 12:18  I have been very anxious all the time of writing this book. It has been in making for eight years, but for many reasons. So as I write, and I decided to write that epilogue very late. So the last chapter in that book about pressure that I felt during the writing from left, right and center. Female academics would ask me, why do you write about woman perpetrator? Why would you give her a mic? Then I got from Serbs, she’s not a war criminal, but she is a president. And then, you know, I was also warned by a few researchers of Bosnian ethnicity. I’ve been told, like, don’t be like another Serb apologist or something. 

So it was a lot of pressure how to write this book. And to be honest, I didn’t know, I didn’t have a real plan, what I’m going to write, how am I going to write. It’s just that I, after so many hours, had so much material, as I said, I have to make something, of course, bigger than just one journal article, right? I decided to talk to a lot of my colleagues who are researching perpetrators and, you know, how to do this in methodological way and ethical. So because I’m insider, I’m also part of the Serb community, I have these family connections. And I do, as a feminist, always position myself, and I wanted to be honest and upfront about how did I meet her? Because of course, when I did talks before the book was published, people would ask me, oh, how did you get to Plavsic? Like, you know, no researcher could get to her. And then I just, you know, said and explained. So I didn’t get any pushback so far. 

And I really don’t know, I’m waiting to see what are going to be reactions. I think it’s quite still early, so far so good. But I embraced myself to, yeah, maybe get these questions that they’re right, you know, why would you give Plavsic a mic? Why would she say all these things? It’s, you know, revisionism of history. But what I tried to do is after she would say something, I tried to say what she forgot to say, or this is not really what the ICTY said. So that was my intervention in some of her representations of what has happened. I tried to do that in that way rather than—yes, another favorite question that I would get, why didn’t you confront her? I said, you can’t just confront her and say, you know, you are not telling really truth or whatever. I mean, I tried two times, but that didn’t work. And I just let it go. Because I had to decide what I want to do, whether I want to get the most out of these interviews and her thinking, or I’m just going to try to contradict her, because I could, you know, after each sentence, contradict and try to convince her in something else. And I really gave up and said, no, I’m not going to change someone who is 85 or 90 and try to convince her in something what I think.

Janet: 15:19  I want to ask you a bit about how she still addresses her relationship with the tribunal itself. Because it’s fascinating to me that she went to the tribunal. I mean, she pled guilty, but she sees this tribunal as an illegal one. She said it didn’t have the right to prosecute Serbs, that it had no legal basis. It’s quite a complex relationship. Or would you say it’s quite simple, Olivera, that she just did not respect it and she just went there in order to… Why did she go there? Why did she plead guilty if she didn’t respect it?

Olivera Simic: 15:57  I have an explanation, I think. Well, at first, it’s not that unusual to claim that ICTY was illegitimate institution, first. And as you know probably that her views, I guess, reflect those of the majority of Serbs. So she’s basically articulating what many Serbs in the region think. So she spent a lot of energy telling me that the tribunal was set up to prosecute only Serbs since the vast majority of convicted defendants were Serbs. She, of course, knows that not only Serbs were prosecuted, as she shared with me. I have a whole chapter on her time in jail. But I can explain why she still thinks that these other judgments against non-Serbs are irrelevant. 

So you’re asking why she showed remorse. She’s very blunt about it, as she was with the Swedish magazine for the first time. She said she wanted to avoid the trial. She wanted to avoid masses of fake witnesses and with their fake stories. These are her words. So that was the reason why she decided to plead guilty, because she said, I was of considerable age and I couldn’t allow myself to go that long kind of in prison. So what happened? She withdrew that apology or remorse very soon, as we know, I think two years after, in her jail time. I think she didn’t tell me that, but I think she was, as you probably know, so much attacked by Serbs that she is a traitor, right. 

And there is a truth to that, because if you look, people who apologized, like Milan Babić, he committed suicide or they were completely ostracized from their communities. So I think that once she realized that this didn’t really go well with the Serb community and that she, from some kind of hero, suddenly became a traitor and that even some of her friends were telling me she should never have done that. So it’s something unforgivable. She decided to reverse that story and come up and say, no, actually, I don’t have remorse. And I think in this book, what she says at the end in particular, that she will never have remorse, doesn’t have remorse, but it’s actually that she wants to go down in history as a Serb who is not remorseful, but proud of her nation. And she wants to be remembered like that. So she would, I think, rather forget that little episode about her remorse and apology.

But I think it may be, look, this is my side, it may be because she also got very harsh criticism from her own community for apologizing. I don’t know, you remember Radislav Krstić, who sent this letter in detention to apologize to the victims in Srebrenica. You know, what kind of comments Vojislav Šešelj and others gave him? Vojislav Šešelj said he should kill himself and never return to Serbia because he apologized. And I can go on and on and on with examples of people who apologized and really were being completely ostracized from their own communities.

Stephanie: 19:05  So I know all these names, but I know our listeners don’t. So Radislav Krstić is the Bosnian Serb general who was convicted of genocide for Srebrenica, the first genocide conviction in post-war Europe. And Vojislav Šešelj is an ultra-nationalist Serb politician who was also prosecuted by the tribunal and convicted for kind of minor charges. I wanted to say, I thought it was kind of funny to read how much resistance there was to that guilty plea of Plavsic, because I remember covering it at the time, and it was one of those not really guilty, guilty pleas. It was kind of this, “I’m sorry that you felt this way” apology. She said she did it all for her country. She did what she thought was right at the time, but kind of people got hurt in the process. Covering it, it read as a kind of, I’m making this apology because this is part of the plea agreement and not, I feel sincere remorse. To me, it read very much as this is a political calculation of getting a lower sentence. And there are other guilty pleas. For example, two of the Srebrenica military commanders pled guilty. And one of them, Obrenović, I think, who is very evocative about, “we used to drink coffee together with my neighbors, and in this world of war, everything went wrong.”

Olivera Simic: 20:26  No, it’s just to implicate Serbs in any sort of crime. So, of course, it doesn’t seem sincere. And if you look at the text, she got harsh criticism from Bosnian community as well. They were so disappointed. But just for saying that she kind of apologized and she thought that was not right, that was enough for Serbs, because you can’t admit anything. So it doesn’t matter the way you say, but she said she had the word, I think, apology there and kind of remorse and that she feels sorry for all victims. So that’s no, no. And I think that was enough to accuse her of being a traitor. And Serbs definitely interpreted, I know it’s not sincere or whatever, but they interpreted that as admission of guilt of Serbs as a nation, right? Because as you know, these people unfortunately did not represent themselves, but all ethnic group or nation. I just want quickly to say why she, or the majority of Serbs as well, would say ICTY only convicted Serbs, because what she said, and I realize I may not write about this, I didn’t write maybe this particular thing, is that she would say that, of course, Croats and Bosniaks were also prosecuted, but she said the crimes these ones committed and prosecuted for, I quote, were not against Serbs, but against Croats and Bosniaks. So they were accused only of, you know, kind of killing each other, but not of killing Serbs. So Serbs usually say, like, there is only one judgment there that is really a Serb judgment, is the Čelebići case, yeah, where Serbs are victims. So this is how she and other nationalists are, you know, this is why they say only, you know, so they dismiss these others because these are not Serb victims who are Serbs.

Janet: 22:17  It does sound that she has not lost at all any of her ultra-nationalist perspective, perspectives on ethnic identity, what she felt about the ethnic cleansing at the time, that it was kind of necessary in some form. I mean, she just completely thought that, still thinks that, and has no apology for any of that.

Olivera Simic: 22:45  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, she said many times. So the same what she said in ’92, she said to me, and I have this quote in 1993, that she said in 2023, that ethnic cleansing is something really normal. I think she really honestly thinks that. She just can’t, she said, I can’t understand why is this not something normal, like, we just, like when it’s war, people just, you know, they move, they’re displaced, and they have to go like “I left Sarajevo. And that’s how it is. So I moved with the Serbs, and everyone moves with their own group.” So that’s how she justified that. So that also tells you what she said in that, let’s call it apology or remorse statement in the ICTY. She didn’t really honestly think that because she obviously thinks still that that is alright to be persecuted and, you know, displaced forcefully from your own city, because this is how you establish control and power. You can’t establish that in the mixed community.

So she definitely still thinks that ethnically homogeneous entity is the right thing, that Serbs now have their own state. And there has been also, of course, removal of Serb population from other territories as well. So in 1993, that happened to a lot of Serbs from other places came also to live in Banja Luka. So for example, my hometown completely demographically changed because these people came from Zenica, Tuzla, and other territories that were not under Serb control. But I think one unfortunate thing is really that that whole project has succeeded, right? Because now you have these ethnically pure lands in Republika Srpska. More than 85 or 90 percent of residents are Serbs. And also in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, you now have again, I don’t know, 70 percent of Bosniaks and 22 percent of Croats and then maybe 3 percent of Serbs. So that’s what happened back then is just cemented with the Dayton Peace Agreement. And this year is also 30 years of the Dayton Peace Agreement. And it just stayed as it was. So the lines were drawn and people stayed in these territories. Very few people returned simply because they don’t feel comfortable and there is still a lot of discrimination. And really, I can’t imagine any non-Serb feeling comfortable living in Banja Luka.

Stephanie: 25:23  You talk now about the kind of ethnically pure statelets and how ethnic cleansing is still operating in Bosnia. One of the things that the tribunal aspired was to have this justice and reconciliation. And in the book, you quote Plavsic saying that the Hague Tribunal produced ten times more hatred among Muslims, Croats and Serbs than there was before and that they failed to achieve this key goal of reconciliation. Do you think Plavsic is kind of emblematic of international justice failing in the Balkans or is her view of the tribunal too harsh?

Olivera Simic: 26:01  I think there’s a lot to say about it. I think that what’s very common to people in the Balkans is to deflect responsibility always to someone else. There is always someone else, you know, guilty for our failures. There is very little local ownership and accountability for the things that have happened, for example, in the last 30 years after the Dayton Peace Agreement. I don’t think it would be fair to say that international justice, it depends how we define success, to say that it failed. But looking at the region today, it’s really hard to celebrate the situation there or really be overly optimistic. But there is no doubt that the ICTY delivered landmark judgments and gave voice to victims, recorded experiences and promoted fair and impartial standards of judicial proceedings internationally. 

However, the ICTY has not been able to foster reconciliation. And I think, as I said, was that really the key goal? I don’t think it was the key goal. The key goal was to establish the truth, the evidence and bring some justice to victims. Reconciliation is a higher goal and the ethnic divisions in the region remain. And they did deepen right after the war, everywhere in the former Yugoslavia. So it did not succeed in bringing reconciliation among the people in the former Yugoslavia. But it did succeed, I think, in establishing a truth that is accepted universally, but not maybe in the universe of Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, because these governments do pick and choose and select judgments that work for them and their cause, which also says something about their mindset. Because if you are trying to claim that the ICTY is illegitimate, that means that everything what they’ve done is illegitimate. They can’t just select and say that some judgments are okay. But this is what’s happening. But this is not something that ICTY, I think, no one could really predict that this has happened, nor I think that they could prevent this from happening. 

I think if we had different democratic governments after the Dayton Peace Agreement, probably the region would look differently. But unfortunately, the people who are running, especially Serbia and Bosnia, but also Croatia too, are working on revising history, investing a lot of energy in producing new facts and dismissing completely the ICTY and its legacy, turning it around. And there are a lot of examples, and one of them is celebration of war criminals, of welcoming them into the country as martyrs, as victims, rather than as war criminals. So you have all this generation of young people in the region who are growing up on this false narrative. So in Republika Srpska, still the school kids, they learn about Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić as national heroes, rather than prosecuted war criminals sitting in a jail, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. And then you have the most recent example of Nebojša Pavković, former general who was commander of Priština Corps and who was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2009 for charges of murder, persecution of the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo. And he was released recently to Serbia for medical treatment and he died some months later, and he was buried in Belgrade with the highest honors.

There are also students who are writing and defending master theses at universities about the heroism of Ratko Mladić. Master thesis, yeah? And I could go on and on. So when I start to, and I have lots of these examples – this is my next project. It’s really hard to talk about success of international justice, but again, I think despite all this, I think the outcomes of international justice in Yugoslavia is significant because it also gives tool to human rights activists to fight back against revisionism and rely and draw on judgments to tell the truth about what happened. Unfortunately, this is not in mainstream. In mainstream are war criminals as the war heroes. Who is to blame for that? I don’t know, you know, but I want to put blame on political elites. And unfortunately for many citizens in the Balkans, this became new normal.

Stephanie: 31:04  In terms of Plavsic herself, I mean, she’s part of what you’re talking about, that she’s one of those who’s not described as a war criminal. She has this, as you describe it, the utmost respect and admiration for her, but that’s also within your own family. How do you feel about the fact that within your own family, there was admiration for her?

Olivera Simic: 31:26  Well, I think that that’s another complicated story and that’s a lot of us researchers who are insiders have to carry around with them as a baggage. I can’t say that Biljana Plavšić has the same status of celebrity as, for example, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. I don’t think so. It’s a little bit less, yeah, because of her remorse. So once she remorsed, a lot of people changed their mind and that could be never washed away. So including some of the members of my family, they became, you know, they didn’t think anymore of her as kind of celebrity, like it did something. But yeah, majority of people who live there and my family also lives there, I think it’s just part of the mainstream to kind of admire these people. They are there on TVs. Every time I go to Banja Luka and I turn on the TV and dine with my family, I can see Vojislav Šešelj or Šljivančanin and other people talking about, you know, military affairs in Russia, Ukraine or giving advice about food. That’s what Vojislav Šešelj does. He’s a guest at the food shows in Serbia and advises people and citizens of Serbia what they should eat and what’s the healthy diet.

Janet: 32:52  And you’re saying Šljivančanin is giving military analysis of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

Olivera Simic: 32:58  Yes, yes, yes. They are all the time on TV. So he’s one of the most famous. So all these people are there to, because they are, you know, one of the, I forgot his name, one of the, I think he is the minister of foreign affairs in Serbia said, who else knows better about war than our generals? Yeah. Or commanders. So they are the ones who are going to teach the young cadets in military academies. And they are the ones with knowledge. And this is a, so I think this is a joke, but it’s not, you know, this is how they are represented. Like who else? Or Nebojša Pavković, right? He’s a general. He’s a military person. Who else can know better than him to go and teach?

Stephanie: 33:38  For our listeners, and I don’t know if I’m going to get this right on the first go, but Šljivančanin was, he was convicted for Vukovar hospital, right?

Olivera Simic: 33:47  Yes.

Stephanie: 33:47  He was convicted for essentially killing patients in a hospital in Croatia after they took the town of Vukovar. You went into this book with the idea to kind of understand what maybe moves perpetrators or why they do what they did. And your final takeaway on Biljana Plavšić is, she’s not a pathological individual, but rather an ultranationalist. Is that enough of an explanation to you why she ended up where she did or why she essentially committed the crime she’s been convicted of?

Olivera Simic: 34:26  I don’t think it’s a one single thing to point, but I think being ultranationalist does help in committing some violence because you obviously don’t like other people or other group and dismiss the others. So having this strong radical views can provide space for unleashing violence. But what I was interested in, and I think I tried to dig that out, and I guess in chapter two, I think when I write about her childhood and how these views were formed, also where they come from. And this is not, of course, justification or excuse, but I think provides some context of how she became who she became. 

She grew up during the Second World War in Sarajevo. A lot of her family from other side was killed or deported by Ustaša. She witnessed also some of the violence and killings during the Second World War as a teenage, young teenage girl. So she carries a lot of these memories that were imprinted in her mind and also anger towards the Communist Party. And she was also grew up as a very religious person and her father never became part of the Communist Party, was punished for that. And she also never became a member of Communist Party. So I don’t know if you, Steph, noticed, but some people told me that they didn’t realize how much Second World War, and this is where this complicated history plays a part in this war or this, let’s call them traumatic memories of what had happened back then. She said to me hundreds of times that her only reason to enter politics was to prevent that Serbs are going to be killed once again, as they were during the Second World War. I mean, that was her explanation that she really wanted to prevent what had happened to her family and other Serbs during the Second World War by Ustaša. Because I don’t think she really had a reason. 

I think Alette Smeulers defines her as a careerist and definitely she enjoys this power and enjoyed the power she had. But I think she had a lot of power before she entered into politics. She was a dean of the faculty in Sarajevo. She’s a very respectful scientist, traveled the world, etc., etc. So she was really highly successful. So she didn’t have to go down this road of the politics. But that’s what she said, that her main motivation when she was invited to join Karadžić and the Serbian Party was, you know, kind of to prevent what has happened to Serbs in World War II. That’s her explanation.

Stephanie: 37:11  I will jump in here and give a little of a Stephapedia on some of the things you just mentioned. When you talk about Alette, you talk about Alette Smeulers, who does research on perpetrators. And we have an episode with her that we’ll link to. And when you’re talking about World War II and Ustaša, what happened in World War II in the Balkans is that there was a Croatian fascist statelet that basically targeted Serbs. And so a lot of Serbs were sent to concentration camps in the Balkans, one big one in Croatia specifically. And so Plavšić would have seen probably her family members taken away and sent to concentration camps by these Ustaša, these fascist Croatians. So when I read that bit in your book, I mean, I know this history also from just being in the Balkans and covering the ICTY, but it struck me reading it at this moment that it’s the same way that kind of trauma from the Second World War bleeds into current conflict. In other conflicts, we see, for example, Israel and Gaza also has this very strong World War II undercurrent of not letting things happen again, and that being used as somewhat of a justification sometimes for things that are at least questionable. But you see, it’s interesting when we talk about, and I said traumatic memories, it automatically humanizes kind of her and her experiences. And this is kind of where you can get in trouble, right?

But these were traumatic experiences and memories. But everyone in the Balkans, I think we all have these stories. I grew up with these stories. I have uncles, aunts, and grandfathers, et cetera, et cetera, who lost someone in these camps, but that didn’t give other people license to unleash some things or claim that as a legitimacy to do something. But I think it’s, no, it’s just, I was just thinking of when you again said about traumatic memories from Second World War that have never been really discussed. Yeah, they were covered up during the Tito’s time, and many commentators decided that may be one of the reasons why this happened, because we never dealt properly with the past. I have a feeling now we deal kind of too much, I would say, with the past, so now everyone can say everything. And I don’t think looking at the region that he does a lot of good, I’m really pretty concerned about the region.

But unfortunately, I feel it’s completely off the radar because of, of course, all other conflicts and the global situation in the world. It seems not, you know, once the ICTY was closed, it was kind of closed chapter. That’s how I feel that this interest diminished. Yeah. But then you ask yourself for how long we should expect international community today, because by the hand and lead us into, you know, some nice beautiful future and democratic state. So we need to, we, Bosnians and other people in the region need to take some of this local ownership, really, and do something. Looking at everything down there, it seems that some of these things have become pretty normalized, like seeing war criminals on TV screen, which is a danger point. You know, whenever you have most of the population shrugging their shoulders, if Šljivančanin is telling them, you know, where are the Russian troops this morning, which I follow when I go to Banja Luka, you know, he’s every day there telling something like this. It is a danger point, you know, when these things are normalized, you know, but I think there is a kind of fatigue with a lot of people, exhaustion of this transition that kind of seems never end.

Stephanie: 40:53  We will link also to a glowing and thoughtful review that Philippe Sands, who’s one of the big lawyers, big beasts in our world, and himself an author has written.

But it made us wonder, do you think that your book will actually be read in Serbia itself at all?

Will, I mean, when you have a world which is full of war criminals on television, how will your book fare?

Olivera Simic: 41:20  So, I don’t know. Look, perhaps it will be read, but by like-minded people and only if translated into local languages. But I don’t think that, I mean, Serbia was not necessarily marketplace for this book and Plavšić in this book did not necessarily speak to the Serbian audience. She wanted to talk to me as she talked to an international audience. She wanted to say things that she thinks she could never say. So, focus more on her detention and everything else. She knew that this book would be written in English, published by an English publisher. As I said, I’m not really sure that people are maybe now that much interested in her story after so many years. If I published this book during her time in jail or soon as she was released, I think it would be different. But also because it’s a totally different time. As I just mentioned, in Serbia and Republika Srpska, we have ongoing promotions of memoirs. And I will, I will just, I have to mention this to you because I don’t know, I’m just, I’m just curious how much you know about this. 

So, there are ongoing promotions of memoirs written by war criminals supported by the government. So, my book in that sense may compete with, for example, a recent release of Duško Tadić’s memoir. Just a few days ago, just around the time when my book was published about Plavšić, Duško Tadić, the first ICTY indictee, published his new book, new because he published also a few books before that. And he launched it at the Belgrade International Book Festival like a few days ago. So, this is again another example to just think and imagine how far it got with denial and celebration of war crimes in the region. So, he said that he gathered new evidence to prove he did nothing wrong and that he expects the tribunal to apologize to him for the wrongful conviction. 

So, my book would be perhaps the book of the year in Republika Srpska and Serbia if I glorified Biljana Plavšić and, you know, completely bashed the ICTY. I think the Duško Tadić book probably will appeal more to, you know, mainstream and cater to what the Serbian government wants to hear. Unfortunately, I may expect just to be dismissed as a bad Serb. That won’t be the first time though. So, I don’t think that my book serves the Serbian cause. But, yeah, apart what I think would work for Plavšić, that she remains unremorseful. I think she wanted this message to come clearly across in this late stage of her life. She wanted to send this message that she is definitely unremorseful and proud of everything what she had done.

Stephanie: 44:15  It’s fascinating and I could talk for hours and hours about this.

I think we just need to have another chat session or come have coffee when you are in The Hague so that we can talk about all of this and geek out very much about Balkans and war criminals. We are gonna end our podcast here, but we always end with asymmetrical haircuts questions and I have managed to slip in a new one. Our new asymmetrical haircuts question is, what is the kind of weirdest job you’ve ever had? We’re trying to ask this also to show that the path is not always straight.

Olivera Simic: 44:48  I don’t think I have anything that’s funny and unusual. I’m just trying not to think what was, but it’s nothing really unusual. I worked as a bartender. Once I finished law faculty after the war, I could not find a job and I worked as a bartender in a disco bar. But that’s for probably, I don’t know, a year or something as a lawyer.

Stephanie: 45:11  You will hear me talk a lot about the podcast about the Bosnian waiter, which is the big joke I have whenever we had to follow ICTY crimes. The worst kind of people or the people who always did the worst things, the ones that would just come into detention camps and beat prisoners for fun, then one of their bios was always that they to be a waiter before the war. And so whenever somebody tells me that they were a waiter before the war in the former Yugoslavia, all the alarm bell goes off. But luckily you were a bartender after the war, so that goes well.

Janet: 45:46  Our last question, Olivera, is always, is there something that you would like to recommend to our listeners? It could be a book, it can be a podcast, it can be a TV show, it can be what’s on your Netflix queue to get away from this, or it could be something else in this field. And of course, we will recommend most strongly your book and encourage people to read that in depth. But is there anything else that you would like to offer?

Olivera Simic: 46:09  I listen to Asymmetrical Haircuts, that’s my favourite podcast. And I also listen from time to time, New Yorker Radio Hour podcast. I love listening to podcasts, but I’m your regular listener. You’re doing fantastic stuff. In terms of watching, I’m not really a person who is watching movies. I watch documentaries from time to time to relax. I watch investigations into cold cases or I’m a murderer. These are some of the things that I watch, which are not really kind of nice and relaxing, but I like to watch anything that has to do with criminal justice. 

I do read, I’m an avid reader, I read all the time. At the moment, I am reading Peter Beinart, a journalist and professor of political science, his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. And I think when I saw the title, when I saw the title of this book, I immediately, I just thought in my mind, being Serb after the genocide of Srebrenica. You can in so many places, you know, write about how does it feel to be part of the community who committed genocide and then talk about it publicly. And it’s not easy. So I’m appealed to these books. And I like his thoughts memoir with the letter to his former friend, the best friend. And I could, you know, recognize a lot in what he has to say in also my own experience. 

Unfortunately, I think with this work, we don’t talk much about risks of this work or, you know, emotions involved and how this affects us and our families and friends. So I always say, once I publish something, I lose a few friends. I do gain some new friends, but you are always at the risk of losing not just friends, sometimes even family. And I think Peter also kind of lost some of his family members because of saying some things that he was kind of not supposed to say.

And Gideon Levy of Gaza. I like to listen Gideon and I just admire his courage. And I think he’s a fantastic. So this brings some of his earlier reports on Gaza and his personal experiences with the destruction of Gaza. So these two books I’m reading at the moment.

Stephanie: 48:31  Thank you so much for these thoughtful recommendations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Any excuse for me to talk about the ICTY. And also, I thought it was so fascinating to read about Plavšić and her apartment and the way you describe it. I know that apartment and I know that kind of Serbian Belgrade lady who serves you coffee and cookies and smokes constantly and is very proper at the same time. So I thought you brought that to life very clearly. So thank you for the book. Thank you for coming to talk to us about it.

Olivera Simic: 49:07  Thank you so much for having me.

[OUTRO TUNE]

Narrator: 49:35  This was asymmetrical haircuts, your international justice podcast created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Bergh. This episode was created in partnership with JusticeInfo.net, an independent site covering justice efforts for mass violence, and with the Hague Humanity Hub. Music is by Audionautix.com. You can find show notes and everything about the podcast on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. This show is available on every major podcast service, so please subscribe, give us a rating, and spread the word.

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