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Biljana Plavsic in court in The Hague for sentencing in February 2003, Photo: EPA/ANP/REUTERS
Biljana Plavsic is being treated for COVID-19 at Dragisa Misovic Hospital in Belgrade and her condition is serious, a family member told SRNA, the official news agency in Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity on Thursday.
“She has been in the hospital for three days. She has all the symptoms, the family took her to the hospital and after questioning it was decided to hospitalize her,” the unnamed family member said.
She was admitted to the hospital with the initial signs of pneumonia but is not on a ventilator, the family member added.
Plavsic, the former president of Republika Srpska, was the only woman to be indicted and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
She was indicted for genocide, complicity to commit genocide, extermination, murders, intentional deprivation of life and other crimes committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In 2003 she plea-bargained with the Hague court and was sentenced to 11 years in prison for war crimes. In October 2009, she was released after serving two-thirds of her sentence.
But although Plavsic pleaded guilty, once she served her sentence and returned to Belgrade, she made a series of public statements saying she was innocent and that the purpose of her confession was to get a more lenient sentence.
Plavsic is the second high-ranking Republika Srpska wartime official and Hague convict to have suffered with COVID-19.
In September 2020, Momcilo Krajisnik, the former speaker of the Republika Srpska parliament, died as a result of complications caused by COVID-19.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in March 2009 for his involvement in crimes against humanity against non-Serbs, including extermination, murder, persecution, deportation and forced transfer.
In September 2013, when he was released, he was given a hero’s welcome on his return to Republika Srpska.
