Departures of note

Biljana Plavšić was a Bosnian Serb politician who served as president of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, in the years immediately after the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Before entering politics she was a biology professor at the University of Sarajevo, and during the war she sat on the Bosnian Serb leadership council under wartime president Radovan Karadžić. Western officials considered her more liberal than other Bosnian Serb leaders, and she later became a vocal opponent of Karadžić. She supported the Dayton peace agreement at a time when others sought to undermine it. Indicted in 2000 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges including genocide and war crimes, she voluntarily surrendered in 2001 and pleaded guilty to persecution as a crime against humanity. The court found she had disregarded reports of widespread ethnic cleansing and publicly rationalized and justified it. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison and released in 2009 after serving two-thirds of her term. Her death came weeks after that of former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladić, who died in detention after being convicted of genocide.