Biljana Plavšić

Biljana Plavšić was a biologist and university professor in Sarajevo before becoming a Serb member of Bosnia's collective presidency in 1990. During the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian war she was part of the Bosnian Serb leadership under Radovan Karadžić, and she served as president of Republika Srpska from 1996 to 1998. She surrendered voluntarily to the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, pleaded guilty to persecution of non-Serbs as a crime against humanity and in 2003 was sentenced to 11 years in prison, the only woman the tribunal convicted. Released in 2009, she withdrew from public life and lived in Belgrade, where she died on October 1 at the age of 96.