Plavsic: The Iron Lady who turned

By Joe Clancy, CNN.com writer

Silver-haired biology professor Biljana Plavsic was dubbed the Iron Lady of the Balkans for being a virulent Serb nationalist who rejected the West's efforts to end the Bosnian war.

As deputy to Radovan Karadzic who led the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 conflict, she was accused of being "one of the architects of ethnic cleansing."

But she was later embraced by the West when, in 1997, she broke ranks with the hardliners and helped moderates win power.

ALSO Party rallies to Plavsic's defence

Her transformation was epitomised when she shook the hand of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright before their meeting in the Bosnian Serb-controlled town of Banja Luka.

She gained international support for accusing Bosnian Serb hardliners of corruption and profiteering.

Plavsic supported Western-backed candidates during recent elections in Bosnia, but she also retained her nationalistic views and often criticised the arrests of alleged war criminals by NATO in Bosnia.

She had initially opposed the 1995 Dayton peace treaty that ended the Bosnian war in which about 200,000 people died.

The treaty divided Bosnia into two highly autonomous entities, the Muslim Croat federation and the Serb Republic.

During the war, Plavsic asserted that Serbs were racially superior to Croats and Muslims.

She was often seen at places where Serbs conducted the worst systematic killing of rival Muslims and Croats.

She is remembered for walking hand in hand with notorious Serb paramilitary leader Arkan, after he seized the north-east Bosnian town of Bijeljina that became a symbol of Serb atrocities.

Arkan awarded her his self-styled "Obilic" medal for bravery and named her "the Serb empress."

U.S. Balkans envoy Richard Holbrooke, in his book "To End A War," said she reversed her position by pledging support to the Dayton treaty and that she did not support separatism.

Born in Tuzla in northern Bosnia in 1930, Plavsic had led a quiet, respectable life as a biology professor at Sarajevo University.

She was also a Fulbright scholar in the U.S., where she spent two years lecturing and doing research.

But with the fall of communism in the former Yugoslavia Plavsic became an activist for Serb nationalism.

She was one of Karadzic's two deputies during the war, and replaced him as president of the Serb Republic entity in 1996.

A year later she deserted the ultra-nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS) founded by Karadzic, set up the Serb People's Alliance party, and elicited Western support for her anti-corruption drive.

The move eventually led to a total removal of hardliners from the government and the Bosnian Serb parliament's election of moderate Milorad Dodik as prime minister of the Serb Republic.

She remained a nationalist, albeit a less vocal one, and led the Western-backed Sloga coalition in a general election in 1998 in which she lost the presidency to ultra-nationalist Nikola Poplasen.

Her party and Sloga split early last year and after SDS won the presidency and a relative majority in the Serb parliament in last November's election, she quit her parliamentary seat.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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