Description
ISBN: 9781805262862
Year: 2026
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Description:
'Compelling...a far-reaching, powerful and personal account...poses fundamental questions about the nature of justice and the effectiveness of international courts.' - Philippe Sands, The Observer
Olivera Simi has written a book that refuses the comfortable distance most of us want when studying people who order ethnic cleansing. She sat across from a woman in her nineties, unrepentant and free, and let her speak. Simi lets the reader hear the cadence of her sentences, the justifications that still feel rational to her, the small, ordinary moments that somehow coexisted with mass murder. That is something rare. That is the willingness to hold complexity so tightly it bruises. Most books about war criminals are written from the outside looking in. Simi's is written from the chair opposite the only woman convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She stayed with her long enough to observe the inner architecture of her thinking.
Biljana Plavi remains the only woman ex-president and high-ranking politician in history convicted of crimes against humanity before international tribunals. Simi never tries to solve the mystery of how a biologist becomes a nationalist, then a convict, then a free woman again. She just presents the mystery in full, without varnish, and trusts the reader to sit in the discomfort. That takes courage. Seven years of interviews, archival documents, and court files. The ethics of bringing such a story to life are mind-boggling since Plavi was not an outlier. She was a biologist, an academic, a dean of a university and then a political leader who parti