These two following contributions are taken from an online weekly paper titled ‘The Conversation: Books & Ideas’ – written about two very different personalities – a former Bosnian Serb political leader, as noted below, the first female high-ranked politician to be prosecuted for mass atrocities; and popular Australian author, Jane Harper. I copy them to this blog in the wish to share the subject matter for the interest of readers,
[1 From ‘The Conversation’ , 14th November 2025: Friday essay: my time with ‘Madam War Criminal’, unrepentant at 95. Published: November 14, 2025 6.07am AEDT. Written by Olivera Simic Professor in Law, Griffith University
How could a university professor and internationally established scientist become a war criminal? This question prompted me to spend hundreds of hours interviewing Biljana Plavšić, now 95, at her home in Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
Plavšić, a former biologist, senior Bosnian Serb political leader and president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, is the only woman of 161 people to have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She is the first female high-ranked politician to be prosecuted for mass atrocities.
More than 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war from 1992–95. At least 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army in the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995.
During the war, Plavšić defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs (chiefly Croats and Bosniaks) as “a natural phenomenon”, justifying her policies of ethnic cleansing, mostly carried out by Serb paramilitaries, with theories of ethnic and racial superiority.
Described by Western media as the “Serbian Iron Lady” and by Serb soldiers as a “Serb Empress”, Plavšić pleaded guilty in 2002 to a crime against humanity, persecuting non-Serbs for religious, political and racial motives. In exchange, the court dropped further charges of murder and genocide.
After serving six years of an 11-year sentence, she was released in October 2009, returning to Belgrade in a fur coat to meet her supporters.
At the time of her conviction, Plavšić had expressed remorse. This, and her acknowledgement of guilt, were celebrated as milestones for both the tribunal and the Balkans, and hailed as a step towards reconciliation.
However, two years into her prison sentence, Plavšić told a Swedish magazine she had “done nothing wrong”. In our conversations, she told me she had pleaded guilty to avoid other charges and a long trial:
I sacrificed myself. I have done nothing wrong. I pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity so they would drop the other charges. If I hadn’t, the trial would have lasted three, three and-a-half years. Considering my age, that wasn’t an option.
Plavšić, regarded as a hero by many Serbs (she receives regular fan letters), seems unconcerned about her role in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. “They [the tribunal] think that it is something terrible,” she told me. “I can freely say I did not pay attention to that at all. Simply, I did not care much about it […]”
Given her subsequent lack of remorse, Plavšić’s plea bargain risks making a mockery of justice. Under such a bargain, the defendant can avoid trial and bypass the rigorous examination of evidence and witness testimony. In this way, victims are denied the opportunity for their voices to be heard and acknowledged.
First meeting
I was born in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I remained until mid-1992. I watched my close, non-Serb friends leave our hometown, Banjaluka, from April 1992 due to persecution by Bosnian Serbs. My friends left some of their belongings with me, thinking, as I did, they would return in three months or so.
They never returned. At that time, I did not know what I was witnessing was, in fact, the ethnic cleansing of my city. I didn’t have the language then to describe it in those terms.
I was aware of Plavšić. She was constantly in the media calling on Serbs to join the army and fight. I would find out many years later that my late aunt and uncle had befriended her after she fled Sarajevo, her hometown, and came to Banjaluka with her elderly mother in 1994. (My uncle, a doctor, had treated Plavšić’s mother.) They remained close to Plavšić for the rest of their lives.
I would much prefer the Bosnian war had not happened, that I had met Plavšić merely as an iron-willed, single-minded person, perhaps ruminating on the margins at a family meal. However, her views became central to the shaping of appalling historical events. Hence it is our responsibility to try and understand how these views developed, and how they fell on so many receptive ears.
The first time I went to see Plavšić was particularly stressful. I was apprehensive and felt totally unprepared. After ten hours of speaking with her over the phone from Australia, there I was standing in front of her door in Belgrade, which had a fake surname on the buzzer.
My anxiety built until I felt it could burst out through the ceiling above me. I took a few deep breaths and knocked. As the door opened wide, I was bracing myself, my heart thumping, my palms sweating. Plavšić stood tall before me. Our eyes met. She was clearly pleased to see me.
Feeling overwhelmed, I stared at her and apprehensively muttered, “Dobro jutro (Good morning)”.
She stretched open her arms as if we had known each other for a long time, took a step back and studied me from top to bottom. A light, blue cardigan hung loosely from her shoulders. She was beaming.
We went inside. I found myself sitting, almost in a state of shock, talking to someone who was convicted for masterminding so much of the Bosnian war.
I ultimately spent hundreds of hours, across eight years, talking to Plavšić, both face-to-face and on the phone. I had to separate this process, as a legal academic, from her friendship with my late aunt and uncle.
I also gained access to Plavšić’s massive private archive, which contained hundreds of letters, newspaper clippings, original wartime documents and even a handwritten set of three notebooks – diaries she wrote in prison. I had to persuade her to speak with me, and gradually build trust. She would not share anything unless she felt her words were being treated with respect.
Biljana Plavšić with a UN guard at the start of her sentencing hearings at the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, December 2002. Fred Ernst/AFP via Getty images
Plavšić, who is divorced and has no children, comes from a well-educated, urban and affluent family; her father Svetislav was a prominent biologist, a director of the natural science department at the Sarajevo Museum and custodian of its botanic collection. Her mother was a housewife.
As a child living in Yugoslavia, Plavšić was only 11 when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Her teenage years were marked by harrowing events such as her relatives being killed or deported to concentration camps by Ustaša (a Croatian fascist movement) or expelled to neighbouring Serbia.
This marked her identity and, as she would tell me many times, she entered politics to prevent the “extinction of Serb people”. Serbs were killed en masse in the World War II concentration camps together with Jews, Romany people and others. She feared, she says, this would happen again to Serbs when the Bosnian war started in the 1990s.
Before the war, she was a dean of the University of Sarajevo’s science faculty, a Fulbright Scholar who spent two years in New York conducting botany research, and an author of more than 100 scientific papers.
She entered politics in 1990, as a member of the Serb Democratic Party. When Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992 – a move opposed by the party – Plavšić joined other party members in proclaiming the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. During the Bosnian war, she served as vice president under president and leader Radovan Karadzić (a convicted war criminal now serving a life sentence for crimes including genocide). From 1996 to 1998, she was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska).
Over many hours of conversation, she told me her version of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina: what led her to take part in it, why some events happened, according to her, and how.
I was hoping she would express some regret and remorse. But there was none. Indeed, Plavšić told me she had not wanted to sit through a trial to “listen to all fake witnesses and their lies”.
She has never changed her convictions.
It is human nature to want to see war criminals as “monsters”, different to us. But Plavšić is not a pathological individual. Rather, she is a highly educated and clinical ultra-nationalist who believes in the supremacy of Serbs over non-Serbs.
Ultra-nationalist Serbs consider Bosnian Muslims ethnic Serbs who converted to the Islam faith as a means of survival during the Ottoman Empire’s rule. Such claims that Muslims are not a genuine nationality are deeply offensive to Bosnian Muslims who have practised Islam for centuries.
Plavšić rejects, as do many other nationalist Serbs, the legal term genocide in relation to Srebrenica massacre. She described the killings to me as a “crime” but “not genocide”.
At times when I confronted her with some legal facts and evidence, she would snap into a scolding-professor mode, frowning at me. One time, without skipping a beat, she snapped, “I’ve already told you what I think of it”. I quickly realised that no matter what I said, she will never change her convictions, and that my job was not necessarily to try to do so.
I found it hard to stomach much of what she ardently still believed, but I buried my emotions so I could wind my way through it all. It was hard to strike the balance and know how far I could go interrogating Plavšić. I regret not questioning her more, but I was nervous she would have stopped talking if I probed and poked too much.
Plavšić not only feels no guilt about her actions, but remains utterly convinced of their righteousness. “No, there is nothing to regret,” she told me in one of our last in-person meetings. “I had to protect my people.”
Her lack of remorse makes Plavšić’s early release from prison all the more painful for the families of her victims. “They [the tribunal] don’t think about the blood of so many of our children, whom we are still digging Interviewing Plavšić and writing a book about her was the hardest project I have done in my career. I am glad it is over but the politics of extreme nationalism in the region are not. Today, there is a revisionism of history and the government and political elites in the Republic of Srpska hold dearly Plavšić’s views.
Plavšić’s case may serve as a warning to both our present and future. She is a highly intelligent and articulate woman. She was not someone who merely followed orders, but rather someone who gave them: a high-ranking perpetrator who preached extremist views.
This makes her story especially pertinent, as we are witnessing a rise in female participation in extremist ideologies around the world, most of which reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal systems. A female populist such as Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, speaks out against “global elites”, evokes fascist rhetoric, and clings to Mussolini-era slogans such as “God, homeland, family”.
It is important to understand Plavšić’s motivations also because today in the Balkans, war criminals such as General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader serving a life sentence for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, are treated as heroes.
Serbian political elites do not recognise the legitimacy of the ICTY and believe, as Plavšić does, that the court was set up “just to prosecute Serbs”. Many high-ranked war criminals returned to Serbia and were welcomed as heroes, as Plavšić was.
Towards the end of our project, Plavšić became increasingly eager to know when the book I was writing would be published and why it had taken me so long. She was disappointed and worried she would die before she could see it. “You could have written an encyclopedia by now!” she scolded me in one of our last conversations.
Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavšić, Serbia’s Iron Lady by Olivera Simić is published by Hurst.
out of mass graves,” said Kada Hotić, a mother who spent two decades searching for a son who went missing in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Hotić lost her son, husband and two brothers in the genocide.
A warning
Plavšić’s historical revisionism and staged remorse in the face of established facts is of course deeply offensive to her victims. Some may find it wrong even to give her space to express her views. Still, Plavšić’s “storytelling” provides an insight into why leaders choose to commit war crimes and invite armed conflict rather than peaceful negotiation.
Over all these years of writing a book about Plavšić, based on our interviews, I have come to accept that, no matter how I wrote it, I would always be at risk of being accused of sympathising with her. There seems to be one common experience among researchers studying perpetrators: they find themselves endlessly defending their work. In some circles, including academic ones, there remains a stubborn lack of understanding as to why researchers talk to and listen to perpetrators.
Put simply, we do it to comprehend the motivations of war criminals so we can prevent mass atrocities in the future. There is no doubt genocide and crimes against humanity are morally repugnant. However, when we approach the study of those who commit such acts primarily through moral condemnation rather than analytical enquiry, we risk hindering our understanding of perpetrators and their motivations.
Perhaps Plavšić’s scholarly profession is what makes many academics both uncomfortable and fascinated with her. Plavšić is a reminder that higher education does not necessarily mean one is immune to committing crimes.
[2] From ‘From The Conversation, 14th November 2025: Why Jane Harper’s ‘outback noir’ novels make for comfortable – and uncomfortable – reading: Published: November 13, 2025 11.53am AEDT by Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland, and Tara East, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing and Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland
Jane Harper’s novels do not include any significant First Nations characters or perspectives. Nor do they acknowledge the deeper meaning and consequence of their Gothic conventions.
Jane Harper sits in a rare category of contemporary Australian writers whose novels have achieved phenomenal international success. She has sold 1.5 million books in Australia and 3.5 million overseas.
While all popular fiction adheres to certain formulas – that is, after all, why we read these books – Harper has skilfully combined a set of conventional tropes to develop her own narrative brand. Her crime novels build on a familiar ideas about the Australian landscape we have been taught how to interpret and accept – images that have become a type of shorthand.
Harper’s version of what has come to be called “outback noir” invariably features a small-town setting where the natural world is perceived as threatening, and an outsider or outcast who must solve a crime with a link to the past.
Importantly, her depictions of the Australian landscape also draw on the traditions of the Australian Gothic.
When early settlers encountered Australia’s unfamiliar landscapes, they found the place strange and unsettling. Swans were black, not white; the seasons were reversed. As novelist Marcus Clarke famously observed, the trees shed their bark, not their leaves.
Australia’s earliest writers, including Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton, used the strange animals and plants, the harsh weather and the seemingly endless deserts as ominous backdrops for their fictional works.
As one character in Harper’s first novel The Dry (2017) reflects on the emptiness that surrounds the fictional town of Kiewarra: “This place is like a nightmare.”
Despite their rural settings, however, Harper’s novels have not to date included any significant First Nations characters or perspectives. Nor do they appear to acknowledge the deeper meaning and consequence of their Gothic conventions.
Harper’s landscapes
A Gothic sensibility is evident in all of Harper’s novels. It is there in the outback settings of The Dry, The Lost Man (2019), and her newest novel, Last One Out (2025). It is there in the forest hinterland of Force of Nature (2018), the rocky coastline of The Survivors (2021), and the rural farmlands of Exiles (2023).
Each novel is set in a new location, but in all cases the central crime takes place in a small town, playing into the Gothic’s concern with isolation. Characters’ limited access to resources, their strained relationships with others, and their remoteness combine to render them vulnerable and create a sense of claustrophobia.
In The Dry, the residents of Kiewarra are suffering from an extended drought. The paddocks of local farms have dried up; so has the town’s river. In Force of Nature, the constant rain and unfamiliar tracks in a mountain forest cause a group of city folk on a corporate “retreat” to get lost during a hike.
The depictions of Tasmania in The Survivors and Australia’s wine regions in Exiles are less extreme. In these works, the natural world is not described with the same eerie, threatening tone of Harper’s earlier novels. But the most violent and climactic events take place not within homes, city streets, or even each town’s single pub. They occur in the dangerously liminal spaces of an isolated cliff and a coastal cave.
The reader is led to understand that these locations are significant in their uncertainty, which creates a sense of unease, a quiet foreboding. Although the natural sites themselves do not harm the characters, they are used for malevolent purposes by criminals, marking them out as haunting and haunted spaces.
In The Dry, the residents of Kiewarra are suffering from an extended drought. The paddocks of local farms have dried up; so has the town’s river. In Force of Nature, the constant rain and unfamiliar tracks in a mountain forest cause a group of city folk on a corporate “retreat” to get lost during a hike.
The depictions of Tasmania in The Survivors and Australia’s wine regions in Exiles are less extreme. In these works, the natural world is not described with the same eerie, threatening tone of Harper’s earlier novels. But the most violent and climactic events take place not within homes, city streets, or even each town’s single pub. They occur in the dangerously liminal spaces of an isolated cliff and a coastal cave.
The reader is led to understand that these locations are significant in their uncertainty, which creates a sense of unease, a quiet foreboding. Although the natural sites themselves do not harm the characters, they are used for malevolent purposes by criminals, marking them out as haunting and haunted spaces.
Harper’s detectives
Crime fiction is the world’s most popular literary genre. It speaks to our desire for justice and resolution.
Its origins can be traced to the 19th century, but it was during and after the first world war that crime or detective fiction was most in demand. This period – dominated by the work of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – has become known as the “golden age of detective fiction”.
Precisely because of the horrors of wartime, and the shock of the terrible injuries and deaths experienced there, crime fiction of this period was decidedly “unbloody”. As literary scholar Alison Light observed, “fleshiness, either figuratively or literally, was […] in gross bad taste after the butchery many had witnessed”.
In these early iterations, the crime genre was conservative. The crime has disrupted the social order in some way; the resolution of the story depends on the straightforward discovery of the criminal, with the implication that justice will be served.
In contemporary detective fiction, both the crimes and the detectives have become more complicated, more morally corrupt, less transparent in their view of justice.
This is the genre known as “noir”. Even in the recent BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work by Sarah Phelps, the relatively simple character of the famous detective Hercule Poirot has been made more complex and his responses to crimes more nuanced, through the addition of a traumatic backstory.
Noir detectives are marked by their personal struggles: addiction, traumatic pasts, and – often as a result of the two former traits – difficulty in forming relationships, whether platonic or romantic. These traits compound the detective’s isolation and “otherness”.
This is also true of Harper’s recurring detective, Aaron Falk, who was forced out of Kiewarra as a teenager under suspicion of harming a local girl.
These experiences have caused him to become guarded and emotionally closed off to others, especially his romantic partners. In The Dry, we witness the disintegration of his formerly close relations, and the gradual and careful ways in which he slowly builds a fragile new friendship.
It is critical that Harper’s detectives are outsiders to the communities in which they work, albeit as non-professional detectives. In this way, they stand in for the reader, who is also – Harper’s urban and international readership suggests – an outsider, largely unfamiliar with such places and communities. This too increases the sense of mystery and threat.
A legacy version of Australia
Harper’s adherence to these generic conventions is doubtless one reason for her popularity. But her novels are not simply crime fiction.
Outback noir transfers the gritty urban settings of traditional noir to small regional towns, where the claustrophobia and secrets of a small community, as well as the threat of an encroaching natural environment, add tension and stakes to the crime at the centre of the narrative. This is where outback noir overlaps with the Gothic – specifically, Gothic narratives that take place in extreme environments, such as the Southern Gothic of the United States, and of course Australian Gothic.
This use of landscape is a common strategy in noir set in specific locales, such as Nordic noir or tropical noir. But there are negative consequences to this construction of the detective as outsider when the outback setting is presented as something unfamiliar, something to be feared. These arise from the origins of Australian Gothic, which scholars have long recognised as an expression of settler-colonial anxiety about the violent dispossession of the country’s Indigenous people.
Noir is not the only popular fiction genre that makes use of rural settings. Rural romance (or “ru-ro”) also has a wide readership and, like outback noir, uses small-town settings and the natural environment to add stakes to the plot. The small town offers a host of quirky but lovable characters, while the harsh landscape allows for displays of physical prowess and the romance of being saved from physical threat.
Both outback noir and ru-ro present a landscape that is recognisably, and cinematically, Australian. They draw upon longstanding ideas and images of our landscapes and lifestyle: a scalding sun, empty rain tanks, wide and dry plains, and a small town with a single pub where a drunken brawl is not uncommon.
This clichéd understanding of Australia has been presented and reinforced through media and marketing, often aimed at audiences beyond our shores – in Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee films, for example, or in Ted Kotcheff’s film adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1961).
Harper’s contribution to contemporary Australian literature hearkens back to the “golden age” of detective fiction. She uses a formula that embeds familiar features of the crime genre in an alternative setting. And just as the novels of detective fiction’s golden age erased the mutilated bodies of the war dead, her novels gloss over the difficult, traumatic and violent elements of Australia’s past and present.
They are engaging with a legacy version of Australia that is more literary than realistic. In their reinforcement of settler-colonialist depictions of Australia, they are both comfortable and uncomfortable reading.
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