SARAJEVO - JAPANESE SOLDIER IN GAVRILO PRINCIP'S SHOES

Biljana Plavsic

AIM Sarajevo, 2 September, 1997

Middle-aged professor of anatomy of plants - despite her uninteresting appearance, public and private life - has become the subject of discussions of various diplomatic circles, political establishments, alternative and controlled media, and therefrom wider population conversations, or simply said - gossip.

Is Biljana Plavsic, the current president of Republica Srpska, Messiah of the "other" entity who will initiate democratization of that part of B&H? Can one of the founders of the Pale policy turn apostate against her "own" to such an extent to be capable of even waging war against them, or is this just an inside "family" quarrel which will sooner or later be overcome? Is there a secret plan, a clear strategy and promise of the great West according to which Plavsic is its certain favourite in creation of post-Dayton B&H how big a part of the army, the police, the media "belongs" to Pale, and how many of them are loyal to Banja Luka; will Belgrade leader Slobodan Milosevic get involved in the game and who will get his blessing - these are just a few of the questions numerous analysts of this part of the Balkans are trying to offer answers to. Ones are trying to establish their interpretations on data from the curriculum vitae of the president of RS (was she ever married or not, and due to frustration draws her political moves; her father has or has not been an advocate of greater Croatian nation-building ideals, so that nowadays his daughter, who is a graduate of Zagreb university, is trying to secede Banja Luka and leading it into the hands of Croatia; deprived of motherly feelings, she manifests her personal discontent by lightly manipulating the number of killed other people's children for the sake of the "Serb cause"...) which will satisfy the imagination of those confused by Plavsic in the past months, but they have not gone far from the level of gossip, and even the verge of vulgarity.

The others, based on the attempt of a more serious analysis of Plavsic's alleged political orientation, are in fact applying the pattern deja vu in this space: one of the key players of the single-ethnic ruling party sits down and thinks about all kinds of things, suddenly becomes aware how sinful his/her party is, secedes from it, becomes a dissident and founds his/her own party, politically contrary to the one he/she has abandoned. In time it turns out (Silajdzic, Omersoftic, or Manolic, Mesic) that there is hardly anything new about it, and that there are hardly any autochthonous political options offered by it, and that everything is in fact founded on personal squaring of accounts of the dissident with the party leadership. The length and vehemence of the conflict, and therefrom its outcome, depends directly on the sense of value and morality of the newly fledged dissident.

Briefly, the heroine of this story can hardly have a political option of her own, regardless of the fact that she is referring to the original platform of the SDS of seven years ago, Jovan Raskovic, the founder of the first "independent autonomous province" (i.e. the done for "Republic of Serb Krajina"), and the Dayton accords. This is especially true because in combination of these three elements, at least one is automatically foredoomed. Plavsic is not a pragmatic politician with an ideal, but her moves directly depend on her personal characteristics.

Biljana Plavsic is resolute. Resoluteness, of course, can very quickly transform into stubbornness and that is the point where positive connotation of resoluteness as a virtue ends with Plavsic. More than ten years ago, for example, resoluteness in defence of the then state and system pushed Plavsic into a conflict with the nowadays incriminated minister of RS, Velibor Ostojic, at the time just a language editor of Sarajevo radio station. Ostojic at the time corrected Plavsic's scientific paper by replacing all western synonyms of the then Serbo-Croat language by eastern variants, incurring rage of this university professor who retorted that her language was also Croat, that she experiences Zagreb as her homeland equally as other cities of former Yugoslavia, and that she would not allow any language editor correct the language she speaks. For the sake of loyalty to the ideal of brotherhood and unity she did not hesitate to get involved in a dispute with a minor language editor of the radio station. Students remember her as a just and in the exams incorruptible professor. Nowadays, with similar stubbornness, she is defending the single-ethnic ideology which she accepted as the only possible in the beginning of the nineties, similar to millions of communists of former Yugoslavia. Signing of the Dayton peace accords, survival of the state of B&H and recognition of RS as just one of B&H entities, in her typical manner of a botanist, Plavsic explained as follows: "The Serbs are now like wheat. More precisely as wheat seed put in the ground to hibernate during the difficult times which are coming. After that, when this passes, they will nicely spring up and yield even better crop. Republika Srpska is the land which guards the seed which will survive these accords, to reappear in the spring..."

Resoluteness submerged in stubbornness could have turned Plavsic into the last spokesman of Pale policy - something like the Japanese soldier found in the forests of Honshu island who refused to believe that the Second World War was lost for Japan - had the developments not awakened her other characteristic: vanity. Fed up and hurt by numerous newspaper articles and speculations that she was nominated for president of RS just in order to prevent her from making problems in the SDS and leave enough space to the key protagonists, Krajisnik and Karadzic, for manipulations with the peace accords, it is not difficult to picture her carefully reading the Dayton accords long after they were signed, especially the chapters which deal with the rights and responsibilities of the president of Republica Srpska. At the time, the ordinarily restrained Milosevic called her "stupid old woman", not forgetting that she had ridiculed him by undermining and preventing signing of the Vance-Owen plan in the assembly of RS, because of which he had personally come all the way from Belgrade to the Bosnian mountains dragging along the beaming Micotakis with whose pen Karadzic had already approved the agreement in Athens. To Milosevic's "compliment", the insulted Plavsic responded by open and brisk support to Together coalition in the forthcoming Serbian elections. Undermining of Plavsic, who after Koljevic's suicide believes herself to be the only true educated intellectual at the top of the SDS, reached its climax when the agreement on special relations between the RS and the FRY was signed in Belgrade by Krajisnik and not by her. That was the limit which her vanity could not put up with, and Biljana Plavsic began openly criticizing the clique in Pale.

Of course, as a person who persistently pointed her accusing finger at the villains in Pale from the key post in RS, Biljana Plavsic soon attracted attention of the international mediators in B&H as an ideal solution for weakening Krajisnik's and Karadzic's power. The best thing both for Plavsic and for international tutors of the peace accords was to begin tearing down the Bastille in Pale by unmasking smuggling, corruption and malversation, and end it if possible with a similar process in the Federation. It may happen that the finals of the current double-rule in RS will be marked by taking the indicted for war crimes to the Hague, if the current military and political turmoil in RS proves to be a convenient opportunity for something of the kind. Plavsic's conviction that she was the one whose "policy" was supported by the international community is inversely proportional to the belief of the international community (read: America) that the president of Republica Srpska truly supports the Dayton accords, especially its Annex 7 on return of refugees. It is indeed hard to believe that the president read this part of the agreement with great zeal...

How long will then the political life of Biljana Plavsic last? In her stubbornness and vanity as main motive forces of her political moves, Plavsic will persist in the effort to destroy the influence of the Pale dictatorship, refusing to accept the fact that she is not the real reason but just the immediate cause of international military and political involvement in weakening of the SDS oligarchy. Similarly to her compatriot Gavrilo Princip, her assassination of Pale will at one moment be an euphoric struggle for "freedom" and at another acquire the meaning of the immediate cause of later developments.

The leadership in Pale and the Dayton accords definitely do not go together. Nowadays, Plavsic is badly damaging the obscure power of the former over the peace document. In the future, in some other ways and concerning some other issues, she will also weaken the power of the federal partners in power for whom the Dayton accords are not what they had hoped for. By that time, Biljana Plavsic will have done her part of the work. She will probably then meet once again the woman whose resoluteness and self-confidence fascinated her during their first meeting - Madelaine Albright. On the occasion, Mrs. Albright will probably explain to her what she meant last time when she talked to her about "two multi-ethnic entities in B&H", which Plavsic had not read anywhere in the documents from Dayton, but nevertheless nodded her head in approval.

When they tell her that she is not and cannot be an intimate friend of the lady envoy of the American president, Ms. Plavsic will, stubbornly and vainly return to her personification of the Japanese soldier in Gavrilo Princip's shoes.

DRAZENA PERANIC

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