Biljana Plavšić, former president of Republika Srpska, died this morning in Belgrade, aged 96. Sources close to the family confirmed the news, and according to current information the funeral will be held in Banja Luka. With her goes one of the key figures of the Bosnian Serb leadership of the nineties - and the only woman ever convicted by the Hague tribunal.

Her biography reads as if it were written for two different people. Born in Tuzla in 1930, she grew up in Sarajevo. She graduated in biology in Zagreb and earned her doctorate in botany there, specialised in the US as a Fulbright scholar and did research in laboratories from Prague and London to New Delhi. She was a professor and dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Sarajevo. And then, before Yugoslavia broke up, she left science for politics - at exactly the moment when politics in the Balkans was becoming a matter of life and death.

In 1990 she was elected to the collective Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In April 1992, on the threshold of war, she resigned and moved into the leadership of Republika Srpska. She left Sarajevo, where the war had already begun, on 20 May 1992, the last of the inner Serb leadership to do so. In September 1996, under pressure from the international community, Radovan Karadžić handed her his presidential powers, and the same year she was elected president of Republika Srpska. Two years later she lost to the Radicals' candidate, Nikola Poplašen.

The Hague, a confession and a return home

The Hague tribunal's indictment dates from April 2000. In January 2001 she surrendered voluntarily. On 27 February 2003 she was sentenced to 11 years in prison - after pleading guilty to persecution, a crime against humanity, following which the prosecution dropped the remaining counts, including genocide. She served her sentence in Sweden's Hinseberg prison and was released at the end of October 2009, after serving two thirds of the sentence, returning to Belgrade.

Later, in an interview with a Swedish outlet, she claimed she had done nothing wrong and that her guilty plea had been a sacrifice, not remorse. That's the moment the story takes on a Balkan tone we know all too well: a confession before the international court, and at home the explanation that the confession meant nothing.

That's why what happens at the funeral will matter more than the obituary. Will Banja Luka give state honours to a woman convicted of a crime against humanity? Will anyone from the current leadership of Republika Srpska stand beside the coffin, and what will they say? It wouldn't be the first time the Balkans sent off a convict with flowers and speeches, while the names of the persecuted remain only in court records.

Plavšić lived to 96, the last seventeen of those years in freedom. That's far more than the war left many of those whose persecution she herself admitted before the court.