When the time comes for reflective history to be written about the appalling wars that erupted in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the name of Biljana Plavsic will have its place.
It was Hannah Arendt, the American writer and philosopher, who applied the phrase "banality of evil" as she observed the demeanour of Adolf Eichmann during his trial, in Israel in 1961, for crimes committed during the second World War. Eichmann was an ardent Nazi and the principal logistical military officer of the Holocaust in which some 6,000,000 Jews were murdered in Europe. At his trial, however, this most feared monster seemed no more than an ordinary little man.
Biljana Plavsic is no Eichmann. What the Nazis did should not be trivialised by comparison with anything that has happened since. Nonetheless, what occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s, when Yugoslav Serbs, Croats and Muslims waged war against each other, was the nearest thing to genocide the continent has witnessed since 1945. As Yugoslavia disintegrated into its constituent states, Bosnia, with its near equal ethnic split between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, always had the potential for the worst bloodshed.
The Bosnian Serbs, and their masters in Belgrade led by Slobodan Milosevic, were determined to grab as much Bosnian land, while Milosevic hankered after "Greater Serbia". Serbian war aims were pursued by Radovan Karadzic, head of the Serbian Democratic Party, and Ratko Mladic, head of the Bosnian Serb army. But Miss Plavsic, a former biology professor from Sarajevo University in her early 60s, was Bosnian Serb president. Now aged 72, Plavsic looks not unlike every family's favourite maiden aunt.
But this week, she owned up to a single charge of crimes against humanity. In return, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague dropped the remaining charges against her. The Plavsic indictment reads like a horror novel: 60 paragraphs detailing the most shocking and, crucially, systematic, acts of barbarism and butchery against fellow human beings, based on nothing more than cultural differences.
Biljana Plavsic has apologised for her actions and urged reconciliation. It is, as the United Nations' chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, noted yesterday, "a moment of real truth" for the Balkans. Plavsic has been to the place where ethnic and racial hatred can lead us all - if we choose to let it.