But several ex-prisoners have already testified in court to Basic’s brutal torture of detainees since the trial opened in February.
One witness at Basic’s trial recalled in testimony on Friday the glimmer of hope he felt on April 26, 1992.
Dusan Nedic said he saw a woman called Azra enter a detention facility in the northern town of Derventa, where he was being held by ethnic Croats. She spoke with other detainees, he recalled.
“For me it was a glimmer of hope,” said Nedic. “I told myself that a ‘woman should not be aggressive as men.’” But he was wrong.
“She started to beat detainees, she was jumping on them while they were on the floor,” the 55-year-old shoe factory worker said.
Looking at her in court, it is difficult to link Basic with the brutal violence, including one murder, of which she is accused.
A short, silent, bespectacled woman, she avoids eye contact when in court.
When the authorities finally caught up with her in 2011, after the war, she was working in a food factory in the United States.
Basic has pleaded not guilty to war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war at the start of her trial, including a charge that she killed one prisoner.
“This person was not me,” she told the court on Friday, her voice trembling.
Biljana Plavsic, now aged 86, remains the most famous woman war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. The former Bosnian Serb vice-president Biljana Plavsic is also the only one tried before the UN war crimes court.
She was sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2003 after pleading guilty to crimes against humanity for her leading role in a campaign of persecution against Croats and Muslims during Bosnia’s war.
“Women are just as capable of committing crimes,” prominent Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, said.
That much is clear from her essay on war criminals in the former Yugoslavia titled They Would Never Hurt a Fly.
“A woman in such a position has to be ‘better’ than men,” Drakulic wrote in an essay on Plavsic.
“In the given circumstances it meant taking more radical views.”
Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutors say more cases against women suspects are in the pipeline.
In March, Switzerland extradited Elfeta Veseli, a former member of Bosnian Muslim forces, back to Bosnia. She is accused of the 1992 murder of a 12-year-old Serb in eastern Bosnia. As his family had fled, the boy returned for a forgotten dog and paid for it with his life.
But as well as Basic, the US has also extradited Rasema Handanovic, 44. She had lied about her past as a former member of a special Bosnian Muslim unit.
In 2012 she pleaded guilty to the execution of three civilians and three ethnic Croat prisoners of war in the central Bosnian town of Trusina. She was jailed for five and a half years.
“Each of these women had her own personal reason that could explain her sadistic outburst that targeted men in particular,” said Bosnian psychologist Ismet Dizdarevic.
While there were fewer women war criminals they were notably cruel “to prove their power among men,” he said.
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: ‘mistress of life, death’ on trial
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