A couple of notorious criminals died recently. The first, Biljana Plavsic, was the only woman convicted of war crimes in the 1990s post-Yugoslavian civil war:
Ms. Plavsic, a former professor at Sarajevo University who studied in Zagreb, New York, London and Prague and wrote more than 100 scientific papers, became notorious in the 1990s for applying biology to politics when the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia disintegrated. She declared Bosnia’s Muslim population “deformed genetic material” and railed against mixed marriages, common before the war, as leading to “the degeneration of Serb nationality.”
For nearly four years, Ms. Plavsic served as vice president of Republika Srpska, a Serb enclave in Bosnia that declared itself a separate state in 1992 and began a program of ethnic cleansing aimed at driving out Muslims, Croats and other non-Serb residents. In that role she worked closely with Radovan Karadzic, the self-declared state’s president, who in 2016 was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by a United Nations tribunal.
Ms. Plavsic’s contrition, if ever more than a ploy to avoid a lengthy trial and escape genocide charges, did not last long. Released early from prison in 2009 for good behavior, she settled in Belgrade and quickly retreated from what Ms. Simic, the author of the 2025 book “Madam War Criminal,” concluded was “fake remorse” in The Hague.
Closer to home, former US House Speaker and US Representative Dennis Hastert (R-IL) also died:
He wielded great authority while cultivating the genial identity of an uncomplicated former high school teacher and coach, even after a snowballing series of Republican scandals forced him from the speaker’s chair in 2006.
That perception was irreparably changed in 2015, when federal authorities charged Mr. Hastert, by then a well-compensated lobbyist, with seeking to hide financial transactions related to “past misconduct” and then lying about it to investigators.
What he wanted to keep secret, he eventually admitted in court, was that he had sexually abused a male student — one of several he molested decades ago.
Josh Marshall covered Hastert in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and remembers the ironies and complexities of Hastert's speakership:
Few if any political leaders in modern American history have experienced a fall quite so ignominious and total. The obvious point of comparison is Richard Nixon. But post-Watergate Nixon was never without his defenders and supporters. All but his most adamant critics granted significant successes of his presidency. And by the time of his death in 1994, he’d made significant progress in being treated by many as a sage elder statesman, albeit a greatly tarnished one. Hastert remains almost a test case of a top political leader whose fall was immediate and absolute. He came as close as one can come to have to having zero public defenders (though a significant number of former colleagues wrote leniency letters on his behalf at sentencing in 2016).
In retrospect, it is clear [the Mark Foley] scandal [in 2006] must have filled Hastert with fears that his past would be exposed. (In fairness to Foley, who was never charged with a crime, his wrongdoing paled in comparison to Hastert’s.) This was another period of chaos on Capitol Hill. There were lots of end-of-the-majority vibes, changing of the guard. In a different role, I was working phones much as I had eight years earlier. What was clear at the time was Hastert was taking a very passive and kind of MIA role toward the whole unfolding drama. One potential theory was that Hastert had either warnings or knowledge about Foley’s behavior. And that was probably true to at least some extent. There were also rumors or I guess what you’d call chattered suggestions that there was a kind of “gay mafia” of staffers around Hastert that wanted to keep the whole story under wraps, or prevent further investigations.
Accusations like that have a long and dark history. I mention them now — 20 years on — not to suggest they were true but to give you a sense of the climate of that moment, the kinds of rumors and accusations that were flying — a mix of homophobia and some legitimate bafflement about Hastert’s hands-off role. Of course we can’t know what Hastert was thinking in September 2006 while all this was happening. But it seems all but impossible not to conclude that Hastert feared that this was a climate in which his own secrets would be revealed. It’s a bit like kryptonite being casually brought into the office of a dark-side Superman.
Everything eventually came pouring out into the open in 2015. Hastert had left the House soon after the Republicans’ 2006 defeat and had transitioned into a high-flying D.C. lobbyist. Hastert’s undoing actually began with FBI scrutiny of what they suspected was more typical D.C. lobbyist corruption as far back as 2012. Hastert had been paying hush money to one of his then-teen victims. And it was his efforts to hide those payments that led to charges of “structuring”, lying to federal agents and more. The statutes of limitations on the actual sex abuse had run out decades earlier. The payments themselves weren’t necessarily illegal, though perhaps they could have led to blackmail charges.
Hastert served just over a year in federal prison and lived another nine years after his release.
The Daily Parker will miss neither of them.
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