Serb leader tells war crimes court of her people's guilt Â

The former Bosnian Serb leader known as the "Iron Lady" of the Balkans admitted responsibility yesterday for thousands of deaths, and enormous human suffering, as she finally faced up to the results of Serb ethnic cleansing in the early 1990s.

In a tense finale to a day of high drama in The Hague, Biljana Plavsic , the former Bosnian Serb president, told three UN judges: "You must strive in your judgment to find whatever justice this world can offer, not only for me, but also for the innocent victims of this war."

Mrs Plavsic is the first senior Bosnian Serb to admit her guilt, and her acceptance of responsibility is seen by court officials as a turning point for the tribunal. In her brief statement, read in Serbian, she said that, at the time, she had refused to believe stories of atrocities against Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

"I have now come to the belief, and accept, that many thousands of innocent people were the victims of organised, systematic efforts from the territory claimed by Serbs," she said. "The knowledge that I'm responsible for such human suffering and for soiling the character of my people will always be with me."

Earlier, the court was told by the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright that Mrs Plavsic was torn between her strident Serb nationalism, which unleashed the "unimaginable" horror of ethnic cleansing, and her desire to back a peace process.

Ms Albright, the most prominent American to testify before the UN tribunal in The Hague, said Mrs Plavsic bore responsibility for atrocities reminiscent of the Holocaust in the Second World War. But she said Mrs Plavsic later proved instrumental in supporting the Dayton peace plan, in defiance of extremists among her own people and "at some risk to herself".

Called by the prosecution and the defence to speak at the hearing, Ms Albright's evidence managed to give succour to both sides. She described Mrs Plavsic as "a very conflicted individual".

In doing so, Ms Albright underlined the extent to which leading international figures such as herself once courted the leading protagonists of the Balkan wars of 1992-5.

Mrs Plavsic, 72, has changed her plea to guilty on one count of crimes against humanity and expressed "full remorse" for the persecution of Bosnia's Muslims and Croats which claimed about 200,000 lives.

Seven further charges against her, including one of genocide, have been dropped in exchange for her plea.

The hearing, which is due to end today, is to help judges decide on a sentence which will be handed down next year and could extend to life in prison.

Ms Albright said Mrs Plavsic, who was deputy to the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic during the conflict, bore some responsibility for atrocities prior to 1995. "It became evident to anyone who was watching that it was reminiscent of pictures of World War Two," Ms Albright said, referring to the forced separation of families, the herding of victims on to buses and trains and the systematic rape of women in front of their relatives.

People were, she added, "being taken into what could only be labelled as concentration camps", persecuted because of their ethnic origins.

After the war, Mrs Plavsic broke with some former allies and, as president of the Serb enclave in Bosnia, was prominent in implementing the Dayton peace deal reached in 1995.

Her policies of Serb superiority were "repugnant", said Ms Albright, whose view of the Bosnian leader changed after their first one-to-one meeting in 1997.

"We talked at some length about her intentions. At that point it became evident to me that she understood all the things that had gone wrong," Ms Albright told the court.

Others gave clearer support to Mrs Plavsic's plea for leniency. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister who co-chaired the Dayton talks and served as the international envoy to post-war Bosnia, said Mrs Plavsic's life was threatened because of her support for Dayton.

On one occasion she had to be airlifted to safety by international troops from the hardline Serb stronghold of Pale. "Without her, it would have been very difficult and more dangerous and almost certainly more violent" to carry out the peace arrangements, he testified.

The tribunal has also heard from witnesses including the Nobel peace prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who called on the judges not to forget the victims of ethnic cleansing.