Sweden released former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic Tuesday, two-thirds into an 11-year jail term for war crimes, according to the Swedish prison authority. She immediately left Sweden and returned home to Serbia.

“I don’t know what to think being free after eight years,” Plavsic told reporters after landing in Belgrade.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which convicted Plavsic in February 2003, consented last month to grant her an early release.

79-year-old Plavsic was one of three members of the presidency of the Serbian Republic, headed by Radovan Karadzic. She was the only woman convicted by the ICTY of war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

Plavsic pleaded guilty to persecution on political, racial and religious grounds by “inviting paramilitaries from Serbia to assist Bosnian Serb forces in effecting ethnic separation by force”. Charges of genocide, extermination and murder were dropped as part of a plea bargain.

Bosnian Serbs celebrated her release and Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik was in Belgrade to welcome her back home.

But Muslim victims of the war voiced outrage last month at the decision to grant early release. “It might be in line with international law, but it has nothing to do with justice,” Murat Tahirovic, head of an association of Muslim and Croat war camp prisoners, told reporters.

Kada Hotic, a mother still searching for a son who went missing in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide said “they don’t think about the blood of so many of our children, whom we are still digging out of mass graves.”

“Nobody feels sorry for them but they feel sorry for Plavsic, who spent her prison days very comfortably, writing books and memoirs,” Hotic said.

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