19 MAY 2001, Page 32

Why I raided the bank

From Mr Wolfgang Petritsch Sir: John Laughland's factual errors (UN tyranny in Bosnia', 5 May) wouldn't be so bad if he had put the raid I ordered on Hercegovacka Banka in its proper context. Yes, heavily armed Nato peacekeepers went in to secure the bank in Mostar the second time round because, two weeks before, 21 of my staff and soldiers with the peacekeeping force were badly beaten by a well-organised mob. In one instance, two gunmen in the town of Grude took eight investigators hostage and threatened to execute one of them. The heavy security presence on the second raid was to ensure the safety of civilian staff.

For the record, I am not a United Nations employee. The post of High Representative was created at Dayton with extensive powers to protect the peace accords signed at the Ohio airbase in 1995. I have to answer to 55 governments and international organisations. Laws that I have had to impose are debated and adopted by the country's state and entity legislatures.

Of the 38 banks in Bosnia's Muslim-Croat Federation, and the 19 banks in Republika Srpska, only four are Austrian-owned.

The changes to the electoral law were introduced not by the United Nations but by the country's provisional election commission, chaired by an international appointee. The laws were temporary, for the last election only, and constituted a step towards complying with a constitutional court ruling which makes Bosnian citizens equal in law across the country, regardless of their ethnic status.

The international community has never 'cancelled the outcome of elections', even when they resulted, until last November, in nationalist governments which worked against implementation of the peace accords.

I have never described Ante Jelavic, a former Bosnian presidency member and once the HDZ leader — or any of his colleagues — as 'criminal'. I sent investigators into Hercegovacka Banka because I have evidence that up to DM54 million sent by the Croatian government for the Croat component of the Federation Army never made it to where it was supposed to go. Also, large sums arrived seemingly out of nowhere to 50 accounts at the bank. Such transfers of money, under Bosnian banking law (and European law) automatically come under investigation for moneylaundering.

In 1999 Bosnia's leading intellectuals, fed up with the dead-end politics of the nationalists, asked me to establish a protectorate. I have neither the power, nor the inclination, to do so. The philosophy that guides all my work here is that Bosnia will never have a future if it accepts colonial rule, and that Bosnians and Herzegovinans must own the political process themselves.

Wolfgang Petritsch

High Representative, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina