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Riots In Bosnian Croat For Separatist Bid
MOSTAR, Bosnia-Hercegovina, April 6 (News Agencies) - Riots broke out in Croat-dominated areas of Bosnia Friday after international authorities took control of a bank suspected of funneling funds to Croat hardliners seeking autonomy within Bosnia.
NATO-led peacekeeping troops fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd of stone-throwers. The crowd also set a military vehicle alight and overturned several others.
Two policemen and two civilians were injured in the disturbances in the Bosnian Croat nationalist stronghold of Mostar, as NATO-led peacekeepers entered the Hercegovacka bank to provide security for officials of the Office of High Representative (OHR), the international authorities who took control.
A number of soldiers with the international SFOR peacekeeper force were also slightly hurt, a SFOR spokesman said. The exact number was not available, but was understood to be less than two-dozen.
The bank is suspected of being the main source of financing for Croat nationalists, who last month voted to establish self-rule in Croat-dominated areas in Bosnia.
Fighting spread into the bank building, where some civilian protestors and bank employees attacked OHR officials.
Several hundred protestors moved later to the international organizations' headquarters at the Ero Hotel, where talks took place between SFOR and police to calm the situation.
OHR personnel had left their suite in the hotel due to the tense situation, said spokesman Oleg Milisic.
The protestors, shouting "Occupiers, occupiers," blocked the passage of three SFOR vehicles, surrounding them with reversed vehicles.
Wolfgang Petritsch, the top international envoy in Bosnia, strongly condemned the violence.
He had earlier appointed a temporary administrator for the bank, Toby Robinson, to take complete executive control, suspending the bank manager, clerks and shareholders.
SFOR also provided support for the OHR to take over 11 bank branch offices in the predominantly Croat towns of Grude, Medjugorje, Vitez, Tomislavgrad, Siroki Brijeg, Posusje, Ljubuski and Orasje.
The move sparked unrest in several towns with SFOR troops besieged in bank offices in Posusje and Grude, according to reports.
According to a radio report from Tomislavgrad, an SFOR vehicle ran down local radio journalist Zora Stanic, breaking his leg.
The situation was also tense in Siroki Brijeg, Grude and Medjugorje, an SFOR spokesman said.
"It is clear that violent demonstrations have been orchestrated and organized by those who must have feared the consequences of this investigation," Ralph Johnson, deputy to international envoy Wolfgang Petritsch, told journalists in Sarajevo.
The fact that protests had taken place at several locations "practically simultaneously makes clear that they were organized by a leadership whose identity I think we can easily suspect," he said in an indirect reference to the nationalist Croat Democratic Union (HDZ).
The HDZ is heading a self-styled grouping that decided to split from the Muslim-Croat Federation that, with the Republika Srpska, makes up postwar Bosnia.
The move, a response to the adoption of a new electoral law that Croat nationalists consider as biased against their community, is seen as threatening the Dayton peace agreement, which ended Bosnia's bloody 1992-95 war.
Since the self-rule declaration, Bosnian Croat troops and police have effectively withdrawn from the joint security bodies of the Muslim-Croat authority.
Bosnian media have frequently speculated that the HDZ was keeping large amounts of money in secret accounts at the Hercegovacka bank, to help finance the self-rule bid.
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