My letter to the Washington Post, set forth below, was published today. John Kraljic
Saturday, July 6, 2002
Left Out in Bosnia
Wolfgang Petritsch [op-ed, July 2] claimed that a recent agreement to institute constitutional changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina was agreed to by the “main parties” representing the three constituent nationalities of that country. He did not mention that the Croatian Democratic Union, a political party having the overwhelming support of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, refused to sign on to the agreement.
Petritsch admits that his actions were not necessarily democratic but justifies his failure to support democracy by claiming that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina had been intimidated by threats and violence. If this were so, why hasn’t he used his broad powers to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of such crimes?
Petritsch’s legacy is a bleak one for the hundreds of thousands of Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina: the imposition of rule by an international bureaucracy answerable to no one. Most people would prefer democracy, pure and simple.
— John Peter Kraljic
The writer is president of the National Federation of Croatian Americans.
