SARAJEVO CROATS DEMAND PARTICIPATION IN CITY AUTHORITIES

SARAJEVO, Jan 26 (Hina) - The Croatian National Council for Bosnia- Herzegovina on Friday wrote an open letter to the high representative Carl Bildt, urging him to ensure that the principles of equal rights, multiethnicity and multiculturality are respected in the establishment of new Sarajevo city authorities. The letter, signed by chairman Ivo Komsic, insists that the city administration be established on a parity basis. On the other hand, local municipal authorities should be established on the basis of proportional representation. "The Sarajevo Croats' right to participate in the city authorities in this way not based on any political agreement but on their participation in the struggle against the (Serb) military and political aggression," Komsic wrote. "The proportion of Croats who were killed in this struggle is twice their percentage in the general population," he wrote. The Croatian National Council of Bosnia-Herzegovina was founded in 1993, amid Croats vs. Moslems war, as a group of Bosnian Croat politicians and intellectuals -- mostly from Sarajevo -- who had opposed Zagreb's official policy toward Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as Moslem hardliners in Sarajevo. Leading figures of the Council -- Ivo Komsic, currently member of the seven-member Bosnian Presidency, and Ivan Lovrenovic, writer and publisher from Sarajevo and currently advisor at the Bosnian Embassy in Zagreb -- had worked out the outline settlement of the 1993-conflict and in fact inspired the later U.S. sponsored Washington Accord. (hina) jn as bk 261925 MET jan 96