After More Than 30 Years ABN-AMRO's Loans to Cluster Bomb Makers Move Me To Close My Account

ZEVENBERGEN, Netherlands -- I remember opening my bank account with ABN just before I left high school in the Netherlands in the late 1970s. I started it with about 50 Guilders, perhaps the equivalent of $20 at the time. It was a rite of passage having my own account and with our country�s largest bank no less.

You might say banks are banks, but ABN AMRO (ABN later merged with AMRO) also stood for something iconic in my life. My whole family banked there. My aunt and uncle lived in an apartment above one of its branches in Zevenbergen, my dad�s hometown. (I am standing in front of that branch in the photo). With some Dutch pride, we followed the bank�s evolution into one of the world�s largest financial conglomerates as I grew up.

Over the years, I have had no complaints about ABN-AMRO, whose acronym stands for Algemene Bank Nederland and Amsterdam Rotterdam Bank. Its services are great. Its teller machines are everywhere. They have responsive, helpful employees. I never had a problem with a statement error. Even the interest rate isn�t bad.

But while in Holland to visit my elderly mother this month, I did something I never thought I would: I walked into the branch office of my bank�s largest competitor, RABO Bank and opened a new account there with the goal of closing the one I have had so long with ABN AMRO.

Why? Well, in the one of those moments that turns your stomach, I found out a few months ago that ABN-AMRO and another Dutch financial conglomerate, ING, made loans to European defense contractors that make cluster bombs.

ABN AMRO, ING and Fortis, a Dutch-Belgian bank, were part of syndicates which lent �1.5bn to French-Dutch defense group Thales and �3bn to European defense company EADS (based in the Netherlands) in 2005, according to Netwerk Vlaanderen, a Belgian organization monitoring arms trade funding.

ABN-AMRO's loan came after it made promises in its 2003 annual report to withdraw from further loans to "clients with operations directly involved in the manufacture and marketing of clusters bombs."

Earlier this year, 46 countries, including the Netherlands, pledged to work towards a ban on cluster bombs which spread tiny bombs over a large area and have a very high civilian casualty rate (See P-I Opinion Piece).

Cluster bombs are the reason we�re in Vietnam and why we send medical equipment and supplies to Laos. I have seen too many kids with lifelong injuries from cluster bombs in these countries to ignore the fact that my lifelong bank makes their fabrication possible through loans.

I intend to write the bank to let them know why I am closing my account as I hope other account holders will do. I have no illusion that my move will change the bank's policy. But ABN AMRO has been the target of several recent takeover bids by other European banking groups, including two from the United Kingdom.

Perhaps since the problems with landmines and cluster bombs are more deeply embedded in the British conscious because of the awareness brought to the issue there by the late Princess Diana, a new British owner of ABN AMRO will be moved to change its lending policies.

But I am not going to wait around for that.