The Guardian, January 24, 2007 *German Bosnia chief 'fired' after just a year*
The sense of destabilising crisis gathering over former Yugoslavia intensified last night when the German official in charge of running Bosnia abruptly announced he was resigning less than a year after he succeeded Paddy Ashdown in the post. Christian Schwarz-Schilling, a former German cabinet minister and multi-millionaire, succeeded Lord Ashdown last February and has been widely criticised in Bosnia for his alleged lack of energy and attentiveness in the post. "He was the shortest and the worst of the high representatives running Bosnia," said Senad Slatina, a Sarajevo analyst. Senior western officials in Sarajevo said Mr Schwarz-Schilling, who is the EU special representative as well as the international community's high representative, was fired. With next-door Serbia in disarray after an inconclusive election at the weekend and with an international plan to redraw Serbia's border and create a new state of Kosovo about to be unveiled, the events in Bosnia increased the sense of drift towards destabilisation in the region. The Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, is threatening to call a referendum to break up Bosnia and join his half to Serbia in response to any international imposition of an independent Kosovo. Serbia, where nationalist extremists emerged as the strongest party in the weekend election, refuses to surrender Kosovo and the west is likely to impose a form of "supervised" independence within weeks. A meeting in Washington last week of officials from the US, Britain, Germany, France, and Italy decided to replace the German, western officials said. http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=article&articleid=14183 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
