Free Republic

<p>Paddy Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and international overseer of Bosnia, is in the frame to become a European special envoy for the Balkans, according to senior sources in Brussels.</p> <p>Catherine Ashton, the Labour peer who is the EU's foreign and security policy chief, is to discuss Ashdown's possible appointment at dinner in London on Thursday night with William Hague, the foreign secretary.</p>

ISN SECURITY WATCH (20/05/05) - The EU on Thursday said it would not suggest starting accession negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina because of the country’s failure to implement police and media reforms. The European Commission on Thursday said Bosnia had not fulfilled the necessary requirements to begin Stabilization and Assocations Agreement (SAA) talks - the first step towards EU membership talks. “The two conditions have not been satisfied, and there is no recommendation today,” said Reinhard Priebe, the head of the European Commission’s Western Balkans Enlargement Directorate. The European Commission’s negative response comes only days after talks between Bosnian politicians...

Srebrenica atrocity commemorated | 22:29 July 11 | B92 SREBRENICA -- Sunday – In the Memorial Center in Potocari, near Srebrenica, a funeral service was held for 338 identified individuals found in a mass grave in Srebrenica, that were killed in July 1995. Among the identified was also one female and 16 children. The funeral services marked the seven year anniversary of the massacre of more than 7,000 people in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Representing the Bosnia0Herzegovina Executive Council, Sulejman Tihic spoke of the atrocity and its political ramifications, and of punishment for...

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Bosnia peace overseer Paddy Ashdown dismissed 60 Bosnian Serb officials Wednesday over the authorities' failure to arrest top war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic. Those removed included Parliament Speaker Dragan Kalinic, leader of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) founded by Karadzic in 1990, and Interior Minister Zoran Djeric. "I decided to remove these people from public and party positions," Ashdown told a news conference. Ashdown has sweeping powers to remove officials seen as obstructing the peace process under the 1995 Dayton accord that ended Europe's worst conflict since World War II. More than 200,000 people died in the...

SARAJEVO : The top international representative in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown, said that heads should roll after an audit showed that state institutions had exceeded their budgets by millions of dollars. "In any normal country ... that level of waste by institutions could not result in anything else than high-level resignations," Ashdown said, reacting to Wednesday's report from the Bosnian Central Audit Office. The report revealed a number of budget irregularities in six public institutions including the presidency, government and election commission. It blamed lax internal control systems for the losses. The country's tripartite presidency alone spent nearly a million convertible...

SARAJEVO, Nov 6 (AFP) - The top international representative in Bosnia warned Thursday he would stop an increase in public spending by Bosnian Serbs to prevent the country losing the support of the world's monetary institutions. "Don't commit financial suicide. Step back now. If you don't than I will be forced to intervene to prevent you from destroying this country's chances of a better future," Paddy Ashdown told a news conference, directing his message to the Bosnian Serb government. He was referring to its attempt to buy social peace by raising public sector wages and pensions by 20 percent with...

This war's in trouble, bogged down in a Vietnam-style quagmire, up against a tenacious enemy whose... Whoops, sorry. That was last week. In Punditstan and Armchairiya, we're already moving on to the next quagmire: George Bush and Tony Blair may have won the war, but they're in danger of losing the peace if we don't get the UN, EU and all the other multilateral do-gooders involved in rebuilding Iraq. For once, the quagmire predictors could be on to something. It could, indeed, be a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that it's bound to be one if Dominique...

Ashdown 'running Bosnia like a Raj' Ian Traynor in Zagreb Saturday July 5, 2003 The Guardian Paddy Ashdown displays a "bewildering conception of democratic politics" and his exercise of absolute powers in Bosnia is frustrating the establishment of a functioning democracy in a country recovering from war, according to a study of nation building in the Balkans. In a scathing critique of seven years of western efforts to turn Bosnia into a liberal democracy following the 1992-95 war, the study singles out the former Liberal Democrat leader, whom it accuses of turning Bosnia into a "European Raj", deploying the methods...