Lord Ashdown has been appointed as the new UN high representative in Bosnia Herzegovina.

The former Lib Dem leader has long had an interest in the region, visiting Bosnia at the height of the Yugoslav civil war in 1992.

Paddy Ashdown, who replaces the Austrian Wolfgang Petritsch, will hold the post until 2004 and will be tasked with implementing the terms of the 1995 Dayton peace accord.

The seven-year old agreement brokered by the US, backed up by the UN and a NATO-led military stabilisation force, S-For, was first billed as a temporary transition to democracy.

Heading-up an authority similar to former protectorates, Ashdown will command a peace implementation council with sweeping powers to dismiss obstructive officials, oversee elections, impose laws and even veto local broadcasters and media.

"The Balkans have only ever been at peace when they have been held within the overarching context of a greater power," he has said.

Pedigree

The Lib Dem peer has a long pedigree in international relations and the changing role of former colonial powers abroad.

Born in Delhi in 1941, he comes from a family of soldiers and colonial administrators who spent their lives in India, but in 1945 his family returned to Britain to buy a farm in Ulster.

Between 1959 and 1972 he served as a Royal Marines officer and saw active service as a commando in colonial conflicts in Borneo and the Persian Gulf.

After special forces training in 1965, he then led a Special Boat Section in the Far East and then in 1970 took command of a commando company in Belfast, as the Irish conflict took off.

Leaving the marines in 1972, he joined the Foreign Office and was posted to the British UN Geneva mission to the United Nations where he was responsible for Britain's relations with a number of United Nations organisations.

UN chiefs will be aware that Ashdown has long been outspoken on Bosnia, with his view that "I'm not optimistic... I'm realistic".

"It is a difficult situation in Bosnia but there is peace. Bosnia has come a long way in a short time. I'm not optimistic about Bosnia, I'm realistic. There is normality, a currency, the army is back in the barracks - it is stabilising," he said.

Ashdown has often urged the European powers to do more in the Balkans region, clashing in 1995 with Conservative prime minister John Major over claims that Britain had abandoned the Srebrenica safe haven to the Serbs, triggering a massacre of Muslims.