Michael Steiner

Michael Steinerr
Michael Steiner, Zalmai Rassoul and Marc Grossman participate in an International Contact Group press conference at the Government Media Information Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 2011.
German Ambassador to India
Incumbent
Assumed office March 2012
Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Kosovo
In office 14 February 2002 – 8 July 2003
Preceded by	Hans Hækkerup
Succeeded by	Harri Holkeri
Personal details
Born	(1949-11-28) 28 November 1949 (age 67) Bavaria
Occupation	Diplomat

Michael Steiner (born 28 November 1949, in Munich) is a German diplomat who served head of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). He is the current German Ambassador to India since March 2012. He is due to retire in June 2015.

Michael Steiner was born on 28 November 1949 in Bavaria, Germany. Steiner studied law in Paris and Munich from 1971 to 1977 and qualified as a judge in 1981.

In 1981, Steiner entered the German Foreign Office. As a young political officer in Prague in the summer of 1989, he won plaudits for his handling of a refugee crisis that helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. As hundreds of East Germans surrounded his embassy grounds, asking for asylum and West German citizenship, he helped some of them over the wall himself, onto the embassy grounds, which were West German territory. Then he worked to negotiate a deal to allow the East Germans to leave the embassy and go to the West.

During his career with the German government, Steiner served as head of the liaison office for German humanitarian aid in Zagreb, made his mark in the 1990s working with the so-called Contact Group of nations monitoring the Yugoslav wars (of which Germany was a member), and as head of the co-ordination unit for multilateral peace efforts. He also led the special section "International Peace Efforts in Yugoslavia" from 1994 to 1995.

Steiner served nearly six years as principal deputy to Carl Bildt, the first high representative in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1998, while serving as Germany's ambassador in Prague, he was plucked by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to work in the chancellor's office as his foreign and security policy adviser. And in 2001 he was forced to resign after the so-called "caviar affair ()".