  The thermal multihadron production observed in different high energy
collisions poses two basic problems: (1) why do even elementary collisions with
comparatively few secondaries (e+e- annihilation) show thermal behaviour, and
2) why is there in such interactions a suppression of strange particle
production? We show that the recently proposed mechanism of thermal hadron
production through Hawking-Unruh radiation can naturally account for both. The
event horizon of colour confinement leads to thermal behaviour, but the
resulting temperature depends on the strange quark content of the produced
hadrons, causing a deviation from full equilibrium and hence a suppression of
strange particle production. We apply the resulting formalism to multihadron
production in e+e- annihilation over a wide energy range and make a
comprehensive analysis of the data in the conventional statistical
hadronization model and the modified Hawking-Unruh formulation. We show that
this formulation provides a very good description of the measured hadronic
abundances, fully determined in terms of the string tension and the bare
strange quark mass; it contains no adjustable parameters.
