Finnish diplomat wins Peace Prize

Calling him an “outstanding international mediator,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2008 to former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari for his efforts to resolve international conflicts across the globe, from Northern Ireland and Namibia to Kosovo, Indonesia and Iraq.

His efforts over three decades, including convening secret meetings in Finland this year between warring Sunni and Shiite groups from Iraq, “have contributed to a more peaceful world and to ‘fraternity between nations’ in Alfred Nobel’s spirit,” the committee said in announcing the award.

“He is a world champion when it comes to peace and he never gives up,” said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel awards committee.

A lifelong diplomat who heads the nongovernmental Crisis Management Initiative, Ahtisaari is known as a quiet, self-effacing negotiator willing to step out of the way until needed and then to take a firm hand and, at times, risks to broker peace.

“Martti is a brilliant negotiator and mediator with a tremendously effective personal style that combines charm and good humor with an iron determination,” said Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group, of which Ahtisaari is chairman emeritus.

Ahtisaari, 71, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that he considered his work as U.N. special envoy to Namibia to be his greatest accomplishment. He shepherded the country through a decade of negotiations between South West Africa People’s Organization guerrillas and the South African apartheid government, resulting in Namibian independence in 1990.

“Of course Namibia is absolutely the most important, since it took so long,” Ahtisaari said.

South Africa took over Namibia during World War I and despite a U.N.-mandated end to its rule in 1966, continued to hold the territory for decades as a buffer against Marxist Angola. In negotiations, Ahtisaari had to juggle the interests of an array of stakeholders who saw southwestern Africa as a frontline in the Cold War, including the United States, former colonial ruler Germany, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Chester Crocker, who was U.S. assistant secretary of State for African affairs during the 1980s, said Ahtisaari was always analytic and constructively blunt with all sides.

“He’d say [to the Africans], ‘You may not like what the American position is but they are the Americans and they mean it.’ Then he’d come back to us and say, ‘These are the political requirements of the parties,’ ” Crocker recalled. He added that Ahtisaari “has a tolerance for the bizarre quirks and odd behavior of big powers, as well as little countries.”

Namibia’s former prime minister and Parliament Speaker Theo-Ben Gurirab said the award was a “deserved honor,” German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. “It took decades, it took death, it took betrayal, it took suffering, but in the end he was part of the team that brought about the independence of Namibia,” said Gurirab, who was the rebels’ envoy to the U.N. during Ahtisaari’s mediation.

Ahtisaari has the peace-maker’s advantage of coming from the neutral country of Finland. He was born in Karelia, which his family left when he was 2 in 1939 during a Soviet invasion.

It is an experience he has said has given him a sensitivity to the plight of refugees caught up in wars.

As a young man, he set up a teacher training college in Pakistan for a Swedish charity before joining the Finnish Foreign Ministry in 1965. He began his international diplomatic career as Finland’s youngest ambassador, to Tanzania in 1973. He then served at the United Nations in New York, became U.N. Commissioner for Namibia in 1977 and was named the U.N. envoy there the following year.

In 1994, Ahtisaari was voted in as Finland’s first directly elected president, a largely ceremonial office that he held for one six-year term before returning to his first love of foreign affairs.

Ahtisaari is one of the main architects of Kosovo’s independence. He was chairman of the Bosnia-Herzegovina working group in the international peace conference on the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1993 and then was special advisor to the U.N. secretary-general on Yugoslavia in 1993. During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 1999 bombing campaign to force Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo, Ahtisaari and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin were known to the Americans as “the hammer and the anvil,” according to Strobe Talbott, then U.S. deputy secretary of State.

“Martti was the hammer to get [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic to accept NATO’s terms. He had credibility because he was a Finn and because he knew the Russians well and they respected him. And thanks to him the Kosovo war ended in the nick of time, because after 78 days of bombing, the allies were going wobbly,” Talbott said.

Ahtisaari returned to Kosovo in November 2005 as a U.N. special envoy and spent nearly two years going back and forth among the parties trying to draft a plan that would allow Kosovo to achieve independence under the supervision of the European Union backed by NATO forces.

This time a newly resurgent Russia, Serbia’s powerful ally, blocked the plan from coming to a vote at the U.N. Security Council. Kosovo went on to declare unilateral independence in February of this year, and Ahtisaari’s blueprint forms the core of Kosovo’s constitution.

Critics have said Kosovo’s declaration of independence is potentially destabilizing in Europe, and Russia has since used it as an argument for the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which have broken away from Russia’s neighbor and U.S. ally Georgia. But Richard Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and special envoy to Kosovo, said “Martti’s plan was the right one and paved the way for the events that followed.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy also said that the prize vindicated Ahtisaari’s decision to put Kosovo on the road to independence. “France . . . sees this Nobel prize in particular as a recognition that the proposal of President Ahtisaari was the right one,” Sarkozy said in a statement.

In 2000, Britain appointed Ahtisaari and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa to oversee the secretive and highly sensitive inspection of the Irish Republican Army’s weapons dumps, part of the Northern Ireland peace process between Protestants who support continued unity with Britain and Catholic nationalists who seek unity with Ireland.

He oversaw the 2005 peacemaking between the government of Indonesia and Acehnese rebels after nearly 30 years of conflict that left 15,000 dead. The Nobel committee also cited his group’s work “to help find a peaceful conclusion to the problems in Iraq.”

Ahtisaari’s compatriots said they’d long felt he should get the prize. Tapani Vaahtoranta, former director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, said, “It’s big news. . . . Everyone thinks that he deserved a prize.”

Ahtisaari was on the short list last year and when the prize went to former Vice President Al Gore and the Geneva-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their environmental initiatives, many in Finland felt his time might have passed.

“This came as a surprise,” Vaahtoranta said. He said that Ahtisaari works quietly and is not highly visible in Finland anymore. “Sometimes I get the feeling that he was better known outside of Finland than inside Finland.”

The Nobel committee generally prefers to confer the award on primary actors, or leaders of states embroiled in conflicts who engage in peacemaking, though it noted that it has previously awarded the peace prize to mediators in international politics, as it did in the case of former President Carter for his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ahtisaari said he would use the prize money of about $1.4 million to continue funding his Crisis Management Initiative.

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Miller reported from Los Angeles and Chu from London. Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City and Robyn Dixon in Johannesburg, South Africa, contributed to this report.