Nobel prize winner and former president continues on his endless quest for peace
Recently, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari found himself in the international limelight again. On October 10, in Stockholm, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his many peace-building efforts around the globe over the decades.
Born in 1937 in Viipuri (a town now located on the Russian side of the Finland-Russia border known as Vyborg), Mr Ahtisaari is primarily known for his contributions to conflict-resolution in Kosovo, the Indonesian island of Sumatra and Namibia.
He was Finland's president from February 1994 until February 2000.
He then founded NGO Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), where he remains chairman. One of CMI's first assignments was to help with talks between the Indonesian government and Sumatra's Free Aceh Movement.
These took place between 2003 and 2005, culminated in a peace deal, and increased peace and security on Indonesia's largest and most restive island. Mr Ahtisaari's other post-presidential jobs have included chairing an independent panel on the security and safety of United Nations personnel in Iraq, UN special envoy for the Horn of Africa, and one of the official inspectors of the Irish Republican Army's arms caches when the organisation vowed to give up weapons in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement between London and Dublin, and the main sides involved in the Northern Ireland conflict.
He began his working life as a primary school teacher before becoming a Finnish diplomat in 1956.
Soon after, he rapidly earned a solid reputation as a peace-builder in Africa.
As a young diplomat, serving in Tanzania in East Africa, he enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a specialist in African politics and peace-building, and it was at the request of African leaders that the UN secretary general appointed him as UN commissioner for Namibia in 1977, and then as the secretary general's special representative for Namibia in 1978.
His role in Namibia's independence process was to co-ordinate the wildly divergent stances of the pro-independence organisation Swapo, South Africa, the west and the former Soviet Union, and to forge an agreement that would be acceptable to all. Somehow, the unflappable Finn, then only in his early 40s, succeeded in getting results.
He remained involved with Namibian politics and nation-building right up to the country's independence in 1990.
Mr Ahtisaari was offered a similar challenge in the late 1990s in establishing peace in the Balkans, where he acted as a peace broker between the United States, its Nato allies, Russia and the former Yugoslavia, over Kosovo.
As a result of his success in overseeing these talks, in the autumn of 2006, he headed multilateral discussions on the future status of Kosovo, a task of monumental complexity on an issue that has today been more or less resolved.
Mr Ahtisaari retains a link to the Balkans by serving as chairman of the Balkan Children and Youth Foundation.
Until 2003, he was a member of the board of directors of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and, until 2004, chairman of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
In the speech he gave earlier this year at a Unesco event, Mr Ahtisaari attributed his endless quest for peace to a childhood trauma.
'The origins of my career as a peace mediator can be found from my childhood years. I was born in the city of Viipuri, then still part of Finland. We lost Viipuri when the Soviet Union attacked my country. Along with 400,000 fellow Karelians, I became an eternally displaced person in the rest of Finland.'
Mr Ahtisaari knows what it feels like to be a refugee. Later in the same speech, he explained: 'With my mother, I moved from one household to another before settling in the eastern part of Finland, in the city of Kuopio.
'This experience, which millions of people around the world have gone through, provided me with sensitivity, which explains my desire to advance peace and thus help others who have gone through similar experiences as I did.'
