Martti Ahtisaari

Martti Ahtisaari (born June 23, 1937, Viipuri, Finland [now Vyborg, Russia]—died October 16, 2023, Helsinki, Finland) was a Finnish politician and noted mediator who was president of Finland (1994–2000). In 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts to resolve international conflicts.

Born in Viipuri, Finland, Ahtisaari was displaced along with the rest of his family when the city was ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 after the Russo-Finnish War. The family moved first to Kuopio in south-central Finland and later northwest to Oulu. Ahtisaari graduated from the University of Oulu in 1959 and in the early 1960s worked in Pakistan on an educational project for the Swedish Agency for International Development. He returned to Finland and joined the Foreign Affairs Ministry in 1965; eight years later he was appointed ambassador to Tanzania, a post he held until 1976. He was also an envoy (1975–76) to Zambia, Somalia, and Mozambique. Ahtisaari honed his diplomatic skills as the United Nations (UN) commissioner for Namibia (1977–81), a country torn by internal strife. He continued to represent Namibia during the 1980s while serving in several Finnish Foreign Ministry posts, and he led the UN team that supervised Namibia’s transition to independence (1989–90). Ahtisaari was a key figure in the Bosnia and Herzegovina peace talks (1992–93).

In 1994 Ahtisaari ran for the Finnish presidency, and his vision of Finland as an active participant in international affairs helped him win the election. He urged his nation’s entry into the European Union (EU), and for the first half of 1999, Finland assumed the EU’s rotating presidency. In June of that year, Ahtisaari used his diplomatic skills to help end the conflict in Kosovo as he and Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin persuaded President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to accept a peace plan as a condition of stopping punitive bombings by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Often encountering resistance from Finland’s Parliament, which preferred a more cautious foreign policy, as well as from his party, the Social Democrats, Ahtisaari did not run for reelection in 2000.

After leaving office, Ahtisaari founded the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) and was selected for a number of diplomatic roles, including acting as an arms inspector in Northern Ireland, heading a UN fact-finding mission into an Israeli army operation in Janīn in the West Bank, and mediating the conflict between the government of Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement. In 2005 he was named the UN special envoy for the future status of Kosovo, and in 2007 Ahtisaari issued a proposal—accepted by Kosovo’s majority Albanian population but rejected by Serbia—that called for UN-administered independence for Kosovo along with self-governance for the region’s Serb-dominated municipalities. In 2007–08 he helped organize and mediate talks in Helsinki between Iraqi Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims. He subsequently was an active member of the Elders (2009–18), a group that sought to address global human rights issues and abuses. In 2021 it was announced that Ahtisaari was suffering from advanced Alzheimer disease.

In addition to his Nobel honour, Ahtisaari received the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding in 2000 and the UNESCO Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in 2008.