Former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari, a global peace mediator who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his work in resolving international conflicts, died on Monday at the age of 86, his foundation announced.
“It is with great sadness that we receive the news of the death of President Martti Ahtisaari,” Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said in a statement.
“He was president in times of change, he led Finland into a global era of the European Union,” he said after announcing the foundation set up by Martti Ahtisaari to prevent and resolve violent conflicts.
Niinistö’s statements were made in a speech on Finnish public television YLE – which interrupted regular programming – in which he appeared somber and said the 2008 Nobel laureate had died after “a long illness”.
In 2021, it was announced that Ahtisaari had advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
Among his most notable achievements, Ahtisaari helped broker peace agreements regarding Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo in the late 1990s, Namibia’s independence in the 1980s, and autonomy for the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2005.
Ahtisaari was also involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s, after being tasked with overseeing the disarmament of the IRA.
When the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee selected Ahtisaari in October 2008, it explained the decision with “his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.
Ahtisaari, who served as president of the Nordic country for a six-year term (from 1994 to 2000), later founded the Helsinki-based Crisis Management Initiative, aimed at preventing and resolving violent conflict through informal dialogue and mediation.
Born on June 23, 1937 in the eastern city of Viipuri, now in Russia, Ahtisaari was a primary school teacher before joining the Finnish Foreign Ministry in 1965.
He spent about twenty years abroad, first as ambassador to Tanzania, Zambia and Somalia and then to the United Nations in New York.
He then joined the UN, where he worked at its headquarters in New York, before leading the United Nations operation that led to Namibia’s independence in 1990.
Ahtisaari, during his diplomatic tenure in Africa in the 1970s, became deeply involved in activities designed to prepare Namibians for independence.
He was appointed special representative of Namibia by then-UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in 1978, and is widely credited with leading the African nation to independence during his tenure as head of the UN peacekeeping force in the late 1990s. seventy.
The government of Namibia thanked Ahtisaari for his work and later made him an honorary citizen of the country.
After returning to Finland in 1991, Ahtisaari worked as a State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before becoming the first Finnish head of state to be elected directly, rather than through an electoral college, in 1994.
Source: DN
