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Ex-Leader Of Finland Wins Peace Prize

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The Washington Post

Published: October 11, 2008

PARIS - Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president who has been a tireless mediator in conflicts around the world for more than three decades, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and expressed hope that the prize will help him raise funding for further peacemaking in hot spots to come.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee picked Ahtisaari, 71, from a 197-name list of nominees including jailed Chinese dissidents and the recently liberated Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt. Leaving aside headline-grabbing figures, the committee honored a former schoolteacher and diplomat known for indefatigable persistence in negotiations to bring peaceful closes to wars in countries including Namibia, Indonesia, Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland.

"He is a world champion when it comes to peace, and he never gives up," Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the awards committee chairman, told reporters in Oslo.

"Through his untiring efforts and good results, he has shown what role mediation of various kinds can play in the resolution of international conflicts," the committee said in announcing the award.

The $1.4 million prize will be formally awarded in Oslo on Dec. 10.

Ahtisaari, interviewed by Norway's NRK television, expressed gratitude for the honor in reserved tones that may have come from his years as a negotiator. Demonstrating the practical bent that has characterized his career, he said the recognition should make it easier to raise funding for his international mediation organization in Helsinki, Crisis Management Initiative.

The longtime international mediator was most recently in the spotlight for his efforts to broker a peaceful resolution for Kosovo as it sought to become independent from Serbia. Appointed U.N. special envoy for Kosovo in 2005, Ahtisaari concluded that an internationally monitored independence was the only way out. In the face of Russian opposition, the U.N. plan was never officially carried out, however, and Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in February over protests from Serbia.

Shortly before taking over the Kosovo portfolio, Ahtisaari had negotiated a peaceful end to the longstanding conflict between the Indonesian government and secessionist rebels in the Aceh region on the island of Sumatra. Returning home from the Kosovo mission, he also tried last year to facilitate reconciliation between Iraq's warring Sunni and Shiite factions.

But Ahtisaari told NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp., that he considered his greatest achievement to be helping smooth the way for Namibia's accession to independence, which he supervised as the U.N. commissioner for Namibia between 1977 and 1981 and again as a special U.N. representative in 1989 after the death of his successor as commissioner.

BETS ON AUTHOR STIR SUSPICION

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A surprising number of bettors correctly chose French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio to win the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, leading the Nobel prize jury to suspect a leak.

The Nobel selection by the Swedish Academy is notoriously hard to guess, but the betting firm Ladbrokes received a large number of bets on Le Clezio in the days before Thursday's announcement.

The academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said Friday that he has a "strong suspicion that there has been a leak in the system."

Engdahl was in Paris over the weekend, where he read a Le Clezio book. But he says he "camouflaged" the book.

The Associated Press

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