Martti Ahtisaari
Martti Ahtisaari was president of Finland from 1994 to 2000 and, before and after, the United Nations mediator who brought Namibia to independence in 1990, carried the terms that ended the Kosovo war to Milosevic in June 1999, brokered the peace between Indonesia and the Aceh rebels in 2005, and wrote the plan for Kosovo's independence in 2007, for which the Nobel committee gave him the Peace Prize of 2008 as a man who had worked on three continents for three decades to resolve conflicts. He was born in Viipuri in 1937 and lost his home town to the Soviet Union at two, which he said was the beginning of his interest in displaced people. He trained as a primary teacher, went to Pakistan for a Swedish aid agency, and entered the foreign ministry in 1965. He was ambassador to Tanzania, and from 1977 the UN commissioner for Namibia, the South African-held territory whose transition he supervised as special representative in 1989 and 1990 with a peacekeeping force, the first of the UN's post-Cold War state buildings and the one that worked. The Social Democrats picked him as their candidate in 1993 while he was chairing the Bosnia working group of the international conference, and he won the first direct presidential election in February 1994 against Elisabeth Rehn, having campaigned on the EU membership that the referendum of October approved. The presidency was shorn of most of its powers by then and he used the rest abroad. The shuttle with Chernomyrdin that persuaded Milosevic to accept NATO's terms on 3 June 1999 was his, done at the villa in Belgrade with the map on the table. He declined to run again in 2000, founded the Crisis Management Initiative in Helsinki, and mediated the Aceh agreement of August 2005 that ended a thirty-year war within months of the tsunami. The Kosovo plan of 2007 proposed supervised independence, which Serbia and Russia refused and Kosovo took in 2008. He died in Helsinki in October 2023 of Alzheimer's disease, and the state gave him the funeral of a president.
- Lived: 1937 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: Finnish
- Roles: president, diplomat, mediator
