Martti ahtisaari biography examples

President of Finland from 1994 to 2000

Martti Oiva Kalevi Ahtisaari (Finnish:[ˈmɑrtːi(ˈoi̯ʋɑˈkɑleʋi)ˈɑhtisɑːri], 23 June 1937 – 16 October 2023) was a Finnish politician, the tenth president of Finland, from 1994 to 2000, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and a United Nations diplomat and mediator noted for his international peace work.

Ahtisaari was a United Nations special envoy for Kosovo, charged with organizing the Kosovo status process negotiations. These negotiations aimed to resolve a long-running dispute in Kosovo, which later declared its independence from Serbia in 2008. In October 2008, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts". The Nobel statement said that Ahtisaari had played a prominent role in resolving serious and long-lasting conflicts, including ones in Namibia, Aceh (Indonesia), Kosovo and Serbia, and Iraq.

Youth and early career

Martti Ahtisaari was born in Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia) on 23 June 1937. His father, Oiva Ahtisaari, whose grandfather Julius Marenius Adolfsen had emigrated with his parents to Kotka, Finland in 1872 from Tistedalen in Southern Norway, took Finnishcitizenship in 1929 and Finnicized his surname from Adolfsen in 1935. Oiva was working as a NCO in the supply troops in Viipuri when Martti was born.

The Continuation War (World War II) took Oiva Ahtisaari to the front as a non-commissioned officer army mechanic, while Martti's mother, Tyyne, moved to Kuopio with her son to escape immediate danger from the war in 1940. Kuopio was where Ahtisaari spent most of his childhood, eventually attending Kuopion Lyseo high school.

In 1952, Martti Ahtisaari moved to Oulu with his family. There he continued his educati

Martti Ahtisaari 1937 – 2023

Martti Ahtisaari, President, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the CMI, has died on the 16 of October 2023. Martti Ahtisaari was 86 years old. He was born in Vyborg on 23 June 1937.

In many ways, his life was marked by emigration. He made his first evacuation at the age of two, from Viipuri near Savonlinna during the Winter War, from where the family later moved to Kuopio and later to Oulu. Ahtisaari graduated as a school teacher from the Oulu Teacher Training Institute in 1959. However, his curiosity and interest led him to travel the world. When, after a year on the job, the newly graduated teacher was offered a permanent position, he opted to go to Pakistan to work in development cooperation. In 1960, the only destinations from Oulu were Sweden, some people went to America, but seldom to Pakistan.

After three years in Pakistan, Ahtisaari returned to his studies in Helsinki and became involved in the activities of international student organisations, including as the executive director of Students’s International Relief (YKA ). He continued to follow international politics actively: at weekends, he bought the Observer magazine from a newsstand at Helsinki’s railway station and regularly listened to the BBC World Service on the radio. Eeva Hyvärinen, a history graduate, was impressed by this, and she and Martti soon became engaged . They married in 1968, and their son Marko was born the following year.

Ahtisaari’s career in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs began in the mid-1960s at the new development cooperation department headed by Jaakko Iloniemi. In 1973, the 36-year-old Ahtisaari was appointed Finland’s ambassador to Tanzania, and the Ahtisaari family moved to Dar es Salaam. During his time there, Ahtisaari became familiar with the whole African continent, its liberation movements and its leaders. Although the temperature outside Dar es

Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president, died on 16 October at the age of 86. Born in eastern Finland, he was two years old when his family fled from the Russian invasion at the outbreak of the second world war.

A trained school teacher, he moved in 1960 to the Swedish Pakistani Institute in Karachi. In 1965 he joined the Finnish foreign service. His posting as a diplomat in Tanzania in 1973 was the beginning of lasting bonds to the African continent. Only two years later, he started his commitment to the struggle for self-determination of the Namibian people.

Namibia, then called South West Africa, was under the illegal control of apartheid South Africa. According to the United Nations, it was “a trust betrayed”.

Namibia and its decolonisation process have been among my interests as a scholar. Martti Ahtisaari played a crucial role in the United Nations supervised transition to independence, as documented in his biography, aptly titled The Mediator.

The government of Namibia awarded him honorary Namibian citizenship after independence. Upon the news of his death he was locally praised as

a light during Namibia’s dark days.

Namibia’s President Hage Geingob described him as a friend of the Namibian liberation struggle and a leading peacemaker. Through the United Nations, he “played a pivotal role in midwifing the birth of a new Namibia”.

Ahtisaari’s work in Namibia was the beginning of a long and successful engagement in international conflict mediation. Many more diplomatic achievements in various parts of the world followed.

Ahtisaari and Namibia

Ahtisaari’s involvement in Africa began in 1973 when he was appointed Finland’s ambassador to Tanzania. At the time, the anticolonial movements of southern Africa had offices in Dar es Salaam, home to the headquarters of the African Liberation Committee of the Organisation of African Unity.

In 1975 he was appointed as a senator to the council of the United Nations Institute for Namibia. The instit

Martti Ahtisaari (1937-2023) leaves a powerful, living legacy for peace mediation. His core principles are ever more important for advancing peace in an increasingly unstable world.

Martti Ahtisaari, President, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of CMI, passed away on the 16 October 2023, but his example lives on. As Ahtisaari often emphasised, CMI is the most important legacy of his life’s work. In 20 years, CMI has grown into one of the world’s leading peace mediators, continuing the work of its founder around the globe.

Ahtisaari also had a significant impact on the broader development of peace mediation. In 2024, to honor his contributions to the evolution of this field, CMI aims to stimulate discussion on how Ahtisaari’s core principles are relevant to the future of peacemaking.

Ahtisaari’s living legacy is essentially about values and ways of working, of which we now introduce three key principles. All of them continue to guide CMI’s work.

Treat everyone equally

Ahtisaari was known for not making distinctions between people. For him, everyone was on an equal footing. The most important thing in mediation is to try to listen to others and to place yourself in their shoes. Ahtisaari had an extraordinary ability to connect with people.

Peace is not made between friends, but between enemies, and yet every wrongdoer must be treated with respect. Ahtisaari was sometimes criticised for this approach. During the Kosovo peace talks in 1999, Ahtisaari’s colleagues wondered at his courteous treatment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević after the Serb forces had attacked Kosovo on Milosevic’s orders. “My reply to my colleagues was: Milosevic is the president. He must be treated with dignity in order for a solution to come about.”

Ahtisaari