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LONDON — It is a sign of the times, perhaps, that the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the soft-spoken Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari was immediately met with angry and violent-sounding responses in several countries Friday.
Mr. Ahtisaari, 71, a former Finnish president who became a behind-the-scenes negotiator in many of the world's hot spots, has spent the past 20 years quietly pushing for a form of peace that brings an end to violence and paralyzing conflict, without necessarily pleasing the parties at the table or pretending to be neutral.
In terms of lives saved, it has been an enormously successful approach – although Mr. Ahtisaari has left lingering enmities, as exemplified by the responses to the prize heard in some countries last night.
“This is some kind of a sick joke,” one Serbian listener told the Belgrade radio station B92 Friday night, before denouncing him as a “Nazi.” Another asked: “So the Finnish guy wins an award for managing to split a country in two? What is the world coming to?”
Finland's former president and Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Martti Ahtisaari. (File/2007)
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In Russia, even government figures were willing to denounce him. “I can't fathom how the Nobel Prize or any other award could be granted to Ahtisaari,” Russia's ambassador to NATO said in Brussels Friday.
This sort of openly vented anger – and his characteristic silence in its face – is the sort of thing that has always surrounded Mr. Ahtisaari's approach to conflicts. He has not always pretended to be neutral or guided by high principles; rather, he tells interlocutors, he is simply interested in getting the conflict to end.
In passing up bolder and more heroic-seeming figures – such as last year's choice of former U.S. vice-president and climate-change champion Al Gore – the Nobel judges put their stamp of approval on the modern, European vision of peace-making, which Mr. Ahtisaari has come to embody.
That vision has put him at the centre of many of the world's most nettlesome conflicts. Notably, he brokered the deal that ended South Africa's military control of Namibia and gave that country its independence in 1990; the deal with the government of Indonesia that ended the independence aspirations of the breakaway region of Aceh, the lengthy and ultimately successful effort to get the Provisional Irish Republican Army to give up violence in Northern Ireland and, most controversially, the lengthy talks with Serbia that resulted in the Albanian-majority region of Kosovo becoming an independent nation earlier this year.
His role in that decision infuriated Serbs, who saw him as an advocate of Western and European interests rather than a neutral mediator and who bitterly resented the loss of a region that was both an ancient Serbian religious site and the location of terrible acts of Serbian repression of minorities.
The decision also reinforced a long-held resentment against Mr. Ahtisaari by Russians, whose distrust dates back to his period as president of the former Soviet satellite state of Finland, from 1994 to 2000.
This was almost inevitable: He was born in the Finnish region of Karelia, which was annexed by the Soviet Union and remains part of Russia today; his family was forced to flee along with many other ethnic Finns.
But Mr. Ahtisaari's peace-negotiating organization, Crisis Management Initiative, has sometimes rubbed United Nations officials and international-law leaders the wrong way by avoiding a totally neutral or impartial approach. In last year's Kosovo negotiations, his strongest card was Europe's power over Serbia's potential membership in the European Union, a threat he did not hesitate to dangle, say diplomats involved in the negotiations.
The declaration of independence that resulted from the talks infuriated Russians and annoyed many figures in the international-law community. Yet it has been a surprisingly successful move, producing an end to violence and allowing Serbia to move toward economic normality and membership in Europe.
This week, Kosovo was recognized as a state by neighbouring Montenegro, which as a Slavic country, a Russian ally and a former federal partner of Serbia, surprised many observers by acknowledging the new reality.
This is not the first time the Ahtisaari approach has rubbed people the wrong way. In his early days in Namibia, where he began as a Finnish ambassador, he was seen as eager to impose Western interests on the region in an atmosphere that was still guided by Cold War animosities.
One Australian negotiator on the Indonesia-Aceh peace talks told the Associated Press Friday that Mr. Ahtisaari began “from a very naive position. He was, by definition, pro-Indonesia, supporting the integrity of the state and dismissing Aceh's insistence on independence.”
After initial fury from the Aceh representatives, however, his tough approach ended up winning their respect, and fully ended a decades-long bloody conflict.
Behind the bland, self-effacing Scandinavian façade, Mr. Ahtisaari has never been afraid to make such positions known, and dangle very solid carrots and sticks at the bargaining table.
