Martti Ahtisaari

Biography

Martti Ahtisaari was born in Viipuri in 1937 and grew up in Kuopio and Oulu after the family fled the war. He qualified as a primary-school teacher in Oulu in 1959, ran a physical education school in Karachi in the early 1960s and then studied at the Helsinki School of Economics. In 1965 he joined Finland's foreign ministry to help build its development aid office.

He was ambassador to Tanzania, with accreditation to Zambia, Somalia and Mozambique, from 1973 to 1977, then UN Commissioner for Namibia from 1977 to 1981. From 1987 to 1991 he was UN under-secretary-general for administration and management, and in 1989-90 he led the UN Transition Assistance Group that oversaw Namibia's path to independence. He later served as state secretary in the Finnish foreign ministry and worked on the UN's Bosnia negotiations.

Winning the Social Democrats' primary and then the first direct presidential election in 1994, he was president of Finland from 1994 to 2000. He backed Finland's entry into the European Union and, with Viktor Chernomyrdin, negotiated with Slobodan Milošević to end the Kosovo war in 1999.

After leaving office he chaired the International Crisis Group, founded the Crisis Management Initiative, inspected IRA weapons dumps for the Northern Ireland decommissioning body, mediated the 2005 Aceh peace agreement and led the UN's Kosovo status negotiations from 2005 to 2007. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 and joined The Elders in 2009. He died in Helsinki in October 2023.