In a world afflicted by conflict and the suffering of innocent victims of war, there are few people who know more about the value – and challenges – of making peace than the 78-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari.
So when the former president of Finland speaks out about the tragedy of a lost opportunity to bring peace to Syria, as he did this week, it’s not unreasonable to speculate about the tens of thousands who might still be alive today but for an extraordinary and complacent failure of diplomacy.
In 2008, Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.
He had been there, working behind the scenes to solve many of the world’s apparently intractable conflicts. His triumphs included helping to oversee the disarming of the IRA in Northern Ireland, bringing down the curtain on Namibia’s 25-year war of independence in 1990, coaxing the parties in the complex Kosovo War to stumble towards an end to bloodshed in 1999 and ushering to an end in 2005 the three-decade battle for independence fought by Indonesia’s Aceh province.
In short, as Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general and fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate once said, Ahtisaari “is the only person I know who has successfully built peace on three different continents”.
But on February 22, 2012, Ahtisaari lost a crucial behind-the-scenes battle at the United Nations in New York to end the nightmare that Syria had already become, and which would escalate into the refugee crisis now testing the world.
What he disclosed this week in an interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper was as astonishing as it was shocking, and casts an even starker light on the failure of the world community to intervene decisively to end Syria's torment.
Publicly, Russia has always stood by the Syrian president Bashar Al Assad. But Ahtisaari says that during meetings in 2012 with representatives of the permanent five nations of the UN, the Russian envoy told him it was time “to find an elegant way for Assad to step aside”.
Had that happened, countless Syrians might have been spared the loss of their homes and lives, and the indignity and danger of fleeing as refugees.
The Russian diplomat was Vitaly Churkin – who, diplomatically, has declined to comment on “a private conversation” – and Ahtisaari says he immediately passed on what he knew was a direct message from the Kremlin to the British, French and American missions at the UN.
But "nothing happened", the Finn told The Guardian. The western powers, already hesitant to become embroiled, were so "convinced that Assad would be thrown out of office in a few weeks" they decided no action, elegant or otherwise, was necessary.
Ahtisaari’s credibility is buttressed by the fact that he had been dispatched to the UN on his Syrian mission as a member of The Elders, an independent group of global leaders, chaired by Annan, who work together for peace and human rights around the world.
It’s an exclusive club, whose members have included Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela, and how Ahtisaari came to be a member is an inspirational story to give hope to the most despairing refugee.
The seeds of Ahtisaari’s determination to help the innocent victims of war and oppression were sown during his childhood. Born in 1937 in Viipuri, a city then in Finland and now in Russia, Ahtisaari and his mother, Tyyne, were driven from their home, along with 70,000 other refugees, during the Winter War between Finland and the USSR in 1939.
Earlier this month, just a few days before his revelations in The Guardian, Ahtisaari spoke about the formative experience at an event in London to mark the publication of The Mediator, a biography on Ahtisaari written by two Finnish authors.
“I very soon realised I would become an eternally displaced person because I could never return to where I was born because it was not part of my country,” he told an audience at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
The experience of being a refugee, said Ahtisaari, had “definitely influenced me ... If I could be of any use, I would try to use my own experience to promote compassion for refugees”.
Ahtisaari rose from relative obscurity as a civil servant in the Finnish foreign ministry to become one of the most respected players in the field of international conflict resolution.
After graduating from Finland’s Oulu university in 1959 as a teacher, in 1960, Ahtisaari moved to Karachi, where he ran a YMCA school. His experiences in Pakistan set him on a path. Returning to Finland, in 1965, he joined the foreign ministry, serving in roles linked to the country’s aid programme.
But it was in 1973, at the age of 36, that Ahtisaari found his true talent, for diplomacy, when he was appointed Finland’s ambassador to Tanzania.
It was in this post that Ahtisaari began his long relationship with the fortunes of war-torn Namibia, which would later make him an honorary citizen out of gratitude for his efforts.
Serving first as a member of the senate of the UN Institute for Namibia between 1975 and 1976, in 1977, he was appointed the UN commissioner for the country. From 1978 to 1988, he was special representative of the secretary general.
In 1984, Ahtisaari returned to Finland to work once more in international development at its foreign ministry, but in 1987, he was invited to New York by the then UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to serve as under-secretary general for administration and management.
The following year, fate took a hand. On December 21, 1988, PanAm flight 103 was brought down by a bomb over the Scottish town Lockerbie, killing all 259 people on board. Among them was Bernt Carlsson, a successor UN commissioner for Namibia, and Ahtisaari was sent in his place to head the United Nations Transition Assistance Group, which shepherded the country towards independence in 1989.
As Ahtisaari’s Nobel biography notes, after 13 years of involvement with Namibia for the UN, “his first peacemaking task resulted in the independence, [an] experience [that] has had crucial importance in his later work”.
In his Nobel Prize speech in 2008, Ahtisaari reflected on what he had learnt from the resolution of the Namibian nightmare. It was, he said, “almost unbelievable that we managed to get all the key actors ... to work towards a shared goal”.
The lesson was that “a durable solution can only be found if one is also prepared to engage in discussions with your political opponents”.
A paper for the Brookings Institute in the same year gave an insight into Ahtisaari’s negotiating skills. To great effect, wrote the author, he combined “immense personal charm with a tough, no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is approach to conducting negotiations”.
One of the players in the Aceh negotiations put it this way: “His method was really extraordinary. He said: ‘Do you want to win or do you want peace?’”
In 1994, Ahtisaari was elected president of Finland, a post he held until 2000, helping to steer his country through a recession and to membership of the European Union.
On leaving office, Ahtisaari founded the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), an organisation dedicated to helping the international community “enhance its capacity when it comes to preventive diplomacy [and] peace-building”.
As the Christian Monitor noted in 2006, "the reputation of the self-deprecating former Finnish president as an impartial mediator" had made him "the 'go-to' guy for international crises".
In London earlier this month, Ahtisaari spoke of his persisting faith in a political solution to the Syrian crisis.
“We should have concentrated on a political solution,” he said. “I still believe that has to be done.”
Such an approach remained possible despite the brand of violent extremism peddled by ISIL and other groups. The key, he believed, lay in engaging with Muslims “who reject the fundamentalist distortion of their beliefs ... The whole world is against [ISIL]. They are not representatives of the Muslim world.”
Last year, CMI celebrated its 15th anniversary. Its motto, and Ahtisaari’s creed, is “All conflicts can be resolved”.
“Wars and conflicts are not inevitable,” he said during his Nobel speech in Oslo in 2008. “They are caused by human beings. There are always interests that are furthered by war. Therefore, those who have power and influence can also stop them ... we should not accept any excuses from those in power. Peace is a question of will.”
Three years ago, to Ahtisaari’s dismay, that will was not to be found in New York.
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