Former Finnish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari died on Monday at the age of 86 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, the Finnish presidency announced.
“It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of President Martti Ahtisaari,” current President Sauli Niinisto said in a statement.
As president from 1994 to 2000, Ahtisaari played the role of mediator in a variety of conflicts, from Indonesia to Kosovo to Namibia, winning numerous awards including the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.
The former UN diplomat led talks between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) separatists, after a thirty-year war that claimed around 15,000 lives.
Talks that began in Helsinki in January 2005 ended six months later with a peace agreement that few observers believed.
Both sides described Ahtisaari as uncompromising during talks but with a sense of humor and warmth outside meetings.
“I have a lot of patience. I’m not used to getting angry, but I can be tough,” he later said, adding that he believed the key to his success was his ability to understand people.
However, the Kosovo issue remains a failure for this tireless peacekeeper, who believed he could bring Kosovo’s Serbs and Albanians together and overcome the horrors of the 1998-1999 conflict.
In late 2005 he was appointed by the UN Security Council to oversee talks between Serbs and Kosovars over the future status of the province.
In March 2007 he ended the talks, recommended independence and gave up his apron. The last negotiations, which were conducted without him, failed and Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence on February 17, 2008.
Ahtisaari retired from public life in September 2021 because he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.