HELSINKI (AP) — Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland and global peace broker awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his work to resolve international conflicts, died Monday. He was 86.
The foundation he created for preventing and resolving violent conflicts said in a statement it was “deeply saddened by the loss of its founder and chair of board.”
Ahtisaari who was the Nordic country's president for one six-year term — 1994 until 2000 — later founded the Helsinki-based Crisis Management Initiative, aimed at preventing and resolving violent conflicts through informal dialogue and mediation. He was appointed as the special representative of Namibia by U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in 1978, and is widely credited for leading the African nation to independence under his mandate as the head of U.N. peacekeeping forces there in the late 1980s.
Having lived abroad for so long, he came into the race as a political outsider and was seen to bring a breath of fresh air to Finnish politics. Ahtisaari was a keen supporter of the European Union and NATO which Finland joined in 1995 and 2023 respectively.
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