Ahtisaari and the fourth chair

Charlotte Airas, director of a new documentary on the 1999 Kosovo peace talks, believes Martti Ahtisaari deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize

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By Unto Hämäläinen
     
      Back in 2001, film director Charlotte Airas was talking with her French producer, pondering which Finn might possibly be interesting enough to the wider public to merit making a documentary for international distribution.
      "In the end we were left with just two names: Mika Häkkinen and Martti Ahtisaari."
      Airas chose the former President over the former Formula One world champion and set about looking into her subject. After five years, the documentary Neljäs tuoli ("The Fourth Chair - The Art of How to End a War", 2006) is complete and will be screened on YLE's TV2 on Tuesday 3.10.
      English, French, and German-language versions are expected to follow on other European TV channels.
      The 52-minute documentary tells of the collaboration between Ahtisaari, the former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in finding a solution to the conflict in Kosovo in the spring of 1999.
     
The subject is more than a touch topical today. Ahtisaari's name has been mentioned in some quarters as a candidate for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, to be announced on October 13th.
      "Yes, I think he would deserve it", Airas says emphatically.
      At present, Martti Ahtisaari is heading the discussions in Vienna on the final status of Kosovo, as the Special Envoy and mediator appointed to the task by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
      Charlotte Airas is convinced that Ahtisaari - if anyone - has the ability to forge a deal on this thorny issue.
      "Ahtisaari has a kind of teacher's style. He can calm people down and wait patiently for the right moment to act, and when it comes he will not throw the chance away."
     
A deal should be reached by the end of the year. Ahtisaari is under a great deal of pressure. Serbia is threatening to walk away from the negotiating table if Ahtisaari suggests independence for Kosovo, which Serbia vehemently opposes.
      Difficulties like this are nevertheless not new to Ahtisaari. The ongoing Kosovo talks are a continuation to that peace process that is described in The Fourth Chair. In 1998 Slobodan Milosevic, the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, had given Serbian troops the order to "cleanse" Kosovo.
      The purges led to around 850,000 Kosovar Albanians fleeing from their homes.
     
When words from the international community did nothing to stop the Serbian action, NATO began a major bombing campaign in Yugoslavia from March 1999. The intention was to force Milosevic into submission.
      The aerial bombardment had continued already for several weeks when Strobe Talbott picked up the phone and called Ahtisaari with a request to head up a three-man team to pursue a peaceful end to the conflict. Ahtisaari agreed. He notes in the documentary that he was told that if he had declined the task, then "this conversation has never taken place".
      His acceptance set in motion six weeks of peace negotiations, during which time the Presidential Palace in downtown Helsinki and the incumbent's residence of Mäntyniemi became briefly the hub of world politics.
     
The documentary presents the cooperation that eventually emerged between Ahtisaari, Chernomyrdin, and Talbott. In the making of the film, Charlotte Airas interviewed Ahtisaari on four occasions, and had two personal interviews each with Talbott and Chernomyrdin.
      "My aim was to get them to talk straight and candidly. Enough time had passed since the events they were describing for them no longer to need to couch everything in stock diplomatic phrases and clichés", says Airas.
     
And the film opens on a particularly dramatic note.
      The imposing figure of Viktor Chernomyrdin fills the screen, as he declares that the world at that time was "close to World War III".
      Initially the assessment seems like something of a politician's self-important exaggeration, but by the end of the documentary you have to concur with the former Prime Minister's claim.
      When Ahtisaari took on the mediator role, the views of the United States and Russia on how to resolve the crisis were far apart indeed.
      The fact that the then U.S. President Bill Clinton launched the NATO bombing campaign without a mandate from the UN provoked real rage in Russia, where the Serbs were regarded as Slav brothers.
      The detective-story excitement in the documentary emerges from a dramaturgical insight on the behalf of the experienced director: she quietly allows her interview subjects to purge their emotions and to tell openly of the wrangling that went on among them.
     
From time to time voices were raised, and expletives were not deleted. Chernomyrdin in particular is a straight-shooter, and some of his language is on the crude side of robust.
      The name - The Fourth Chair - derives from an anecdote told by Strobe Talbott.
      The trio were having talks near Moscow. The Russian hosts had - somewhat ominously - arranged the discussions to take place in an opulent dacha  formerly owned by Josef Stalin.
      Talbott provided a concrete symbol of what the peace-talking was all about. He picked up a fourth chair and set it down in the corner of the room, empty. "I just wanted to say, let's not forget the guy who isn't present here", he says.
      Only by working together could the troikka overcome Milosevic.
     
Talbott demanded that Chernomyrdin accept two conditions: firstly that the Serbs - ALL Serbs - should withdraw immediately and unconditionally from Kosovo, and secondly that NATO-led peacekeeping forces should be brought in in their place.
      The Russians acknowledged the need for Serb withdrawal, but wanted instead that their own Russian troops would do a share of the peacekeeping. The Americans would not swallow this. They took the view that a "Russian island somewhere in a NATO sea" would have offered a hiding place for some of the worst Serb offenders.
     
The arm-wrestling between the three men culminated one night in June 1999 in Bonn, at the Petersberg Hotel. The negotiators were so exhausted that they were having trouble staying on their feet.
      Coming back from taking a breath of air outside, Ahtisaari did in fact stumble on a mat and fell over, hurting his chin. He did not dare to exit the room and seek medical attention, however, since that would have left Chernomyrdin and Talbott alone to fan the flames of their disagreements.
      Ahtisaari simply could not afford to let this happen: his most important role in the peace talks was to find a way of forcing Talbott and Chernomyrdin to reach some kind of accord.
      In the early hours of the morning, Chernomyrdin told his closest aide - Col. General Leonid Ivasov, from the Russian Ministry of Defence - to go out and "take a smoke", and he agreed to Talbott's conditions.
     
This was the crucial stage: Milosevic had just lost his most important ally, the Russian Federation.
      In the film, Ivasov does not shrink from expressing his opinions on Chernomyrdin: "At the time I immediately declared him an enemy of the Russian people and the betrayer of the Serbs. And I have not changed my view on the matter."
     
The following morning, Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin flew to Belgrade and delivered the terms for peace to Milosevic.
      The meeting in the Serb capital had a glacial atmosphere, and Milosevic's aides attempted even then to modify the terms of the deal. In the middle of their speech, Ahtisaari leant across and put his arm around his "brother" Chernomyrdin. This was as clear a signal to the Serbs as possible: the game is up, don't bother.
      "Chernomyrdin was the Finnish President's brother", the Serbs were forced to acknowledge. The Slav connection with Russia no longer held. After a day considering the document, the Yugoslav leaders announced they would accept the terms.
      It came as a shock, even to Ahtisaari himself. "Yes, it took me by surprise. I was surprised, and I thought it was all a bit too easy", he confesses to the camera.
     
As it happens, Ahtisaari was probably right: the deal struck that day and the jubilation at the G8 meeting in Germany were only the beginning of the final stretch. There were anxious moments a week or so later when Russian troops, their deployment apparently not cleared with the Kremlin, surfaced in Pristina.
      Serious talking among the Russian and U.S. foreign and defence ministers was required to avert a dangerous stand-off with NATO forces. Ahtisaari himself muses that this last turn of the cards - the "unofficial" Russian military presence - might even have been in Milosevic's mind when the deal was accepted in Belgrade. 
     
Charlotte Airas comments that during the making of her film she pondered more than once: what if... what if Ahtisaari's team had failed in June 1999?
      "NATO had 50,000 ground troops ready to roll into Yugoslavia. A land war would have started there in the fall of that year, and it could still be going on even now. Look at what has happened in Iraq."
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.10.2006
     
     
The Fourth Chair, TV2 Tuesday 3.10.2006, 22:05


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Mediator Martti Ahtisaari´s efforts receive full support from West in Kosovo talks (22.9.2006)

Links:
  Martti Ahtisaari (Wikipedia)
  Finnish Film Foundation
  Helsinki International Film Festival 2006

UNTO HÄMÄLÄINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
unto.hamalainen@hs.fi