The Negotiator
"If I were not an idealist, then why in the world at the age of 68 would I still be running around all over the place?"
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By Tanja Vasama
According to some African words of wisdom, a person should stop from time to time when walking, so that the soul can keep up. Mrs. Eeva Ahtisaari always follows this rule.
But her husband, now he’s a different character. He is constantly trying to catch up with his soul.
The temperature is about -20°C. A wintry rural idyllic scene opens up at the Königstedt manor house on the banks of the Vantaa River, just north of the Finnish capital.
On a Saturday morning in January, about 20 Indonesian journalists are shivering in the front room of the building wearing various articles of winter clothing acquired from who knows where. Some have the ear flaps of their hats pulled down, even though they are indoors.
A long line of black cars arrive in the front yard. The host of the gathering walks to the door. He does not appear to be at all concerned that the convoy is about 20 minutes behind schedule.
Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari shakes the hands of Indonesia's Vice President Jusuf Kalla, as well as Malik Mahmud, Prime Minister of the rebel movement of Aceh Province, and the delegations of the two gentlemen.
The three pose for a joint photo. But Vice President Kalla is accidentally placed in the middle. He tries to make room for his Finnish host.
"No, no, it is a good sign for you to be side-by-side", Ahtisaari responds.
Ahtisaari, who travelled to Finland for the meeting, is obviously quite pleased with the setup. Only about six months previously, he had got the two sides to sign a peace treaty, which brought to an end nearly 30 years of hostilities in Aceh, a province in a remote corner of Indonesia, on the island of Sumatra, known for its rich oil and gas deposits.
The peace agreement has been adhered to in Aceh unexpectedly well, and now the sides are going through the peace process in Königstedt in a relaxed atmosphere.
For Ahtisaari himself, Aceh raised his name close to the top of the pile of candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A few weeks, and a few trips later, Ahtisaari will again meet one of the representatives of a restless province and the central government that has power over it.
This time, however, the meeting place is not a remote manor house in Vantaa; it is in the Austrian capital Vienna, in a home for several UN organisations, at the gates of Western Europe and the Balkans Peninsula.
The guests include the leaders of Serbia and the province of Kosovo.
Also in other ways, the trappings are on a completely different level than with Aceh. Whereas the peace over the rebellious Aceh Province was being negotiated at the initiative of the Finns, and with a very small group of people involved, the talks in Vienna are being watched closely in the capitals of Europe, the United States, and Russia - after all, Kosovo is an important part of the stabilisation of the southeast of Europe.
In the spring of 1999, the fate of the province was considered so important that the United States resorted to a bombing campaign to defend the people of Kosovo against the forces of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic. After Milosevic surrendered, Kosovo's legal status remained unresolved, and accordingly, the UN-administered province remains formally part of Serbia.
Ahtisaari should now find a solution to this. The task could be the most difficult of his career.
Ahtisaari's face shows no sign that he would be under pressure, as he sits at his office in the centre of Helsinki, describing the challenges before the first actual negotiations. He says that at times he feels like a schoolboy, and that his homework task was handed back as incomplete.
Ahtisaari's job was left incomplete specifically in the summer of 1999, when he - along with then-US Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin - persuaded Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo.
Now he intends to finish the job. And this promises to be quite a task, even for a veteran diplomat such as Ahtisaari. A gaping chasm separates the two sides.
It is clear that the Albanians in the province will not accept anything short of full indepenence. Serb leaders will hear nothing of it. The negotiations did not even start on time, because Ibrahim Rugova, the President of Kosovo's Albanians, died in January.
Ahtisaari is actually working for four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: the United States, Russia, France, and the UK. All of them - with the possible exception of Russia - concede silently that the only sustainable solution is independence for Kosovo.
It might be said that Ahtisaari was not chosen to negotiate on Kosovo's position, but rather to discuss the position of the Serb minority in an independent, undivided Kosovo.
However, Ahtisaari does not feel that the great powers are a hindrance to his work. "This setup is very good", he says. Ahtisaari is known as a person who wants and is able to keep all the threads in his own hands. But what kind of a negotiator is he in other respects?
Ahtisaari defines himself as both an idealist and realist. In addition he finds within himself a flexible pragmatist.
"If I were not an idealist, then why in the world at the age of 68 would I still be running around all over the place?"
"On the other hand, idealism does not help much as such, because then you end up on a level of issuing proclamations. Realism requires the ability to analyse a situation. It requires tough intellectual honesty."
And what about the views of the others? Former and present colleagues, all the way from his days in Namibia to the staff of the President's present Crisis Management Initiative, all tend to describe Ahtisaari's characteristics in similar terms.
"A fair, direct sort of guy." "Very fair and equitable." "Does not hesitate to say things as clearly and as simply as possible." "Seeks an honest analysis of the situation: the situation is like this, and this is not changing at all." "Knows where the pitfalls are, where to put his energies, what issues do not matter, and where to take a tough stand."
The characterisations reveal an uncharacteristic directness for a diplomat, but it does not look like there would be any totally exceptional skills to be found within Ahtisaari.
"Unique would certainly be an exaggeration", says Tauno Kääriä, who used to be called Ahtisaari's right hand. Kääriä served as the number-two person at the Finnish representation to the United Nations, and as the Finnish Ambassador to Thailand, and has later switched over to a business career.
"One thing is that he has the patience to listen to people. On the basis of what he hears, he is able to draw conclusions much more easily. another thing is, he's got great staying power, he's persistent", Kääriä says.
There would not seem to have been any magic formula in use when Ahtisaari got the parties to the dispute in Aceh to agree on peace, even though there had been several previous attempts to do the same thing. This time around a short, clear paper was drawn up, which left no room for interpretations.
"A peace agreement has to be simpler than a user's manual for a household appliance. I read those things now and then, and they are so damned complicated, that I can never seem to understand what to do!" Ahtisaari explains.
It seems that here is a diplomat who has been successful around the world specifically with the skills of an elementary school teacher. Ahtisaari qualified as a primary-school teacher in 1959.
But this negotiator also has powerful self-esteem. Ahtisaari openly assesses his characteristics. "All of those who try to do things like this, they need to be extremely creative."
Ahtisaari also often brings out his own reputation. "The fact that I am a former President is no disadvantage. Much is tolerated of such a person. However, probably much more is tolerated from someone when there is evidence of a job well done in the past."
A strong self-esteem can sometimes seem like arrogance, but it can also be an advantage, when there are personalities like that of Milosevic on the other side. One needs to take and hold one's place even in a tough situation.
"I have often been told 'Hey, just a minute, you're only a mediator in these talks'. I have had to say, sorry and all that, but that is not the way to advance peace."
Ahtisaari believes that all negotiations have phases in which the mediator first does not please one party, and later, at some other point, he does not please the other, and sometimes, he doesn't endear himself to anyone. He draws the lines, and does not accept topics at the negotiating table that he considers to be unrealistic.
For instance, at the Aceh negotiations, there was no public mention of independence for the province, even though the rebels had previously demanded it.
Ahtisaari does not find any failures in his career. However, there have been some difficult situations.
One difficult situation was in Namibia in the spring of 1989, when guerrillas of the liberation movement SWAPO pushed into Namibia from the Angolan side. Ahtisaari, who was preparing the way for the independence of Namibia as the special representative of the UN Secretary-general and at the head of UNTAG, gave South African forces permission to chase the guerrillas away, and the two sides clashed violently.
The memory of the events causes the former President to sigh a little.
"There was a phase of about a month, in which the atmosphere was very hostile. It was unfortunate and lamentable that SWAPO forces came from Angola in violation of all that had been agreed upon."
But even unfortunate things can be turned into a victory.
"When I understood that South Africa had not withdrawn from the process, I knew that it would strengthen my position. All in all, the operation remained well under our control. When the going is difficult, that is when adherence to principle is required."
Years later, SWAPO's founding member and Namibia's first democratically- elected President Sam Nujoma denounced Ahtisaari as an opportunist, and as a lackey of the great powers, who was forgetting the interests of Namibia.
However, Nujoma's criticism has been turned on itself and attributed to a need for self-aggrandisement.
The Namibian independence operation under Ahtisaari is still regarded as one of the UN's most successful exercises.
The years have been kind to the veteran diplomat, says a long-term colleague from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
"His career-path was originally a bit speedy, and did not exactly correlate with the experience that had been attained. Now that there is experience and vision to go with it, he has grown at least at pace with the years. However, the process of change has been exclusively positive. He has not become arrogant; a healthy self-esteem has grown."
Over the years, Ahtisaari has also established an extensive network of contacts. It is through these that it was possible to attract the European Union into the monitoring of the Aceh peace process.
If Ahtisaari the diplomat has been described as "a key operator holding all threads in his hands", and "a strategic thinker", then as a politician he has not been described with quite as much admiration.
Ahtisaari himself calls his period as the Finnish President an "extra-marital dalliance" - albeit an important one. From his position as Secretary of State at the Foreign Ministry, Ahtisaari entered the presidential campaign race straight from Bosnia in 1993, when there was a clear opening in recession-struck Finland for someone from outside the sphere of ordinary politicians, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The diplomat, who had made his career at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and at the UN, never really got his foot inside the door of Finnish politics. Ahtisaari took power as the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, but the President and the party elite always remained distant and alien to one another.
Nor did the term as President take off without friction. Ahtisaari soon had to explain both his falling down at a royal reception in Sweden and his participation at EU summit meetings.
"In the office of President he clearly did not have the kind of strategic plan about what he was doing. Instead, the machinery of state guided it to a great extent. Matters were dealt with largely in the order that they arrived in front of him", said one source who was close to him.
Ahtisaari's political career did not go beyond one term as head of state. The incumbent President did not agree to take part in the party's primary elections, and the party did not specifically ask him to try for a second term. The greatest gloria of his six years in office - the praise that was brought by the launch of negotiations that led to an end of the war in Kosovo - occurred at a time when Ahtisaari had already said that he would not be seeking a second term.
"Ahtisaari took care of the traditional role of President mainly out of a sense of duty, but at the end of the term he found his own role. When Kosovo and the Finnish EU Presidency [in the latter half of 1999] came up, a completely new person emerged", one person in the inner circle explains. "The difference was even more dramatic when examined from close up than what it looked like from the outside, through the filter of the media."
Ahtisaari himself seems to recall his years as President quite positively.
"We joined the EU, we joined EMU, and got employment to a respectable level."
He was not able to do much for domestic employment, beyond appointing a working group by Matti Pekkanen to look for ways of creating jobs. Outside of Finland, the President travelled along with trade delegations. He also had the important task of polishing the image of Finland, which had been tarnished by the Cold War.
"The things that I came to do, got done. What would have been left? What challenges?" he asks.
"I am a professional person who does his own work as an international civil servant, or in my home country. I am a top professional in my field, and that is also what I was as President."
Now Ahtisaari is again a pure diplomat. He does not have "anything to do" with Finnish domestic politics, although he has repeatedly spoken on behalf of NATO membership.
He took no stand on the recent presidential campaign, citing UN rules and his busy schedule as the reasons. However, the candidates all praised him: Ahtisaari was the only Finnish head of state that Tarja Halonen, Sauli Niinistö, and Matti Vanhanen all mentioned as someone they modelled themselves after.
Praise about his term as president came now that Ahtisaari was doing well internationally. However, it would seem that the candidates praised Ahtisaari for their own campaigning ends. For instance, Niinistö emphasised the respect he has for him on the international level, as if to underscore his view that Halonen has fallen short of Ahtisaari's achievements.
Ahtisaari himself also has his doubts about how sincere the comments really were.
After his term as President, Ahtisaari became a free-lance diplomat. Problems to be solved have ranged from Turkey to Austria, from Northern Ireland to the West Bank, from Iraq to the Horn of Africa, and to Central Asia. At the same time he has helped his Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), an organisation that he established after his Presidency, to get itself off the ground.
His current Kosovo job meant full commitment to a UN post for a year. His contract lasts until November 9th, 2006, and he does not have any intention to work on the project any longer than that.
However, at the beginning of next year, an even more challenging UN task will open up: the post of Secretary-General of the world organisation.
Discussions in the corridors of the UN's New York headquarters are running hot already, and Finnish diplomats have been asked discreetly if Ahtisaari might be interested. Nevertheless, the Finn has not been mentioned as a possible candidate in the foreign press.
Ahtisaari's name will come up in these kinds of forecasts almost automatically, owing to his long career. When a successor to Javier Perez de Cuellar was being sought in 1991, Ahtisaari did not forbid mentioning his name. However, Finland did not begin campaigning on his behalf, and the matter did not end up in the official voting for Secretary-General.
Now it is unlikely for things to go even that far.
"No. I am not available. I am not interested", Ahtisaari says without hesitation.
"I have said, Good grief, I have worked enough for Finland, and quite honourably and respectably on behalf of humanity. I have to have the right to say that now I want to live for myself and for my family."
But before all that, the status of Kosovo needs to be resolved. Ahtisaari has hardly had time for days off in the past year, but the president appears surprisingly energetic for a man of his age and size. Exercise would seem to be very important for him.
And he also does not have any immediate plans for retirement.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.2.2006
According to some African words of wisdom, a person should stop from time to time when walking, so that the soul can keep up. Mrs. Eeva Ahtisaari always follows this rule.
But her husband, now he’s a different character. He is constantly trying to catch up with his soul.
The temperature is about -20°C. A wintry rural idyllic scene opens up at the Königstedt manor house on the banks of the Vantaa River, just north of the Finnish capital.
On a Saturday morning in January, about 20 Indonesian journalists are shivering in the front room of the building wearing various articles of winter clothing acquired from who knows where. Some have the ear flaps of their hats pulled down, even though they are indoors.
A long line of black cars arrive in the front yard. The host of the gathering walks to the door. He does not appear to be at all concerned that the convoy is about 20 minutes behind schedule.
Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari shakes the hands of Indonesia's Vice President Jusuf Kalla, as well as Malik Mahmud, Prime Minister of the rebel movement of Aceh Province, and the delegations of the two gentlemen.
The three pose for a joint photo. But Vice President Kalla is accidentally placed in the middle. He tries to make room for his Finnish host.
"No, no, it is a good sign for you to be side-by-side", Ahtisaari responds.
Ahtisaari, who travelled to Finland for the meeting, is obviously quite pleased with the setup. Only about six months previously, he had got the two sides to sign a peace treaty, which brought to an end nearly 30 years of hostilities in Aceh, a province in a remote corner of Indonesia, on the island of Sumatra, known for its rich oil and gas deposits.
The peace agreement has been adhered to in Aceh unexpectedly well, and now the sides are going through the peace process in Königstedt in a relaxed atmosphere.
For Ahtisaari himself, Aceh raised his name close to the top of the pile of candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A few weeks, and a few trips later, Ahtisaari will again meet one of the representatives of a restless province and the central government that has power over it.
This time, however, the meeting place is not a remote manor house in Vantaa; it is in the Austrian capital Vienna, in a home for several UN organisations, at the gates of Western Europe and the Balkans Peninsula.
The guests include the leaders of Serbia and the province of Kosovo.
Also in other ways, the trappings are on a completely different level than with Aceh. Whereas the peace over the rebellious Aceh Province was being negotiated at the initiative of the Finns, and with a very small group of people involved, the talks in Vienna are being watched closely in the capitals of Europe, the United States, and Russia - after all, Kosovo is an important part of the stabilisation of the southeast of Europe.
In the spring of 1999, the fate of the province was considered so important that the United States resorted to a bombing campaign to defend the people of Kosovo against the forces of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic. After Milosevic surrendered, Kosovo's legal status remained unresolved, and accordingly, the UN-administered province remains formally part of Serbia.
Ahtisaari should now find a solution to this. The task could be the most difficult of his career.
Ahtisaari's face shows no sign that he would be under pressure, as he sits at his office in the centre of Helsinki, describing the challenges before the first actual negotiations. He says that at times he feels like a schoolboy, and that his homework task was handed back as incomplete.
Ahtisaari's job was left incomplete specifically in the summer of 1999, when he - along with then-US Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin - persuaded Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo.
Now he intends to finish the job. And this promises to be quite a task, even for a veteran diplomat such as Ahtisaari. A gaping chasm separates the two sides.
It is clear that the Albanians in the province will not accept anything short of full indepenence. Serb leaders will hear nothing of it. The negotiations did not even start on time, because Ibrahim Rugova, the President of Kosovo's Albanians, died in January.
Ahtisaari is actually working for four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: the United States, Russia, France, and the UK. All of them - with the possible exception of Russia - concede silently that the only sustainable solution is independence for Kosovo.
It might be said that Ahtisaari was not chosen to negotiate on Kosovo's position, but rather to discuss the position of the Serb minority in an independent, undivided Kosovo.
However, Ahtisaari does not feel that the great powers are a hindrance to his work. "This setup is very good", he says. Ahtisaari is known as a person who wants and is able to keep all the threads in his own hands. But what kind of a negotiator is he in other respects?
Ahtisaari defines himself as both an idealist and realist. In addition he finds within himself a flexible pragmatist.
"If I were not an idealist, then why in the world at the age of 68 would I still be running around all over the place?"
"On the other hand, idealism does not help much as such, because then you end up on a level of issuing proclamations. Realism requires the ability to analyse a situation. It requires tough intellectual honesty."
And what about the views of the others? Former and present colleagues, all the way from his days in Namibia to the staff of the President's present Crisis Management Initiative, all tend to describe Ahtisaari's characteristics in similar terms.
"A fair, direct sort of guy." "Very fair and equitable." "Does not hesitate to say things as clearly and as simply as possible." "Seeks an honest analysis of the situation: the situation is like this, and this is not changing at all." "Knows where the pitfalls are, where to put his energies, what issues do not matter, and where to take a tough stand."
The characterisations reveal an uncharacteristic directness for a diplomat, but it does not look like there would be any totally exceptional skills to be found within Ahtisaari.
"Unique would certainly be an exaggeration", says Tauno Kääriä, who used to be called Ahtisaari's right hand. Kääriä served as the number-two person at the Finnish representation to the United Nations, and as the Finnish Ambassador to Thailand, and has later switched over to a business career.
"One thing is that he has the patience to listen to people. On the basis of what he hears, he is able to draw conclusions much more easily. another thing is, he's got great staying power, he's persistent", Kääriä says.
There would not seem to have been any magic formula in use when Ahtisaari got the parties to the dispute in Aceh to agree on peace, even though there had been several previous attempts to do the same thing. This time around a short, clear paper was drawn up, which left no room for interpretations.
"A peace agreement has to be simpler than a user's manual for a household appliance. I read those things now and then, and they are so damned complicated, that I can never seem to understand what to do!" Ahtisaari explains.
It seems that here is a diplomat who has been successful around the world specifically with the skills of an elementary school teacher. Ahtisaari qualified as a primary-school teacher in 1959.
But this negotiator also has powerful self-esteem. Ahtisaari openly assesses his characteristics. "All of those who try to do things like this, they need to be extremely creative."
Ahtisaari also often brings out his own reputation. "The fact that I am a former President is no disadvantage. Much is tolerated of such a person. However, probably much more is tolerated from someone when there is evidence of a job well done in the past."
A strong self-esteem can sometimes seem like arrogance, but it can also be an advantage, when there are personalities like that of Milosevic on the other side. One needs to take and hold one's place even in a tough situation.
"I have often been told 'Hey, just a minute, you're only a mediator in these talks'. I have had to say, sorry and all that, but that is not the way to advance peace."
Ahtisaari believes that all negotiations have phases in which the mediator first does not please one party, and later, at some other point, he does not please the other, and sometimes, he doesn't endear himself to anyone. He draws the lines, and does not accept topics at the negotiating table that he considers to be unrealistic.
For instance, at the Aceh negotiations, there was no public mention of independence for the province, even though the rebels had previously demanded it.
Ahtisaari does not find any failures in his career. However, there have been some difficult situations.
One difficult situation was in Namibia in the spring of 1989, when guerrillas of the liberation movement SWAPO pushed into Namibia from the Angolan side. Ahtisaari, who was preparing the way for the independence of Namibia as the special representative of the UN Secretary-general and at the head of UNTAG, gave South African forces permission to chase the guerrillas away, and the two sides clashed violently.
The memory of the events causes the former President to sigh a little.
"There was a phase of about a month, in which the atmosphere was very hostile. It was unfortunate and lamentable that SWAPO forces came from Angola in violation of all that had been agreed upon."
But even unfortunate things can be turned into a victory.
"When I understood that South Africa had not withdrawn from the process, I knew that it would strengthen my position. All in all, the operation remained well under our control. When the going is difficult, that is when adherence to principle is required."
Years later, SWAPO's founding member and Namibia's first democratically- elected President Sam Nujoma denounced Ahtisaari as an opportunist, and as a lackey of the great powers, who was forgetting the interests of Namibia.
However, Nujoma's criticism has been turned on itself and attributed to a need for self-aggrandisement.
The Namibian independence operation under Ahtisaari is still regarded as one of the UN's most successful exercises.
The years have been kind to the veteran diplomat, says a long-term colleague from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
"His career-path was originally a bit speedy, and did not exactly correlate with the experience that had been attained. Now that there is experience and vision to go with it, he has grown at least at pace with the years. However, the process of change has been exclusively positive. He has not become arrogant; a healthy self-esteem has grown."
Over the years, Ahtisaari has also established an extensive network of contacts. It is through these that it was possible to attract the European Union into the monitoring of the Aceh peace process.
If Ahtisaari the diplomat has been described as "a key operator holding all threads in his hands", and "a strategic thinker", then as a politician he has not been described with quite as much admiration.
Ahtisaari himself calls his period as the Finnish President an "extra-marital dalliance" - albeit an important one. From his position as Secretary of State at the Foreign Ministry, Ahtisaari entered the presidential campaign race straight from Bosnia in 1993, when there was a clear opening in recession-struck Finland for someone from outside the sphere of ordinary politicians, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The diplomat, who had made his career at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and at the UN, never really got his foot inside the door of Finnish politics. Ahtisaari took power as the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, but the President and the party elite always remained distant and alien to one another.
Nor did the term as President take off without friction. Ahtisaari soon had to explain both his falling down at a royal reception in Sweden and his participation at EU summit meetings.
"In the office of President he clearly did not have the kind of strategic plan about what he was doing. Instead, the machinery of state guided it to a great extent. Matters were dealt with largely in the order that they arrived in front of him", said one source who was close to him.
Ahtisaari's political career did not go beyond one term as head of state. The incumbent President did not agree to take part in the party's primary elections, and the party did not specifically ask him to try for a second term. The greatest gloria of his six years in office - the praise that was brought by the launch of negotiations that led to an end of the war in Kosovo - occurred at a time when Ahtisaari had already said that he would not be seeking a second term.
"Ahtisaari took care of the traditional role of President mainly out of a sense of duty, but at the end of the term he found his own role. When Kosovo and the Finnish EU Presidency [in the latter half of 1999] came up, a completely new person emerged", one person in the inner circle explains. "The difference was even more dramatic when examined from close up than what it looked like from the outside, through the filter of the media."
Ahtisaari himself seems to recall his years as President quite positively.
"We joined the EU, we joined EMU, and got employment to a respectable level."
He was not able to do much for domestic employment, beyond appointing a working group by Matti Pekkanen to look for ways of creating jobs. Outside of Finland, the President travelled along with trade delegations. He also had the important task of polishing the image of Finland, which had been tarnished by the Cold War.
"The things that I came to do, got done. What would have been left? What challenges?" he asks.
"I am a professional person who does his own work as an international civil servant, or in my home country. I am a top professional in my field, and that is also what I was as President."
Now Ahtisaari is again a pure diplomat. He does not have "anything to do" with Finnish domestic politics, although he has repeatedly spoken on behalf of NATO membership.
He took no stand on the recent presidential campaign, citing UN rules and his busy schedule as the reasons. However, the candidates all praised him: Ahtisaari was the only Finnish head of state that Tarja Halonen, Sauli Niinistö, and Matti Vanhanen all mentioned as someone they modelled themselves after.
Praise about his term as president came now that Ahtisaari was doing well internationally. However, it would seem that the candidates praised Ahtisaari for their own campaigning ends. For instance, Niinistö emphasised the respect he has for him on the international level, as if to underscore his view that Halonen has fallen short of Ahtisaari's achievements.
Ahtisaari himself also has his doubts about how sincere the comments really were.
After his term as President, Ahtisaari became a free-lance diplomat. Problems to be solved have ranged from Turkey to Austria, from Northern Ireland to the West Bank, from Iraq to the Horn of Africa, and to Central Asia. At the same time he has helped his Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), an organisation that he established after his Presidency, to get itself off the ground.
His current Kosovo job meant full commitment to a UN post for a year. His contract lasts until November 9th, 2006, and he does not have any intention to work on the project any longer than that.
However, at the beginning of next year, an even more challenging UN task will open up: the post of Secretary-General of the world organisation.
Discussions in the corridors of the UN's New York headquarters are running hot already, and Finnish diplomats have been asked discreetly if Ahtisaari might be interested. Nevertheless, the Finn has not been mentioned as a possible candidate in the foreign press.
Ahtisaari's name will come up in these kinds of forecasts almost automatically, owing to his long career. When a successor to Javier Perez de Cuellar was being sought in 1991, Ahtisaari did not forbid mentioning his name. However, Finland did not begin campaigning on his behalf, and the matter did not end up in the official voting for Secretary-General.
Now it is unlikely for things to go even that far.
"No. I am not available. I am not interested", Ahtisaari says without hesitation.
"I have said, Good grief, I have worked enough for Finland, and quite honourably and respectably on behalf of humanity. I have to have the right to say that now I want to live for myself and for my family."
But before all that, the status of Kosovo needs to be resolved. Ahtisaari has hardly had time for days off in the past year, but the president appears surprisingly energetic for a man of his age and size. Exercise would seem to be very important for him.
And he also does not have any immediate plans for retirement.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.2.2006
TANJA VASAMA / Helsingin Sanomat
tanja.vasama@hs.fi