Martti Ahtisaari, who has died aged 86, was a former president of Finland who gained the Nobel peace prize for his position as an impartial mediator serving to to finish conflicts in Namibia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Indonesia.

His efforts have been notably helpful in 1999 within the disaster over Kosovo after a two-month bombing marketing campaign by Nato had didn’t get Serbia’s hardline president Slobodan Milošević to withdraw his troops and police from the disputed province and finish the ethnic cleaning of Kosovo’s Albanian majority.

Ahtisaari was president of Finland however agreed to behave because the EU’s consultant, working alongside the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s negotiator, Viktor Chernomyrdin. The two had a number of face-to-face encounters with Milošević.

Initially implacable, Milošević finally agreed to withdraw his troops from Kosovo after Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin promised {that a} peacekeeping drive of Nato troops, generally known as Kfor, which might change Serbian forces, could be below a United Nations mandate and that Serbia would stay sovereign over Kosovo. Russia’s change to take sides with the west was the principle issue that led Milošević to give up when he noticed he might not depend on the nation to guard him; Ahtisaari’s agency line performed a key position too.

At one second when Milošević tried to drive a wedge between Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin, Ahtisaari turned in direction of Milošević and stated: “I’m not entirely sure you have understood what we have said correctly. We have already agreed on this proposal with Brother Chernomyrdin, as is.”

Ahtisaari then surprised Milošević by rising to his ft and giving Chernomyrdin a hug.

The pledge to maintain Serbian sovereignty over the province was regularly undermined after Milošević misplaced energy in Belgrade in 2000. Ahtisaari got here out in assist of Kosovo’s want to declare independence. Again performing because the EU’s consultant in talks with the brand new authorities in Belgrade, Ahtisaari invented the idea of “supervised independence” for Kosovo. The province must agree to guard the Serbian minority earlier than its independence was internationally acknowledged.

Ahtisaari’s repute as a profitable mediator helped him to play a significant position in ending a 30-year warfare in Indonesia. Towards the top of 2004 he was invited to mediate between the federal government in Jakarta and a guerrilla motion combating for independence for the province of Aceh. Ahtisaari knew the problems from his time as Finland’s president when he promoted the pursuits of Finnish wood-processing companies in Indonesia.

Shortly after accepting the job of mediator he invited representatives of either side, the federal government and the guerrillas, to talks in Helsinki. An enormous tsunami at Christmas that yr had taken the lives of greater than 100,000 folks in Aceh and destroyed hundreds of buildings. It additionally weakened the guerrilla motion, which was advised by Ahtisaari that if it accepted wide-ranging “special autonomy” then the Indonesian military would withdraw.

As with Milošević, Ahtisaari was a troublesome negotiator. Sofyan Djalil, an Indonesian minister, stated: “He is really authoritarian, decisive and occasionally openly angry – which seemed strange to us at first. But his directness made an impre0ssion. He always said, ‘Don’t waste time if you are not in earnest.’”

In 2008 Ahtisaari gained the Nobel peace prize “for his great efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.

Born in Viipuri (now Vyborg) in jap Finland, he was the son of Tyyne (nee Karonen), a farmer’s daughter, and Oiva Adolfsen, a Norwegian who served as a noncommissioned officer and mechanic within the Finnish military. Oiva modified his identify to the extra Finnish-sounding Ahtisaari shortly earlier than Martti’s delivery.

The household fled from the area when Martti was two, after the second world warfare broke out. They moved first to Kuopio in northern Finland, the place he went to main faculty, and in 1952 to Oulo, the place he educated to be a college trainer.

His eye was already on work with international international locations and in 1960 he took a job in Karachi on the Swedish Pakistani institute. Five years later he joined the Finnish international ministry. He served as Finland’s ambassador to Tanzania from 1973 to 1977 earlier than transferring to the UN as its commissioner for Namibia till 1981. He went again to Namibia in 1989 to assist the territory’s transition to independence.

His picture as a reliable public servant paved the best way for the Social Democratic get together to ask him in 1994 to be their candidate for the presidency of Finland. The largely ceremonial put up was to be stuffed by direct elections for the primary time. He gained narrowly.

A eager supporter of European integration, he campaigned arduous within the 1994 referendum for Finland to affix the EU. Two a long time later, after Russia’s first intervention in Ukraine, Ahtisaari got here out in favour of Finland abandoning its long-held coverage of neutrality and becoming a member of Nato, a controversial transfer that was adopted this yr after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ahtisaari selected to not run for a second time period as president. Preferring to give attention to worldwide battle decision, he based the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI). One of his first assignments was in Northern Ireland, the place in 2000 he labored with Cyril Ramaphosa, later to be South Africa’s president, as an inspector of the method of decommisioning weapons.

In 2021 CMI introduced Ahtisaari had Alzheimer’s illness and was withdrawing from public life.

He is survived by his spouse, Eeva (nee Hyvarinen), a trainer whom he married in 1968, and their son, Marko.