Seasoned diplomat Ahtisaari wins coveted Nobel

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his work on conflict resolution.

Ahtisaari, 71, was in the international limelight when he organised and hosted talks between Indonesia's government and the Free Aceh Movement, who signed a peace deal in August 2005 to end 30 years of armed struggle.

The statesman made his mark in international diplomacy as point man for the European Union, when he persuaded then Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to accept NATO's terms for ending the Kosovo air campaign in 1999.

The work in Kosovo earned Ahtisaari a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, and in 2006 he was again tipped as the likely winner after the successful outcome of the Aceh talks.

Until March last year Ahtisaari mediated Serb-Albanian talks on Kosovo as the EU's envoy. He drafted a plan advocating EU-supervised independence with broad autonomy for Kosovo's Serb minority, but Serbia and Russia have rejected it.

Ahtisaari was perhaps best known abroad for his role as a U.N. official in negotiations on the independence of Namibia from South African rule, achieved in 1990.

A no-nonsense diplomat, Ahtisaari investigated U.N. operations in Iraq after the 2003 truck bombing that devastated the organisation's Baghdad headquarters and killed 22 people, including the chief of the mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

His findings -- that security had been "dysfunctional" and "sloppy" -- prompted U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to propose a $97 million (57 million pound) overhaul of the world body's security arrangements, and 778 new security jobs.

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