A real peacemaker

THIS YEAR, the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee selected a laureate who has actually made peace. And not once, but several times. It would be hard to name another mediator who has had more success resolving intractable conflicts around the world than the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari.

Nobel-worthy peacemakers come in two distinct varieties. The more renowned are the statesmen who negotiate with each other and sign treaties or cease-fires. The 1978 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin, fit this mold, as do the 1973 winners, Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho.

Ahtisaari belongs to a less visible, more self-effacing category. He plies his trade as a firm but patient arbitrator who seeks to bring about reconciliation - or at least a diplomatic compromise - between warring parties. Like a surgeon for wounded nations, he is called in to heal the debilitating injuries of ethnic, territorial, or religious conflicts.

His persistent, soothing bedside manner helped bring about the birth of an independent Namibia in 1990, freeing the people of what had been South West Africa from apartheid-era South Africa. He was acting at the time as a United Nations envoy, as he was in 1993 when he served as special adviser to the UN secretary general on the war-torn former Yugoslavia.

But then his peacemaking vocation was interrupted from 1994 until 2000 while he served as the Social Democratic president of Finland. Even so, he responded to a call from the European Union in 1999 to go to Belgrade, where he succeeded in persuading the bellicose Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to accept NATO's terms for ending the war over Kosovo.

In 2005, Ahtisaari brought together leaders of the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh movement to negotiate a peace accord ending a war for secession that had lasted for 30 years.

Ahtisaari's one notable failure came last March, when Serbia refused to accept his plan for a phased movement toward independence for Kosovo. With unnecessary impatience, the United States and the European Union nonetheless recognized an independent Kosovo.

If anything, his Nobel prize ought to make the American and European leaders have second thoughts. They should have kept Serbs and Kosovars at the negotiating table with Ahtisaari. Eventually, his patience and persistence could have produced a mutually acceptable resolution of the Kosovo dispute - like others he wrought in Asia, Africa, and Europe.