Pony Trekking or Camping, or Fixing the World

Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland, has won the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize “for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts”.

Finland has it all!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under A Fistful Of Euros, Culture, Europe and the world, Political issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Jussi Jalonen Says:
   October 11th, 2008 at 8:22 am

   The prize was awarded to a _person_, not to a country.

   There are some people for whom this distinction in important, and who find the conflation rather annoying.

   The prize was Ahtisaari’s own personal achievement for his individual accomplishments, and had nothing to with his work as a President of Finland. There’s certainly no denying that he’s a first-rate international statesman on his own right; but as a President of Finland, he was neither very gifted nor very fortunate.

   Of course, there are also those people who now claim with a straight face that “the prize is an honour to the entire country”. Not surprisingly, some of these people are the same ones who were busily hounding him out of office when he was abroad resolving the Kosovo crisis.

   Me, I’m a fair man. I never particularly liked him, so I’m not going to pretend that I feel some great national pride because of the prize. Of course, he certainly deserved it, and would have deserved it already before… but well, as said, it was his own personal achievement. Congratulations.

   The Russian slamming of Ahtisaari is sort of interesting. Apparently our eastern neighbours have conveniently decided to forget that he was actually brokering the peace in Kosovo together with Chernomyrdin.

   … and also, Kosovo was hardly the most significant event in his career. But who knows, the Russians could be right, and there may have been political motives behind the decision to grant the prize. After all, the Nobel committee had political motives when the prize was granted to Carter, at the eve of the American invasion of Iraq; and back then, Gunnar Berge even openly admitted these motives.

   Cheers,

   J. J.