Martti Ahtisaari Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Ahtisaari beat out a Chinese dissident and a Chechen human rights activist for the Peace Prize. The remarkable thing is that Ahtisaari has actually been involved in making peace.

The citation by the Nobel Committee reads for Martii Ahtisaari reads, as the reason for awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts."

Martti Ahtisaari has involved in peacemaking efforts in Namibia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, and Kosovo in various diplomatic capacities. Martti Ahtissari served as President of Finland between 1994 and 2000.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize has sparked its share of controversy in the recent past. The Nobel Peace Prize has, from time to time, been awarded to people who have done very little to foster peace.

In 1992, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Guatemalan activist named Rigoberta Menchú. An anthropologist named David Stoll subsequently discovered that much of Menchú'a memoirs, I, Rigoberta Menchú had been fabricated. Nevertheless the Nobel Committee has resisted calls to revoke her Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1994, PLO terrorist chieftain Yassir Arafat was included in that year's Nobel Peace Prize, along with Israeli statesmen Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East" surrounding the Oslo Peace Accords that established the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza. The problem with awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Arafat was that before and since Arafat was directly involved in terrorist activities, including the murder of noncombatants. Arafat's career as a terrorist was only ended by his mysterious death in 2004 in a French hospital.

In 2007 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former American Vice President Al Gore along with the International Panel on Climate Change "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change." The problem with awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore is that his campaign on "climate change" has often been based on hysterical rhetoric and shaky, some suggest even fraudulent science.

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a career diplomat, Martti Ahtisaari, returns to a more traditional criteria for the prize. Martii Ahtisaari is not a political activist or a particularly controversial figure, but rather someone who has actually been involved in peace making. His selection as a Nobel Laureate is therefore a refreshing change from past practices by the Nobel Committee.

Sources: The Nobel Peace Prize 2008, Nobelprize.org
Nobel Peace Prize, Wikipedia