[1] The Nobel statement said that Ahtisaari had played a prominent role in resolving serious and long-lasting conflicts, including ones in Namibia, Aceh (Indonesia),[2] Kosovo and Serbia, and Iraq.

[6] In the summer of 1960, Ahtisaari signed the contract for the position of director of the Swedish Agency for International Development physical education boarding school in Karachi, Pakistan, after interviewing in Sweden and hearing about the offer announced by the YMCA in April of that year.

[11] Ahtisaari remained in that office until 1972, where he served from 1971 as assistant to the director, a position he combined with his presence on the Government's Advisory Committee for Trade and Industry Affairs of Developing Countries.

[12][13][6] This new mission allowed him to get closer to East African affairs, monitoring from Dar es Salaam the independence process of Namibia and maintaining close contacts with South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO).

Ahtisaari took advice from British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who was visiting the region at the time, and approved the SADF deployment.

"[15] Perhaps because of his reluctance to authorise this SADF deployment, Ahtisaari was alleged to have been targeted by the South African Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB).

According to a hearing in September 2000 of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, two CCB operatives (Kobus le Roux and Ferdinand Barnard) were tasked not to kill Ahtisaari, but to give him "a good hiding".

[17] Ahtisaari served as UN undersecretary-general for administration and management from 1987 to 1991 causing mixed feelings inside the organisation during an internal investigation of massive fraud.

When Ahtisaari revealed in 1990 that he had secretly lengthened the grace period allowing UN officials to return misappropriated taxpayer money from the original three months to three years, the investigators were furious.

[12][6] Finland's ongoing recession caused established political figures to lose public support, and the presidential elections were now direct instead of being conducted through an electoral college.

[12] During the campaign, there were rumours spread by some political opponents of Ahtisaari that he had a drinking problem or that he had knowingly accepted a double salary from the Finnish Foreign Ministry and from the United Nations while trying to negotiate an end to the Bosnian War.

A minor controversy arose during a town hall-style presidential debate in Lappeenranta, southeastern Finland when an apparently born-again Christian woman in the audience asked Rehn what her relationship with Jesus was.

[12] His term as president began with a schism within the Centre Party government led by prime minister Esko Aho, who did not approve of Ahtisaari's being actively involved in foreign policy.

His monthly travels throughout the country and his meetings with ordinary citizens (the so-called maakuntamatkat or "provincial trips") nonetheless greatly enhanced his political popularity.

Ahtisaari's party chairman Erkki Tuomioja said that giving medals was questionable since he feared the act may tarnish the public image of Finnish human rights policy.

[28][29] President Ahtisaari publicly supported Finland's entry into the European Union, and in a 1994 referendum, 57 percent of Finnish voters were in favour of EU membership.

In 2000, he became Chairman of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group,[39] an NGO to which he committed $100,000 in government funding in 1994 one month after becoming elected President of Finland.

[42] In 2000–01, Ahtisaari and Cyril Ramaphosa inspected IRA weapons dumps for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, as part of the Northern Ireland peace process.

[43] In 2003 Ahtisaari defended George W. Bush's attack to Iraq, describing it as humanitarian intervention, which incited criticism from professor of history Juha Sihvola.

[46] In November 2008, Serbian media reported Pierre Mirel, director of the EU enlargement commission's western Balkans division as saying: "The EU has accepted that the deployment of EULEX has to be approved by the United Nations Security Council, and that the mission has to be neutral and will not be related to the Ahtisaari plan," Mirel said, following his meeting with Serbia's vice-president Bozidar Djelic.

Since neither the UN nor the troika had asked him to continue mediations in the face of Russia's persistent refusal to support independence for Kosovo, he said he would nonetheless be willing to take on "a role as consultant", if requested.

[56] In September 2009 Ahtisaari joined The Elders,[57] a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues.

[60] In August 2012, Ahtisaari opined on the sectarian violence in Syria[2] and was mentioned as a possible replacement as Joint Envoy there to succeed former Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

[61][62] However, Ahtisaari then told the Finnish state broadcaster YLE that "he wished the mission would fall on someone else"[63] which it ultimately did in the person of Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and longtime U.N.

[64] In late 2015, Martti Ahtisaari reiterated charges he already had made in an interview with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle in early 2013 against members of the UN security council on the obstruction of a political solution to the escalating conflict in Syria.

According to the committee, Ahtisaari and his group, Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), also contributed to resolving other conflicts in Northern Ireland, Central Asia, and the Horn of Africa.