Ahtisaari’s Well Deserved Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last Friday to former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari. The mainstream media claimed matter-of-factly that this was the “global trouble-shooter’s” reward for many years of “helping end strife” in . The Norwegian Nobel Committee hailed Ahtisaari (71) “for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts.” The claim is ridiculous: Far from being a peacemaker, Ahtisaari is an obedient apparatchik of the global elite class whose job it is to help impose “solutions” decided upfront by his paymasters in Washington, New York and Brussels. He is therefore eminently deserving of this particular honor.

There have been controversial Nobel peace prizes over the years – Yasser Arafat comes to mind, not to mention Menachem Begin – but over the past two decades the institution has degenerated into farce.

Last year it went to Al Gore for his “Inconvenient Truth.” Enough said.

In 1992 the panel of five Norwegian worthies gave it to Guatemalan “activist” (i.e. leftist self-dramatist and fraud) Rigoberta Menchu, whose deservedly forgotten autobiography was cut out of whole cloth. (The brother she “watched die of malnutrition” was later found to be alive and well fed.)

In 1999 the laureate was Bernard Kouchner, a shameless self-promoter and currently Sarkozy’s foreign minister. This quintessential ’68-er has been piggybacking of human misery for decades. Kouchner’s outpouring of pornograpic compassion, elicited by the plight of the “Boat People,” prompted even his very own Doctors Without Borders to disown him. His mending of fences with the French right – and current gainful employment – came in the aftermath of his failed bids for the post of the director of the World Health Organisation and the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees.

Ahtisaari is in good company. His most high-profile mission to date – Kosovo – is an unresolved problem made worse by him than it had been before him, or that it would have been without him. His support of the Albanian cause and insistence on independence as the only option is what the United States wanted, and he performed on cue. That his “plan” is detrimental to peace and stability in the region needs no restating.

It is ironic that the Nobel Committee announced its decision in the same week when Serbia’s resolution to have the International Court of Justice consider the legality of Kosovo’s self-declared independence was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly. It’s a bit like giving Neville Chamberlain the 1939 peace prize for Munich 1938…

Ahtisaari embarked on his bungled attempt to “deliver” the Serbs after spending many years as “Chairman Emeritus” of the Soros-funded International Crisis Group (ICG). There isn’t a single evil cause or bad idea – especially in the Balkans – that the ICG does not support and promote.

Ahtisaari’s approach to “troubleshooting” in Kosovo in 2006-2007 may have been based on six years’ worth of flawed advice that he and others in the “international community” had received from Western diplomats in Belgrade and from a small but influential clique of “pro-Western” Serbian officials and analysts who now hold the reins of power. All along his assumption had been that Serbia would cave in yet again and agree to Kosovo’s detachment, albeit with some meaningless fig leaf (”conditional independence,” “international guarantees for minority rights,” etc, etc); that Russia and China would endorse the deal at the Security Council; and that the problem would be taken off the agenda by the end of 2007 with the raising of yet another ex-Yugoslav flag at the U.N.

Ahtisaari cared not a hoot what the nature of the new entity would be – an international protectorate, an EU-NATO condominium, a future province of Greater Albania – but he was insistent that it would no longer be part of Serbia. His plan has promised protection for the remaining Serbs, and everyone – Ahtisaari included – knew that those “guarantees” were just new lies on top of the old.

When all the Serbs are cleared out from their historic and spiritual heartland, and their holy places destroyed – an even bet for the next decade – there will be expressions of surprise and regret from the latest Nobel laureate. Both sentiments will be false. Ahtisaari’s true surprise and regret will come when he dies.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Dr. Trifkovic is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute, and Director of the Institute’s Center for International Affairs. He has a BA (Hon) in international relations from the University of Sussex (UK), a BA in political science from the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and a PhD in history from the University of Southampton (UK).
www.trifkovic.mysite.com

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