Nobel laureate urges Middle East focus for Obama

NOBEL peace prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari urged US president-elect Barack Obama yesterday to delve into solving the Middle East conflict in his first year in office, calling it a knot that could be untied.

The former Finnish president and veteran diplomat received the 2008 peace prize on Wednesday at Oslo’s city hall. The award for decades of peace-brokering around the globe was announced in October.

“Peace is a question of will,” Ahtisaari said, according to a copy of his acceptance speech. “All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal.”

“I hope the new president of the United States, who will be sworn in next month, will give high priority to the Middle East conflict during his first year in office,” he said.

Ahtisaari said that Washington’s partners in the Quartet — the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — must also be seriously committed “so that a solution can be found to the crises stretching from Israel and Palestine to Iraq and Iran.”

“If we want to achieve lasting results, we must look at the whole region,” said Ahtisaari, aged 71, who won the peace prize for more than three decades of peace mediating in hotspots from Namibia to the Balkans and Indonesia.

“The tensions and wars in the region have been going on for so long that many have come to believe that the Middle East knot can never be untied,” Ahtisaari said. “I do not share this belief.”

“All crises, including the one in the Middle East, can be resolved,” he said after receiving a Nobel diploma and medal to applause from about 1,000 guests at a ceremony attended by Norway’s King Harald and Queen Sonja.