---
title: "The Ahtisaari mystery — a negotiator's legacy | Alpo Rusi | Negotiator 221"
summary: "Dr Alpo Rusi, foreign policy adviser to President Martti Ahtisaari, joins Sami Miettinen in November 2023 — three weeks after Ahtisaari's death. The starting point is a sentence Ahtisaari said to Miettinen in an interview for the book Uusi neuvotteluvalta, and which kept nagging at him: after Namibia, did he intend to negotiate peace in the Middle East? Out of that comes an article on Ahtisaari's legacy as a negotiator — the Namibian mandate, the bombs behind the Kosovo mediation, Aceh's autonomy and Northern Ireland's outside verification — and on Rusi's counter-thesis that the morality of foreign policy is measured in outcomes. The episode contains a commercial partnership and a strongly opinionated Middle East section; both are disclosed. The transcript is auto-captioning."
datePublished: 2023-11-10
dateModified: 2023-11-10
originalLang: en
section: society
sections: ["society"]
authors: ["Sami Miettinen"]
tags: ["Neuvottelija","EP221","Martti Ahtisaari","Rauhanvälitys","Diplomatia","Namibia","Kosovo","Lähi-itä","Neuvottelu","Alpo Rusi"]
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep221-martti-ahtisaari-palestiinassa-alpo-rusi/
---
# The Ahtisaari mystery — a negotiator's legacy | Alpo Rusi | Negotiator 221

# The Ahtisaari mystery — a negotiator's legacy | Alpo Rusi | Negotiator 221

> **Summary:**
> Dr Alpo Rusi, foreign policy adviser to President Martti Ahtisaari, joins Sami Miettinen in November 2023 — three weeks after Ahtisaari's death. The starting point is a sentence Ahtisaari said to Miettinen in an interview for the book Uusi neuvotteluvalta, and which kept nagging at him: after Namibia, did he intend to negotiate peace in the Middle East? Out of that comes an article on Ahtisaari's legacy as a negotiator — the Namibian mandate, the bombs behind the Kosovo mediation, Aceh's autonomy and Northern Ireland's outside verification — and on Rusi's counter-thesis that the morality of foreign policy is measured in outcomes. The episode contains a commercial partnership and a strongly opinionated Middle East section; both are disclosed. The transcript is auto-captioning.

## How to read this, the connections, and the source notes

**Alpo Rusi** is a doctor of political science, a diplomat, and was **foreign policy adviser
to President Martti Ahtisaari** during his presidency. The recording is **10 November 2023** —
**three weeks after Ahtisaari's death** and about a month after 7 October 2023. The episode
is therefore a eulogy and a crisis commentary at once, and that explains its tone.

Six disclosures, better read before anything else:

- **The episode contains a commercial partnership.** It opens with an advertisement for
  Tradeka's *Ei pelkkää puhetta* podcast, on which the host has himself been a guest. It is
  disclosed in the episode description and it is disclosed here.
- **The host interviewed Ahtisaari himself.** Sami Miettinen interviewed Ahtisaari for his
  book *Uusi neuvotteluvalta* (WSOY), and **the whole episode starts from one sentence in
  that interview.** This article is built around it, because that is the episode's genuine
  core.
- **The guest is not a neutral source on Ahtisaari.** Rusi's relationship with Ahtisaari
  broke down in August 1999, and he gives his own version of it in the episode. It is
  reported here in a section of its own and marked as his account, because a reader needs to
  know a source's relationship to their subject.
- **The second half of the episode is strongly opinionated and concerns the Israeli–
  Palestinian conflict.** This article **takes no position on the conflict** and does not
  present Rusi's interpretations as its own conclusions. The historical sequence is
  summarised, contested points are marked, and some of the episode's claims are not
  repeated at all (see section 11).
- **There is no publisher caption track**, so this article is based on YouTube
  auto-captioning. No verbatim quotation is used, except where the substance is an idea
  Ahtisaari expressed in the book interview, and that too is marked as a paraphrase.
- **This article is longer than the others in this series**, because the request was for an
  extensive treatment of Ahtisaari's legacy as a negotiator. The weight is on negotiation,
  not on current politics.

---

## 1. The Ahtisaari mystery

The episode begins from a question that has nagged at the interviewer for years.

When Sami Miettinen interviewed Ahtisaari for *Uusi neuvotteluvalta*, Ahtisaari said
something suggesting that he regarded **peace in the Middle East as his next task.** The
same note can be read in his Nobel lecture. The sentence was left open, and Ahtisaari never
explained it.

And the hypothesis Miettinen puts is what makes the episode worth an article about
negotiation:

> **Namibia worked.** Namibia was a League of Nations mandate territory administered by
> South Africa — and Ahtisaari negotiated the unwinding of that mandate into independence.
>
> **Palestine is structurally the same case.** After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the
> territory became a British mandate, and Israel came into being on the basis of a UN
> resolution.
>
> **Did Ahtisaari believe the Namibian solution was a model that transfers?**

The episode calls this **the Ahtisaari mystery**. There is no answer, because it can no
longer be asked. But it is a good question, and it serves as the spine of this whole
article, because it forces the more important question: **what actually decided Namibia?**

---

## 2. Namibia: why the mandate was the key

This is the article's most important analytical section, and it is written here because the
episode does not unpack it fully.

Namibia was a **League of Nations mandate** administered by South Africa, first as a mandate
and then in practice as its own. When the UN inherited the League, the legal fate of the
mandate remained an open question — the UN General Assembly resolved in 1966 to terminate
it, South Africa did not recognise the decision, and the International Court of Justice
issued an advisory opinion in 1971.

**From which follows the observation in negotiation theory that is the heart of the Namibian
case:**

> **The dispute had an address in international law.**

That means four things, each of them decisive for a negotiation:

1. **The end state was defined before the negotiation began.** A mandate is temporary by
   construction: it is administration on another's behalf, aimed at self-government. When
   the negotiation started, there was no need to agree on *where* this was going — only on
   how and when.
2. **The parties' legitimacy was settled.** The UN had recognised SWAPO, and South Africa's
   status was defined. There was no need to argue over who got to sit at the table — the
   question that kills most peace processes before they begin.
3. **The external pressure was structural.** South Africa's own system was breaking down, and
   holding the mandate was costing it more and more. The negotiation did not produce
   pressure; it offered a way out of pressure that already existed.
4. **The process had an enforcer.** The UN operation UNTAG supervised the transition and the
   elections. The agreement did not stay on paper.

Rusi adds one factor from the South African side, and it is the warmest passage in the
episode: **on the other side there was Mandela** — a leader who had himself suffered and who
proved morally strong. And he highlights the **truth commission**: the past was dealt with
separately, which helped the transition to democracy. Rusi attaches a remark about Finland
to this, returned to in section 7.

**And from this comes an answer to the mystery — or at least the best guess at one.** If
Ahtisaari believed the Namibian model transferred to the Middle East, he needed all four
conditions above. In the Palestinian case **at most one** of them holds: the address in
international law exists, but the end state has not been jointly defined, the parties'
legitimacy is itself the object of the dispute, and there is no enforcer.

**The mandate background is therefore a shared feature, but it is not the feature that
decided Namibia.**

---

## 3. Kosovo: a mediator with bombs behind him

If Namibia is the evidence for Ahtisaari's idealism, Kosovo is its opposite — and on Rusi's
account it is the case Finnish historiography knows least well.

**The setting.** In the Kosovo crisis of spring 1999 Russia first tried to make itself the
peacemaker with Milošević **without the West**. Rusi's assessment is that this would not have
been acceptable to the West, because it would have been a settlement between Russia and
Serbia.

What eventually worked was a triangle:

- **Ahtisaari** with a Western mandate,
- **Viktor Chernomyrdin** as Russia's special representative,
- and **NATO's bombing** in the background.

**Pertti Torstila** was also involved on the Finnish side; the channel has interviewed him
separately.

**And here is the episode's hardest single fact, and it is one Ahtisaari conceded himself.**
Rusi reminds the listener that Ahtisaari admitted in his 2011 book: **without NATO's bombing
there would have been no settlement.**

For negotiation this matters more than it sounds, and it is worth unpacking:

**What did Chernomyrdin's presence do?** It did not bring arguments to the table. It removed
Milošević's **best alternative to a negotiated agreement** — waiting in the belief that
Russia would rescue him. Once Russia's representative sat on the same side of the same
table, the value of waiting went to zero.

**What did the bombing do?** It made waiting more expensive every day.

**What did Ahtisaari do?** He offered **an exit that could be accepted** — and did it in a way
that let the other side take it without losing everything at once.

That is the correct division of labour in mediation, and it runs against how mediation is
usually discussed: **a mediator does not create pressure, he channels it.** The pressure comes
from elsewhere. Without pressure the mediator is a polite guest; without the mediator the
pressure only destroys.

**And then the window Rusi raises, which is easy to miss.** The Kosovo settlement came in
June 1999. Over the following month and a half a large transfer of power took place in
Russia: **Putin** — head of the presidential administration, director of the FSB and
secretary of the security council — acquired the keys to power. Rusi's assessment is that
Russia's line then turned.

**The negotiating lesson is about timing:** the same settlement would not have been possible
months later, because the decision-maker on the other side had changed. A mediator's most
important resource is not an argument but **a window**, and windows close for reasons that
have nothing to do with the negotiation.

---

## 4. Aceh and Northern Ireland: two other models

Ahtisaari's later career produced two cases that differ, in negotiating terms, from both
Namibia and Kosovo. The episode treats them briefly, but they deserve more space here,
because they are the two Rusi ultimately proposes as Middle East models.

### Aceh (2005): self-determination without independence

A long guerrilla war for independence was fought in Indonesia's Aceh province. Under
Ahtisaari's chairmanship an agreement was reached in Helsinki in which **Aceh did not receive
independence but very extensive autonomy.**

Three lessons for negotiation:

1. **The end state was redefined.** The dispute was about independence; the agreement was not
   a compromise on the *quantity* of independence but **a move to a different axis** — local
   self-government, local political parties, a share of natural resource revenue, amnesty.
   Neither side got what it demanded, but both got what they needed.
2. **An external shock changed the alternatives.** The 2004 tsunami struck Aceh
   catastrophically. It changed both parties' best alternative to agreement at a stroke:
   continuing the war suddenly cost more than either could bear.
3. **Implementation was monitored.** An EU and ASEAN monitoring mission was attached to the
   agreement. Again: an agreement with an enforcer.

**Rusi proposes this as a model for the Palestinian territories**, and says he would be
willing to write the model in a week. That is returned to in section 10.

### Northern Ireland: outside verification

Ahtisaari served in Northern Ireland as an **independent inspector of IRA arms dumps** (with
Cyril Ramaphosa). The role was not mediation but **verification**.

For negotiation this is the most underrated of Ahtisaari's roles, and its lesson is precise:
**when the parties do not believe each other, they can still believe a third party.**
Decommissioning was a thing neither side could establish to the other by saying it. It had to
be shown to someone both accepted as a witness.

**From this Rusi draws the episode's most interesting structural distinction.** He notes that
Northern Ireland had **centuries of religious antagonism** between Catholics and Protestants
behind it — and it was settled anyway. That, he argues, is evidence that **Ahtisaari-style
idealism carries in some conflicts.**

And from that he derives a division that is this article's most usable tool:

| | **Solvable** | **Not solvable at a table** |
|---|---|---|
| Character | identity and community conflict | strategic conflict |
| What the parties want | standing, security, recognition | territory, power, the other's disappearance |
| Is the end state divisible | yes | not without one side's defeat |
| Example in the episode | Northern Ireland, Aceh | Russia–Ukraine |

The distinction is not sharp and Rusi does not claim it is. But it is better than a division
into "solvable and insoluble", because it names **why** — namely whether the end state can be
divided.

---

## 5. Rusi's counter-thesis: morality is measured in outcomes

This is the episode's central disagreement with Ahtisaari, and it should be presented
respectfully in both directions, because neither position is naive.

**Ahtisaari's position**, as Rusi presents it and as Ahtisaari maintained to the end:
**all conflicts can be resolved** with the support of the international community. That was
not rhetoric but a working hypothesis — if a conflict is held to be insoluble, nobody tries,
and it becomes insoluble.

**Rusi's position** has two parts:

1. **Over-expectation.** On his account the successes in Namibia and Kosovo left behind an
   excessive expectation of what mediation can do. A ceasefire can be reached — the **roots**
   of a conflict cannot be settled at a single table. He appeals to his own Balkan experience
   and his work with Haris Silajdžić.
2. **The measure.** And from this comes the episode's weightiest single line:

> **The morality of foreign policy is measured in outcomes, not in words or aims.**

He adds that foreign policy today rests in many ways on **an understanding of power
politics**. In Serbia, Milošević took NATO bombs, and that brought him into line.

**Why this disagreement genuinely matters rather than being merely rhetorical:** both
positions are testable against the same material, and that material is Ahtisaari's own
career.

- **For Ahtisaari:** Aceh and Northern Ireland were settled without anyone bombing anyone.
  Namibia was settled without the mediator using force.
- **For Rusi:** Kosovo would not have been settled without the bombing, and Ahtisaari conceded
  it himself. The Aceh settlement was preceded by a natural disaster, not by persuasion.

**A synthesis this article is willing to offer:** both are right about different things.
Ahtisaari was right that **a mediator has to act as though a settlement were possible**,
because otherwise he will not find the moment at which it is. Rusi is right that **the moment
is made possible by something other than the mediator** — force, catastrophe, exhaustion, or a
change of ruler.

Ahtisaari's professional skill was not belief. It was **a readiness to be present and ready
at the moment something else had changed the calculation.** You cannot do that if you have
already decided the thing is insoluble.

---

## 6. Ahtisaari's Russia: chemistry that was infrastructure

Rusi's description of Ahtisaari's relations with Russia is the episode's most concrete
observation about how personal relationships turn into access.

**The claim:** there was genuine chemistry between Ahtisaari and Boris Yeltsin, and it rested
on both of them speaking of **relations free of ideology**. It led to **Russia accepting
Ahtisaari as a peace negotiator in the Kosovo crisis.**

This matters more than it sounds. The Kosovo mediator could not have been just anyone: he had
to be someone Russia could accept without losing face. **The personal relationship was the
entry ticket, not the decoration.**

Rusi also makes a more contested claim here, marked as his interpretation: that **Finland's
relations with Russia were better under Ahtisaari than at any time in Finnish history**, and
that the later relationship has been of a different quality. A comparison across decades is
a matter of interpretation and cannot be settled here.

**Koivisto.** Rusi also goes through Mauno Koivisto's legacy and is openly at odds with the
general assessment. He disputes that Finlandisation was confined to the Kekkonen era, and
grounds his position on three things: Koivisto's public statements at the time of the Soviet
collapse, his refusal to open the archives, and the failure to examine the activities of the
Finnish Communist Party.

**This is a contested historical interpretation and is marked as such.** Rusi has written
books on the subject and is a known party to it; his view is expert but not neutral. This
article does not settle the question.

---

## 7. The source's own story — a bounded section

This section is here for one reason: **a reader needs to know the source's relationship to
his subject.** It is written briefly and every claim about motive is marked as Rusi's own
account.

**The publicly known frame.** Alpo Rusi was the subject of suspicion regarding contacts with
the East German state security service, the Stasi. The suspicion became public in 1999, led
to a process lasting years, and Rusi took the state to court over it and won. He notes in the
episode that the Stasi's foreign intelligence personnel register contains some **350,000
entries**, a large share of them concerning people who had nothing to do with the Stasi, and
that he belongs to that group.

**Rusi's own account of what went wrong**, marked as his account:

- He was not asked for a statement, and the matter was handled behind his back for years. He
  regards that as a violation of his right to due process.
- His relationship with Ahtisaari broke down in August 1999.
- He says Ahtisaari first announced an intention to demand the dismissal of a particular
  official, and that the position changed after a certain meeting. **This is Rusi's reading
  of causation, not an established fact, and this article does not repeat his assessments of
  named persons' motives.**
- He had to begin the heavy process against the state himself, and the state never met him
  halfway. The victory did not, in his view, repair the wrong.
- He judges that without the affair his career would have gone differently.

**One part of this is a public act and deserves to be named:** Rusi says that **Olli Rehn**
defended him publicly and almost alone, at a time when doing so was politically risky. Rusi
regards it as something that permanently binds them. He also notes that his few supporters
did so at the risk of their own jobs.

**And from it he derives his general demand**, the only policy point in this section: Finland
needs **an examination of its recent past** — not because of one person, but because the
Soviet-era networks of influence did not disappear with the Soviet Union. He connects this to
South Africa's **truth commission** as an example that dealing with the past can be a
precondition of a transition rather than an obstacle to it.

**Why this is in the article:** it explains why the episode is simultaneously warm and
critical about Ahtisaari. Rusi is speaking about a man he served, whom he respects as a
negotiator, and with whom his personal relationship ended bitterly. **That makes him an
exceptionally good source on Ahtisaari's working methods and an exceptionally poor source on
Ahtisaari's motives.** This article is written according to that distinction.

---

## 8. What Ahtisaari said in the book interview

The warmest and at the same time most usable passage in the episode is Ahtisaari's own
thought, recorded by Miettinen in his interview. In paraphrase:

> People around the world hope for two things: **that the police and the courts will treat
> them as equals.** If those two are in order, development for the better is possible. Quite
> often they are not.

This is worth reading slowly, because it is the compression of Ahtisaari's entire way of
thinking, and it is precise in negotiating terms.

**Notice what is not in it.** No democracy, no elections, no market economy, no list of human
rights. Just two institutions, and both are **procedural**.

**Why these two?** Because they are the institutions on which a person can **expect**
something. If the police and the courts treat people as equals, a dispute can become a thing
whose outcome does not depend on who you are. And only then is it worth negotiating rather
than reaching for a weapon.

**This is a mediator's doctrine, not an idealist's.** Ahtisaari does not say people long for
justice. He says they long for **predictability**. That is a much more modest claim and a much
stronger one.

Attached to it is a second thought the episode connects to the same interview: **defending
the smaller against the stronger's exercise of power.** That is the same thing seen from the
other side. If the procedure is equal, the stronger has no reason to use force, because force
buys them nothing more.

---

## 9. The Middle East chapter — summarised, not adopted

The episode's longest continuous section is Rusi's account of the history of the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. **It is summarised here because it is the episode's content,
and it is marked as his account.** The article takes no position on the conflict.

**The sequence Rusi presents** — mostly standard event history, the emphases his:

- **The collapse of the Ottoman Empire** after the First World War, the territory's passage
  into a **British mandate**, and the fragmentation of the Arab world.
- **The founding of Israel** on the basis of a UN resolution and **the 1948 war**.
- **1967**, after which Israel holds Gaza, the Golan and the West Bank; **Sinai is returned**
  later.
- **The 1978–79 Egypt–Israel peace**, which stabilised one front permanently. Rusi returns to
  this later as a model.
- **The PLO** originates as a secular, Marxist Fatah movement and draws support from the
  Soviet Union and developing countries.
- **The 1979 Iranian revolution**, which Rusi names as the turning point in the rise of
  Islamic fundamentalism, and **the 1982 Lebanon war**, out of which the Iranian-backed
  Hezbollah emerged.
- **The first intifada in 1987**, ending in **the Oslo process** and recognition of the PLO.
- **Camp David in 2000** under Clinton — a last attempt to reassemble the process. On Rusi's
  account the research literature strongly emphasises that it foundered partly on the
  question of refugees' right of return.
- **The second intifada**, 2000–2005.
- **The 2006 elections across the whole Palestinian territory**, in which **Hamas** became the
  largest party, a few percentage points ahead of Fatah; **in 2007** Gaza separated into its
  own territory.
- **The Gaza wars** of 2008–09, 2012 and 2014.
- **Israel's internal shift**: the Oslo-era labour-government configuration gave way and
  right-wing forces strengthened.
- **The 2020 Abraham Accords**: diplomatic normalisation with Bahrain, the United Arab
  Emirates and later Morocco; Saudi Arabia was approaching the same.
- **7 October 2023** and the war that followed.

**Rusi's own interpretive frame**, which is his position and not this article's:

> The region was simultaneously **on a path to peace and radicalising.** When Arab states
> began to accept Israel's existence, that threatened the actors whose position rests on
> such acceptance never arriving.

He attaches a strategic calculation to this: on his account Saudi Arabia needs Western
technology and peace with Israel, and without them the region would be dominated by Iran and
its clients. That is **an assessment, not an observation**, and it is marked as such here.

**Three places where Rusi draws distinctions that belong in this article too**, because they
are methodological rather than positions:

1. **A terrorist organisation is not a state military force.** On Rusi's account it follows
   that the logic of the law of war and of ceasefires does not transfer unchanged. The
   distinction is legally correct, and it is at the same time contested — what follows from it
   is a live dispute in international legal debate.
2. **The distinction between a population and an armed actor.** Rusi appeals to an analogy
   from the Second World War: the fight was against Nazi Germany, not against German
   civilians. He presents this as a requirement running **in both directions**.
3. **The conflict is not a conflict between religions.** This is Rusi's own position and it is
   the episode's most calming claim: this is not a conflict between Judaism and Islam.

**What the article adds, because the episode does not say it:** in November 2023 the war was
catastrophic for civilians on both sides, and every assessment summarised here was made
mid-war, on incomplete information, and before its course was known. This article does not
present them as forecasts nor assess them with hindsight.

---

## 10. Rusi's proposal: Aceh as a model for Palestine

The episode's closing proposition is the reason the Ahtisaari frame existed at all, and it
returns the article to negotiation.

**Rusi's position has three parts:**

1. **The one-state model is ruled out.** On his account it will not happen.
2. **The two-state model is the right direction**, but it will not come about in its present
   form without long processes, and the precondition is that Israel is not surrounded by a
   hostile environment. He uses **the Egyptian peace** as evidence that this is possible.
3. **The interim step is the Aceh model.** He proposes building **very extensive autonomy**
   in the Palestinian territories — the same structure Ahtisaari negotiated for Aceh: not
   independence now, but self-government that is genuine and verifiable. He says he would
   write the model in a week.

He adds two conditions, which are his position: **dismantling Hamas's military capability**
and **Arab states taking responsibility** for stabilising the region.

**Why the Aceh analogy is interesting in negotiating terms**, and this is the article's own
assessment:

- **Its strength:** it moves the dispute away from the name of the end state. Most negotiating
  deadlocks arise because the parties argue about what the settlement is **called** rather
  than about what happens in it. Aceh was settled precisely by bypassing that.
- **Weakness 1:** in Aceh there was **one state**, and what was agreed was an internal
  arrangement within it. In Palestine the core of the dispute is exactly whose state one is
  inside. The analogy settles that question in one party's favour before the negotiation
  starts.
- **Weakness 2:** Aceh had **an enforcer** (EU and ASEAN monitoring) and **a shock** (the
  tsunami) that had changed both sides' alternatives. Neither is available.
- **Weakness 3:** in Aceh the counterparty was a movement able to give up the demand for
  independence and remain a political actor. That is the most critical condition of the Aceh
  settlement, and its transferability is precisely the question the proposal does not answer.

**This is not a refutation of the proposal.** It is reading it by the same measure Rusi
himself applied to Ahtisaari: **in outcomes, not in aims.** It is the best proposal made in
the episode, and it is nonetheless incomplete for the same reason as all the others — because
you cannot copy a mediation structure without the pressure that made the original possible.

**On Israel's future** Rusi offers one further position, marked here as his view and the
episode's most ambitious: Israel is a democracy and fundamentally a state of European origin,
and its most natural long-term partner would be **the European Union** rather than reliance on
American support alone.

---

## 11. What this article does not repeat

Towards the end of the episode Rusi makes broader political claims that go beyond what the
episode itself can evidence. They concern, among other things, European immigration and
demographic change, the role of religious movements in world politics, and what he holds to
follow from criticism of Israel.

**These are not summarised here in detail.** The reason is methodological rather than
political: they are generalisations about whole populations and political positions, they are
not supported with evidence in the episode, and no opposing voice is present. Repeating them
in an article would give them a weight the episode does not give them.

A reader who wants to hear them will find them in the episode. This article deals with what
in the episode is verifiable and useful for negotiation.

---

## 12. Ahtisaari's legacy as a negotiator

Finally, what the article was written for.

**Five things from Ahtisaari's career that a negotiator can use:**

**1. A mediator does not create pressure; he channels it.** Kosovo is the clearest evidence,
and Ahtisaari conceded it himself. The mediator's value lies in turning existing pressure into
**an acceptable way out**. Without pressure there is no agreement; without a mediator there is
no exit.

**2. The other side's best alternative decides, not the other side's opinion.** Chernomyrdin
sitting on the same side of the table removed the value of waiting for Milošević. That was the
real move in the negotiation, and it was made before anyone said anything at the table.

**3. A dispute with an address in international law is a different dispute.** Namibia was a
mandate whose unwinding already had a defined direction. That was not an accident but the
basis of the negotiation. This is the answer to the Ahtisaari mystery: **structural similarity
is not enough when the decisive condition is missing.**

**4. Redefining the end state is the most underrated move.** Aceh was settled because the
dispute was moved from independence to self-government — onto a different axis, not to a
compromise on the same one. It is a move available in most deadlocks and used rarely.

**5. Predictability of procedure matters more than justice of outcome.** This is Ahtisaari's
own thought from the book interview, and it is the compression of his legacy: people hope the
police and the courts will treat them as equals. That is the foundation of mediation and of
any negotiation — **a person agrees to negotiate only if they believe the procedure will be
the same for them as for everyone else.**

**And what stays open.** There is no longer an answer to whether Ahtisaari really intended to
try the Middle East. Rusi supposes that the successes in Namibia and Kosovo left an
over-expectation. That is possible.

But it is also possible that Ahtisaari knew exactly how unlikely it was and held it as a
working hypothesis anyway. **A mediator who has decided a conflict is insoluble is no longer a
mediator.** The skill lay in his being willing to be wrong more often than right, so as to be
present at the moment something else had changed the calculation.

From the outside that is hard to tell apart from idealism. The difference is that an idealist
believes. Ahtisaari was ready.

---

*The episode ends on a lighter note: Rusi recalls good moments with Ahtisaari — among them a
lunch with Orthodox church leaders during which one of the guests fell asleep, and July 1997
in Eastern Karelia with Boris Yeltsin as host. The reminiscences are not summarised further
here; they belong to the episode and are better heard.*