Nobel Peace winner urges Obama to focus on Mideast

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari urged President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday to start his term by giving "high priority" to the Mideast conflict, calling it the world's most challenging peace-building project.

The Finnish diplomat and mediator also warned that the global financial crisis would strike hard at the developing world, and he called on governments to not cut back on foreign aid.

Ahtisaari received this year's coveted Nobel Prize for his three decades of peace work around the globe including in Namibia, Kosovo and Indonesia. He served as Finland's president from 1994 until declining re-election in 2000, when he left politics and founded his Crisis Management Initiative, a peace mediation institute.

In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony Wednesday in Oslo, Ahtisaari insisted that "all conflicts can be settled" and that the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not need to rage indefinitely.

"We cannot go on, year after year, simply pretending to do something to help the situation in the Middle East. We must also get results," Ahtisaari said in prepared remarks released before the speech.

"I hope that 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."

more