WORLD> Middle East
Laureate urges Obama on Mideast
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-11 07:44

Nobel Peace Prize winner 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, announced in October, for decades of peace-brokering around the globe.

"Peace is a question of will," Ahtisaari said upon receiving the prize at Oslo's city hall. "All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal."

"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.

Ahtisaari said that the US' partners in the Quartet - the EU, Russia and the UN - 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, age 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," he said. "I do not share this belief."

"All crises, including the one in the Middle East, can be resolved," he said in a speech 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.