- President of Finland 1994-2000.
- In October 2008 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
- In 2008 he was awarded the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize.
- In 2008 he was awarded the Geuzenpenning in Netherlands.
- He graduated from the Oulu University Teacher Training School. After a year of teaching, he became an aide worker in Pakistan and for international student organizations. He joined Finland's Foreign Ministry and served as an ambassador to Tanzania, Zambia and Somalia.
- In 1995 he was awarded with the 'Zamenhof Prize for International Understanding', of the World Esperanto Association.
- Ahtisaari served as UN undersecretary general for administration and management from 1987 to 1991 causing mixed feelings inside the organisation during an internal investigation of massive fraud. When Ahtisaari revealed in 1990 that he had secretly lengthened the grace period allowing UN officials to return misappropriated taxpayer money from the original three months to three years, the investigators were furious. The 340 officials found guilty of fraud were able to return money even after their crime had been proven. The harshest punishment was the firing of twenty corrupt officials.
- In September 2009 Ahtisaari joined The Elders, a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues. He travelled to the Korean Peninsula with fellow Elders Gro Harlem Brundtland, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson in April 2011, and to South Sudan with Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in July 2012.
- In 1960, he moved to Karachi, Pakistan, to lead the Swedish Pakistani Institute's physical education training establishment, where he became accustomed to a more international environment. In addition to managing the students' home, Ahtisaari's job involved training teachers. He returned to Finland in 1963, and became active in non-governmental organizations responsible for aid to developing countries.
- According to the memoir of the former secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, former Foreign Minister and UN ambassador Keijo Korhonen, who was strongly against awarding the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize to Ahtisaari, wrote a letter to the committee which negatively portrayed Ahtisaari as a person and his merits in international conflict zones.
- In 2000-01, Ahtisaari and Cyril Ramaphosa inspected IRA weapons dumps for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, as part of the Northern Ireland peace process.
- After the independence elections of 1989, Ahtisaari was appointed an honorary Namibian citizen.
- Besides his native language, Finnish, Ahtisaari spoke Swedish, French, English, and German.
- Ahtisaari spent several years as a diplomatic representative from Finland. He served as Finland's Ambassador to Tanzania from 1973 to 1977. As UN Deputy Secretary-General 1977-1981 and as United Nations Commissioner for Namibia from 1976 to 1981, working to secure the independence of Namibia from the Republic of South Africa.
- South Africa gave him the O R Tambo award for "his outstanding achievement as a diplomat and commitment to the cause of freedom in Africa and peace in the world".
- In 1965, he joined the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in its Bureau for International Development Aid, eventually becoming the assistant head of the department.
- On 2 September 2021, it was announced that Ahtisaari had Alzheimer's disease and retired from public life.
- Ahtisaari was a member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation's Ibrahim Prize Committee.
- After completing his military service (Ahtisaari held the rank of captain in the Finnish Army Reserve), he began to study through a distance-learning course at Oulu teachers' college. He was able to live at home while attending the two-year course which enabled him to qualify as a primary-school teacher in 1959.
- In 2003 Ahtisaari defended George W. Bush's attack to Iraq, describing it as humanitarian intervention, which incited criticism from professor of history Juha Sihvola.
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