It is the responsibility of "all parties involved" to work toward a solution to peace in the Middle East, 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari urged on Wednesday, according to dpa. "The credibility of the whole international community is at stake," Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president, said as he accepted his award in Oslo's City Hall. "We simply cannot go on, year after year, simply pretending to do something to help the situation in the Middle East." He urged US president-elect Barack Obama to give "high priority" to the conflict and called for continued commitment from the other members of the Quartet on the Middle East, a group including the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia. "Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal," he said. The veteran diplomat and mediator is the first Finnish national to win the coveted peace prize worth 10 million kronor (1.2 million dollars). The award includes a gold medal and a diploma. The Peace Prize is one of the awards endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel. In accordance with Nobel's will, the peace prize is handed out in Oslo. In a separate ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall, Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf presented the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics. Outgoing Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjos lauded Ahtisaari for "important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts." Ahtisaari, 71, joined an "exclusive group of peace negotiators," Mjos said mentioning former US President Theodore Roosevelt (1906), former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (2001), and former US President Jimmy Carter in 2002. Mjos noted that Ahtisaari personally rated his efforts in Namibia the highest, noting he had been called "Namibia's midwife" for his role in negotiating Namibia's independence from then-apartheid South Africa. Ahtisaari has also been involved in mediation efforts in countries including Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Indonesia. He reminded guests, including Norwegian King Harald V, of his personal experience as a displaced person. As a child he was one of hundreds of thousands forced to relocate from Karelia, a region that Finland had to secede to the Soviet Union during World War II. Ahtisaari urged governments to stick to their goals of "eradicating poverty" despite the financial crisis and said future peace processes will need broader participation, including from women. Other guests in Oslo included Norway's Queen Sonja, Ahtisaari's wife Eeva and son Marko, Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. In Stockholm, Swedish Queen Silvia, Crown Princess Victoria, Prince Carl Philip and Princess Madeleine attended the award ceremony. Several female guests in the Stockholm audience wore kimonos, since three of the 2008 prize winners hailed from Japan. The physics prize was shared by US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. They have described nature's order within the framework of spontaneous broken symmetry. Nambu, 87, was absent and was to receive his prize in Chicago. Osamu Shimomura of Japan and US citizens Martin Chalfie and Roger Y Tsien won the chemistry prize for work on developing a key tool used for tagging bioscience processes. German researcher Harald zur Hausen was awarded for discovering the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer; the other half of the medicine prize was shared by Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the literature prize. US economist Paul Krugman received the economic sciences prize for work on international trade and economic geography. The Stockholm Concert Hall was decorated with thousands of flowers from San Remo, Italy, where Nobel died on December 10, 1896. The theme colours were red and green. Some 1,300 guests, including royal family members, diplomats, academics, politicians and leaders from the worlds of business and the arts then attended a banquet at Stockholm's City Hall.
