Johannesburg - Minutes after winning the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize, Finnish ex-president Martti Ahtisaari's thoughts were with the south-west African desert state of Namibia, where he cut his teeth as a peace-broker in the 1970s.

The veteran mediator was a United Nations envoy to the country between 1977 and 1990 - during the struggle in then South West Africa's for independence from apartheid-era South Africa.

Ahtisaari oversaw the long and difficult negotiations between Pretoria and the South West Africa's People Organization (SWAPO) liberation movement leading to Namibia's independence in
1990.

Speaking to Norwegian broadcaster NRK minutes after the award announcement Ahtisaari described Namibia as his "most important achievement."

Reacting to Ahtisaari's win, Namibian former prime minister and speaker of parliament Theo-Ben Gurirab, who was SWAPO's envoy to the UN during Ahtisaari's mediation, said Friday he thought being a Finn stood "in good stead."

In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Gurirab, who described himself as a close personal friend of Ahtisaari, said: "He brought a typical Finnish character - very calm, very friendly, very respectful, a very balanced cultural attitudes to things."

South Africa took over the large, sparsely-populated state during World War 1. Despite the UN ending South Africa's mandate over Namibia in 1966, Namibia, which served as a buffer between the apartheid state and Marxist Angola, did not gain independence until 1990.

Ahtisaari first came into contact with SWAPO when he was ambassador to Tanzania in the 1970s, where SWAPO activists were living in exile. In 1977 he was named UN Commissioner to Namibia and in 1989 became the UN's secretary-general's special representative to the country.

As a negotiator in Namibia, Gurirab said, Ahtisaari had to try to juggle the interests of a bewildering array of stakeholders, for whom south-west Africa became a frontline in the Cold War, including the United States, former colonial power Germany, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

"It took decades, it took death, it took betrayal, it took suffering but in the end he was part of the team that brought about the independence of Namibia," said Gurirab.

Gurirab situated the turning point in the negotiations at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola in 1988 between Cuban Angolan and South Africa forces that left thousands dead on both sides.

"That is what made everybody to say 'there is no point in this, lets sit down and work out a roadmap towards Cuba leaving Angola, South Africa leaving Angola, and on their way, leaving Namibia, and the UN to come and organize free and fair elections'," said Gurirab, who went on to become Namibia's first foreign minister after independence and later prime minister.

For Gurirab, Ahtisaari's Nobel Prize was a "deserved honour" for a "job well done." (dpa)