Harri Holkeri

HELSINKI (AP) - Former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri, who brokered peace talks in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s and headed the U.N. administration in Kosovo, died Sunday. He was 74.

Holkeri, a lawmaker and chairman of the conservative National Coalition Party, was prime minister 1987-1991. He was also a member on the board of the Bank of Finland 1978-1997.

He died in a hospital after a long illness, Finnish news agency STT reported. No cause of death was given.

At the end of 1998, Holkeri was honored by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as a member of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell's team brokering peace talks in Northern Ireland which lasted from 1996 to 1998.

In 2000, Holkeri served as U.N. General Assembly president. Three years later, he was appointed the U.N. special representative to the Serbian province of Kosovo, which had been administered by the world body from the end of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign that halted a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.

Holkeri resigned from the U.N. posting in Kosovo less than a year later because of ill health.

In 2008, he was badly injured when a thief knocked him over in the street while escaping from a store in Helsinki. Holkeri, a former keen cross-country skier, seemingly never recovered from the fall, appearing frail in public.

He is survived by his wife, Marja-Liisa Lepisto, whom he wed in 1960, and two adult children.


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