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Former Finland president, Martti Ahtisaari just wouldn't take no for an answer, and in the end his determination paid off. A war that lasted three decades between the Acehnese and the Indonesian government has now come to an end. The Nobel Prize Committee awarded Ahtisaari this year's peace prize for his efforts in mediating talks between the two warring sides. It is well-deserved recognition.

Credit should also go to the members of the two rival sides for their courage in making the necessary sacrifices to achieve peace.

Besides Ahtisaari, there were other international organisations that helped nurture the delicate peace process, keeping hopes alive even when Indonesian government soldiers and the Free Aceh Movement (Gam) troops slugged it out on Aceh's battlefields. About 15,000 lives were lost during the three decades of fighting that pitted the Indonesian government against the Free Aceh Movement.

Ahtisaari is a brilliant negotiator and mediator with an extraordinary track record of commitment and success - especially in Namibia and Kosovo, and now Aceh.

If anybody should be paying closer attention to what went on in Aceh during those trying times, it should be Thailand. Our country is confronted by a ruthless new generation of insurgents in the deep South, where more than 3,400 people have been killed since January 2004.

The previous government of Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont had also said that the Thai authorities should learn from the Aceh peace process. He also urged the authorities to look at the peace process in Mindanao in the Philippines. During his term in office, Surayud reached out to the people in the Malay-speaking region and apologised to the local Malays for past atrocities committed against them by the state. He even reached out to members of the long-standing separatist groups. Last December Surayud held a secret meeting in Bahrain with members of the Patani United Liberation Organisation (Pulo).

There were high hopes among the involved parties that, in the post-coup election, the incoming government would pursue the policy laid down by Surayud. But the next prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, wouldn't even give the deep South the time of day. Like the current government, Samak was more worried about his own political survival.

But instead of picking up where Surayud left off, a number of initiatives have sprung up. From Indonesia's vice president Yusuf Kalla to former Thai premier Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, and former Army chief turned politician Chettha Thanajaro, all of a sudden people wanted to be part of the solution. And so they launched their own dialogue processes with exiled separatist leaders. Needless to say, too many cooks spoiled the broth.

One of the successes behind the Aceh peace process has to do with the fact that the involved parties understood the need for outside help. They were able to come to this agreement because they understood that, no matter how ugly and brutal things were on the ground, the violence was essentially a part of a conflict that centred on the legitimacy of the Indonesian government in the Acehnese historical homeland.

Thailand, on the other hand, has difficulty seeing the insurgency in the Malay homeland beyond the framework of law and order. And according to that law and order, all violators must be crushed by any means necessary regardless of the root cause of the problem or the merits of the people's grievances.

Today, participants talk about coming up with a win-win solution for the deep South. A win-win scenario seems like a far-fetched dream but in reality it may not be an impossible task. Peace in Thailand's Malay-speaking South, it seems, will depend on the kind of concessions the two sides are willing to make. In order to do that, they are going to have to sit down together and understand each other's positions before they can work out their differences.