The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace Laureates Discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation

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Chapter One

José Ramos-Horta

East Timor

Short Biography

In conferring the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to two East Timorese peace activists, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Committee sent a fundamental message to the world: the value and importance of respect for human rights are not measured by the numerical or political strength of an oppressed people.

    East Timor forms part of one of the easternmost islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Located three hundred miles north of Australia and some nine hundred miles east of Jakarta, this tiny territory was the victim of Indonesian aggression, as well as general international acquiescence to the blatant violations of human rights and international law that were perpetrated by the Indonesian government since it invaded East Timor in 1975. In the years following that invasion, an estimated 230,000 East Timorese (one-third of an original population of 690,000) lost their lives due to starvation, epidemics, war, and terror. Economic and strategic ties to the Indonesian government led most of the world's major powers to cooperate with Jakarta without regard to the serious legal and human rights issues raised by the situation in East Timor.

    East Timor was first settled by Portuguese traders in 1520. The Dutch began to expand to the island of Timor and wrested control over West Timor from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century. An 1859 treaty established the current borders. West Timor, administered as part of the Dutch East Indies, became part of Indonesia in 1946, while East Timor, with a different language, religion, and customs from its island neighbor, remained part of the Portuguese colonial empire. Unlike Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim nation in the world, with more than 190 million people, East Timor is populated primarily by Roman Catholics.

    Following the 1974 collapse of the Portuguese colonial system, the Portuguese withdrew from East Timor while retaining sovereignty over the former colony. Two political parties then vied for power, the leftist Fretilin party and the conservative Timorese Democratic Union (UDT). An initial alliance between the two parties dissolved in May 1975, and in August 1975 the UDT launched a coup. Within three weeks, the Fretilin forces completely defeated those of the UDT, and for a period of about three months, the Fretilin party controlled an independent East Timorese government. The foreign minister and United Nations representative for the fledgling government was the twenty-five-year-old José Ramos-Horta.

    Two days after a December 5, 1975, state visit in Jakarta with President Suharto in which President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger pledged U.S. support and military aid, Indonesia invaded East Timor. The Indonesian government formally annexed East Timor in July 1976 as the twenty-seventh Indonesian province.

    The United Nations never recognized Indonesia's sovereignty over East Timor, in part because the annexation violated the Indonesian national constitution. In its independence settlement with its former Dutch colonial masters, Indonesia renounced any claims to territories not controlled in 1942 by the Netherlands-Indies government. Despite the important principles at stake--the right of self-determination, the sanctity of international borders, and the authority of the U.N. Security Council--international reaction to the Indonesian invasion was muted or non-existent.

    Born in 1949 in Dili, the capital of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta came by his activism naturally. His father, a native of Portugal, had been deported to East Timor by the Portuguese government for protesting its military dictatorship.

    In 1970, José Ramos-Horta was exiled for two years to Mozambique by the Portuguese government for his outspoken advocacy of East Timorese independence. In 1975, he fled the country only days before the Indonesian invasion. In the years since, he became the principal spokesman for his country's cause, pleading its case before the United Nations, the European Parliament, and other diplomatic and political bodies.

    In his award presentation speech, Francis Sejersted, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, noted that since the invasion, Ramos-Horta has lived abroad, "unceasingly and with great personal sacrifice collecting and communicating information on the repression, torture, and killing in his home country, and acting as East Timor's principal international spokesman. At the same time, he has successfully kept up his efforts to unite the various East Timorese groups in a single national front, while constantly seeking opportunities for a peaceful solution to the conflict with Indonesia, based on respect for the integrity of the East Timorese people."

    He praised both Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo for their "work towards a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor" and for their "sustained and self-sacrificing contributions for a small but oppressed people." On behalf of the Nobel Committee, he added his hopes that the award would "spur efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict in East Timor based on the people's right to self-determination."

    In 1992, Ramos-Horta began calling for a three-phase peace plan for East Timor, similar to the Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The plan was to start with demilitarization and self-rule, and lead to a referendum and a final decision on the territory in five to ten years. He also called for the release of political prisoners, including Xanana Gusmao, the Fretilin resistance leader, captured by Indonesian troops in 1992 and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

    The awarding of the Nobel Prize to Belos and Ramos-Horta served to redirect international attention to the conflict in East Timor. In May 1998, President Suharto resigned following massive protests and was replaced by former Prime Minister B.J. Habibie. On June 10, 1998, Habibie proposed a plan of limited autonomy for East Timor, linked to international recognition of Indonesian sovereignty over the territory In 1999 full independence was gained after a referendum.

JOSÉ RAMOS-HORTA

"Democracy and Diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific Region"

First, I would like to thank so much the organizers of this conference for your kindness in inviting me and giving a platform to the often voiceless people of East Timor. I bring to you the warmest greetings of my good friend and co-laureate of the 1996 Peace Prize, Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo.

    This morning, as I was sitting next to my good friend Oscar Arias in the bus coming here, I asked him, "Do you have a written speech?" He said he does, and that's when I got nervous because if Oscar Arias, such a brilliant, wonderful statesman, brings a written speech, and I don't have a written speech--he literally spoiled my morning. So, I have to apologize to you if my speech is a rambling one.

    Let me start by sharing with you a story. A few years ago, I was in Sweden, and paid a courtesy call to the Cuban Ambassador in Stockholm. A colleague accompanied me to the meeting. After the meeting, my colleague told me, "If your intention was to tell the Cuban Ambassador how the situation in East Timor was very confused, you did a very good job, because the man was totally confused. You mixed three languages throughout the discussion. Why the hell didn't you just speak in Portuguese?" So, please, my apologies if my English is not clear enough, eloquent enough, to convey to you what the people of East Timor feel, and what I feel.

    To situate the question of East Timor and the region in its historical and geopolitical context--you might recall a picture that made headlines in 1975. An American helicopter was trying to land on the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to rescue American diplomats, CIA officials, South Vietnamese collaborators. Soon after the collapse of U.S. presence in South Vietnam, Cambodia and then Laos followed. Better than a thousand words, that picture illustrated the humiliating retreat of one of the two superpowers from a peasant war in Asia. In another continent the same year, the Portuguese empire had collapsed. Cuban/Soviet forces entered the battleground for influence in Angola. Mozambique became independent under a Marxist movement. The battle between East and West for influence in Southern Africa raged on. In the horn of Africa, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia had been overthrown, again shifting the balance of power to the Soviet side. The Soviet Union was already in control, so to speak, in Somalia with the collapse of Haile Selassie, a Marxist regime took over. It seemed as if the "domino theory" first articulated by Lyndon Johnson, which served as a strategic rationale for U.S. intervention in China, was being confirmed.

    It was against this background that then-President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger visited Indonesia, on December 6, 1975. Within twelve hours of their departure, East Timor was invaded by Indonesia. East Timor, a country of 700,000 then, 95 percent subsistence farmers, peasants, squeezed in an area of only 19,000 square kilometers, was to experience in the following years one of the worst massacres--amounting to genocide--since the end of World War II. The tens of thousands of people who died in East Timor in the following days, weeks, months, and years were, in fact, just a footnote to the Cold War, a casualty of realpolitik and pragmatism of states. We, the East Timorese, join the Tibetans, the Kurdish, the Armenians in the past, the Palestinians, the Gypsies, and the Jews for centuries, as expendable peoples, as casualties of the grand scheme of the larger powers. Some of the Palestinians have managed to survive and get out of oblivion, at least cease to be ignored. But if we were to try to understand why all of this happened, what happened to the Jews for centuries, to the Tibetans for the past fifty years, to the Kurdish in endless wars, to the East Timorese, I would say, we are all sacrificed in the order of realpolitik and pragmatism of states.

    One issue that always captured my attention--even though I come from a very remote island far away from the Middle Eastern region--I was always fascinated by one people, the Jews. As a young teenager in the sixties, I would relentlessly look for books on Jewish history. One thing I could not comprehend: the persecution, the discrimination, the killing of the Jews. Then a few years ago, I found out that apart from my Asian and African heritage, I have some Jewish heritage as well, going back to the Inquisition. Maybe that is the reason for my curiosity. But why were the Jews almost literally thoroughly destroyed in the thirties? What wrong did they do? A powerless group of people. No power behind them. It was prejudice, ignorance for centuries that led to the hatred towards the Jews. But if those who were so hateful of the Jews were to read and study their extraordinary culture--the wealth, the richness of their history and their culture, their music-maybe those years, centuries of persecution and discrimination, would not have happened.

    My contention, my belief, is that it is ignorance of each other that feeds into prejudice. Prejudice leads to suspicion and then conflict. I do not wish to oversimplify; there are other reasons for wars, such as fighting to control natural resources, territory, but a lot of the wars in the past and today are caused by prejudices because of ignorance, and then mistrust and fear of the other side. We, the East Timorese, join all these peoples--the Jews, the Palestinians, the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Armenians in the past--in this long list of endless conflict, people sacrificed in all the pragmatism and realpolitik.

    Twenty-three years ago, no one thought the East Timorese could survive the onslaught. Every major country in the world provided weapons to Indonesia; countries that preach democracy and human rights were the ones that provided the most weapons not only to Indonesia but to many dictators around the world. All kinds of weapons were unleashed on the people of East Timor. Twenty-three years later, we are there kicking, surviving, and it is the Indonesian empire that is collapsing around us. The Suharto dictatorship is gone. There is a dynamic, lively democracy movement taking shape in Indonesia, and Indonesian people are beginning to ask, What have we done to this small nation of East Timor? Who is going to explain to the Indonesians the loss of their own people--that thousands of Indonesian soldiers, young people, lost their lives in the fields of East Timor? Who is going to explain to the Indonesian people the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted in weapons purchases instead of channeling them to education, health care, clean water, housing for their people?

    The West has something to answer as well. With the end of the Cold War, we thought there would be less conflict, but, since the end of the Cold War, as Europe could no longer find much of a market in Europe itself for their weapons, they actively promote weapon sales to the poorest countries of the south. We became the market, the dumping ground, for the excess weapons produced by the democracies of the north. I will not elaborate much on this topic because our good friend Oscar will address this issue. But the collapse of the East Asian myth--of the East Asian tiger economies--Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea--as painful as these economic collapses are for the millions of people in the region, opened extraordinary opportunities for democracy and the rule of law to finally triumph and prevail in the region. Those events have destroyed the so-called Asian values that have been advanced for many years by Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Li Peng of China, and Suharto of Indonesia--Asian values that are supposedly unique and stand against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is supposed to be, according to them, a Western concept. Millions of people pouring into the streets of Rangoon, Bangkok, Manila, Indonesia, and South Korea are telling their leaders that human rights, democracy, rule of law are also our aspirations, are also our rights. That is the extraordinary opportunity offered by this economic and financial collapse in the region.

    As I speak here today, I must say thanks, President Clinton, for the U.S. leadership in this current crisis in the region. Sometimes I think back on the criticism that people addressed at the U.S., but the reality is when the need comes, it has been the U.S., and particularly this administration, that has offered the necessary leadership for economic recovery in East Asia, for peace in the Middle East, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland. Again it was Clinton, after many, many years of Africa being ignored, being off the agenda, being off the radar screen of the U.S. administration, who put Africa back on the map. I say, "Thank you, Mr. President." And thank you for the modest things you are doing on East Timor. I hope that in the last two years of his administration, he will forcefully support the emerging democracy in Indonesia, support the economic recovery, and use his abilities, his extraordinary energy and creativity, to finally bring about peace in East Timor.

    Lastly, let me share with you a story. A few years ago, I was driving from Lausanne, Switzerland to Geneva to attend yet one more of those almost futile exercises at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. I tuned in to the BBC, the only good thing the British ever invented--I know it is a wild exaggeration, and my sincere apologies to any British subject in the room, but it is my favorite radio station, the best anywhere in the world. Tuning in to the BBC at eight in the morning, I heard this extraordinary news of a Soviet cosmonaut who had gone into space a few months earlier when the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union: as he prepared his spacecraft to return to earth, the startling news came from Moscow, "Do not come back. Your country no longer exists." Just imagine someone out of Houston, Texas telling John Glenn, "Don't come back." If it had been certain other U.S. politicians, I would like to hear someone telling them not to come back, but John Glenn, please come back. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist--the mighty empire had ceased to exist. Someone, offering a second thought from Moscow, told him, "Circle the earth a few more times," and he diligently did. In Moscow, it was disarray; no one knew what to do with him. Finally, after many hours, they brought him back to earth. The empire had ceased to exist; Armenia became independent; the Baltic States were liberated; Vaclav Havel became president of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic; Poland and all the other countries in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, became independent, contradicting those who have told us year after year that we must accept the irreversibility of military occupations, the rule of force. The East Timorese, Tibetans, Burmese, and Kurdish remember this extraordinary lesson; we will survive. We will win.

    Thank you.

Discussion Among the Participants

Julian Bond : Earlier this summer, there seemed to be some movement toward discussions of extending democracy, but lately, not much. And secondarily, what role does Portugal play?

José Ramos-Horta : I will start with the last point. Portugal has had a remarkable attitude in support of the struggle for East Timor. Having colonized East Timor for five hundred years, they woke up to their responsibilities, and, in spite of the fact that it is one of the poorest countries in Europe, they have put up a valiant effort in support of East Timor. The Secretary-General Kofi Annan--the best Secretary-General the U.N. has had in at least thirty years--has also put enormous effort in this issue, bringing Portugal, Indonesia, and myself to the negotiating table. There is a genuine move in Indonesia towards resolving this issue, in spite of their extraordinary problems; they realize it is one of the most costly problems to them. But, as in a situation of transition, like anyplace, there is lack of cohesiveness, lack of direction, lack of a central authority to make the necessary move. Thus, we have to wait a few more months for clarification in Indonesia. Right now, we are discussing an autonomy plan presented by the U.N., drafted by a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and it really is a good, good plan. If Indonesia agrees to it, with minor changes as is normal in negotiations, we could have in place by next year the implementation of this autonomy plan, leading in two, three, or five years to a referendum to determine the final status of the territory. [A referendum was conducted in August, 1999, in which the East Timorese overwhelmingly called for independence.]

    And I must report that when my good friend Oscar Arias and I spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, I asked him to be the leader of advisors to the East Timorese negotiating team, and he agreed. When I informed my colleagues, they were all thrilled that Oscar Arias had accepted to be our advisor--someone who brought about peace in Central America when the two superpowers were fighting each other in Central America. That's why thought, If he can pull that off in Central America, he can help us in East Timor.

Jody Williams : I have a question, not specific to Indonesia and East Timor. You were talking about ignorance and prejudice being causes of conflict. The reason I ask this question is that we are contemplating how to resolve conflict hopefully before it happens, and thus at this time when there is great emphasis on the new millennium, how we can teach the world to do things differently. Is ignorance and prejudice the cause, or, as we saw in Rwanda and other places, are those fighting for power and exploiting the ignorance the cause? It may seem like a semantic difference, but I think it's important, because it helps us decide how we go about preventing conflict. If it is the powers that be that are fighting for power--and using everything at their disposal, including arms of war, including ignorance, including prejudice--then we have to attack the problem from many different angles. So this is the question I ask: "How do we attack the problem--from the top down, from the bottom up, from all sides?"

José Ramos-Horta : Yes, certainly, I did not mean to attribute to ignorance, prejudice, that it is the sole reason. There are others, such as often a nation's quest for survival in terms of even water resources, mineral resources, and so on. You are absolutely right. In Bosnia and in Rwanda, for instance, a few individuals in their quest for power irresponsibly ignited prejudices and hatred by instilling fears in a given group. How to solve it? I tell you, I don't have a clue. The only thing I could say is that yes, diplomatic intervention and mediation are obviously necessary, like you have in Bosnia. There has been a lot of criticism of the Bosnia Peace Accord, but Richard Holbrooke did outstanding work in Bosnia, as he has done in Kosovo, and so on, because at least guns fall silent.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 2000 Jeffrey Hopkins. All rights reserved.