CIAO DATE: 06/03

José Ramos-Horta on the Future of East Timor

Nermeen Shaikh

Q&A AsiaSource Interview
September 2002

Asia Society
Asia Source

José Ramos-Horta, Nobel laureate and Foreign Minister of the Democratic Republic of East Timor, was a leading figure in the country's liberation movement. Mr Ramos-Horta lived in exile for the duration of the Indonesian occupation, during which time he also served as the Permanent Representative to the UN of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin).

In this interview, Mr Ramos-Horta discusses the role of the UN in East Timor's struggle for national liberation, the work of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, and other foreign policy and domestic issues confronting the new nation-state.

The Financial Times wrote in a recent article that, “Full independence for East Timor marks the pinnacle of what has been one of the world’s most comprehensive and successful reconstruction efforts.” Given that you spent the better part of almost three decades lobbying the UN and powerful member countries to acknowledge the plight of East Timor, do you think such praise is well deserved?

I would say so. The success of East Timor should not be credited only to the East Timorese people for their courage, perseverance, and faith. There are many other nations equally courageous who have been fighting with even more resources for much longer and are still fighting and are not independent, are not free. One thinks immediately, for instance, of the Palestinians or the Kurds.

East Timor's freedom and independence is owed also to the international community, to the United Nations, particularly to the leadership of the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, and to individual countries like Portugal. Of course, the success of the liberation movement is also due to common people; individuals who took to the streets over the years, who, in more recent times, in the age of the internet, used this medium to alert friends and governments to the plight of the people of East Timor.

It has been argued that one of the shortcomings of the UN mission in East Timor is that it did not build a systematic case against those ultimately responsible for war crimes. Would you agree with this claim?

I would not agree entirely; the UN mission did some preliminary research and investigation with the very limited resources available to them. The main shortcoming can probably be attributed to the fact that the UN Security Council did not think the establishment of an international tribunal for East Timor was appropriate at the time.

The UN mission in East Timor, with the support of the UN human rights office in Geneva, ultimately decided to set up a Serious Crimes Unit that has done an excellent job in investigating and prosecuting some of those responsible for the violence in 1999.

Could you please explain the distinction between the Serious Crimes Unit you refer to and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established earlier this year in East Timor? What is the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under what conditions was it established, and how will it operate?

They are two separate entities; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was entirely an initiative of the East Timorese themselves. The mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to examine the entire history of violence in East Timor dating back to 1974, including the violence perpetrated by the resistance before the Indonesian invasion in 1975.

The Commission will not be discriminating in the sense that they will not focus only on the violence allegedly committed by the Indonesian side or the pro-Indonesian side. It is our firm, clear conviction that in order to be effective, the Commission's work has to be balanced, it has to show integrity by looking as well at the violence committed by East Timorese of various persuasions.

The mandate of the Commission, however, does not cover serious crimes; that is, acts that are defined as crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide. The mandate of the Commission is only to look at lesser crimes and encourage both sides involved to engage in dialogue, to find forms of justice through traditional means and reconciliation.

The Serious Crimes Unit will be responsible for trying the bigger crimes. This Unit has international and East Timorese judges on it, and has already been operating for three years.

The Indonesian army was responsible for arming and training militias in East Timor as elsewhere in the country now. Could you comment on how the Indonesian military has responded to secessionist movements there (Aceh or Papua, for example, to name only the most obvious) and what the position of the East Timor government is vis-à-vis these movements?

We feel enormous sympathy for the Indonesian authorities because we understand how difficult it is to try to build democracy in a country of 220 million people scattered over thousands of islands, with a fifty-year legacy of autocratic, dictatorial and corrupt rule. I don't think anyone, anywhere in the world, would do any better than what the Indonesians have been trying to do in the last three years: reforming institutions such as the judiciary, the police, and the army, while at the same time attempting to reform the way people think.

The central government has also been weakened because of this transition from dictatorial to democratic rule; its authority has further diminished as a result of the economic and financial crisis. Separatist groups who have been fighting for years are attempting now to exploit the situation by increasing their demands while the army increases its repression, which is what it knows best.

At the same time, it must be said that the army is the institution most responsible for the instability in Indonesia because of its brutal record in parts of Indonesia, or really, throughout Indonesia. That the people of Aceh and Papua, after half a century under Indonesia, are still not happy, are angry, want independence, should be the cause for some reflection on the part of the military. The Indonesian authorities should ask themselves why this might be the case: Why are the Acehnese so angry? Why are the West Papuans so angry? Rather than asking themselves these questions, they are again attempting to crush the insurgencies by brute force, using the same tactics that gave rise to these situations in the first place, and which will ultimately only escalate the conflict and violence.

Having said that, let me turn to our government's position. There is no sensible and rational government in East Timor, now or in the future, as there is none anywhere in the world, that could tell the Acehnese and the Papuans that we support their right to secede from Indonesia. We just cannot do that. It is not a question only of pragmatism because of our relationship with Indonesia and the possible consequences, but also the more wide-ranging implications of such support. If the Acehnese and Papuans are given the right to secede, even though they have been part and parcel of Indonesia now for as long as they have, then where would we stop in terms of other third world nations that are plagued with the same situations? That is why we have to be very careful.

At the same time, we do not deny at all that the Papuans and the Acehnese have legitimate grievances and legitimate rights. We can only pray that the autonomy proposals offered by Jakarta - which offer rather wide-ranging autonomy and are in fact more advanced than similar proposals in many developed countries - will be fully implemented. The tragedy in Indonesia, as in many third world countries, is that autonomy arrangements, including federal structures, have never been entirely successful. These arrangements are open to abuse by local authorities who tend to use them for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of the federation as a whole.

The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) concluded in its ministerial conference in July that it would invite East Timor to attend future meetings in an observer capacity. Do you expect East Timor to gain full membership of ASEAN in the future?

I would expect that about five years from now we could consider applying for full membership. East Timor is, after all, a country in Southeast Asia, geographically speaking, although culturally and ethnically it is much closer to the islands of the Pacific. East Timor has two predominant ethnic groups: one Melanesian, which is like Papua Guinea and the Pacific islands, while the other is Malay Polynesian, which is Asian. Nevertheless, East Timor is geographically like the footprint of Southeast Asia.

I believe it is in our common interest, in the interest of both East Timor and ASEAN member countries, to have East Timor be embraced by ASEAN as a regional group. It is important that not one country in the geographic region be excluded from that group.

Are there certain conditions that ASEAN has attached to full membership?

They have not told us about the conditions; we are the ones who understand that before we join ASEAN, we should have first consolidated our independence. We need to consolidate our political and democratic institutions, have our economy on a more or less sound footing, acquire more technical expertise and human resources, and be in a better financial position than we are now.

If the ASEAN countries were to tell us today that we could join them next year, we would be in a predicament because we would not have the human and financial resources to fulfill our obligations as members. I think five years is a reasonable waiting period.

Your government has recently signed an oil deal with Australia under which East Timor will get 90 per cent of the revenue from a jointly controlled area of the Timor Sea. Will oil be the primary source of revenue for the new country?

Oil and gas will be the primary sources of revenue but that does not mean that we are going to make ourselves dependent on oil and gas. We will continue to invest in agriculture, fisheries and tourism. At the same time, we will think of creative ideas of how to encourage foreign direct investment in East Timor by offering fiscal incentives in order to create jobs and bring skills to our people.

Could you comment on the difficulties associated with making the transition from a movement of national liberation to the formation and administration of an independent nation-state? In your particular position, for instance, do you find that you have to be a great deal more cautious, perhaps even compromising, than you were as a member of the liberation movement in exile?

Certainly. Not only myself but every other leader of a national liberation movement who subsequently works in government has been in the same position. People who work in trade unions or in NGOs and then find themselves in government have a similar experience; all of a sudden, you must bear the responsibility for the well being of the country.

Whatever we say or we do has implications for the country as a whole, and we can no longer just think narrowly about this or that organization. As a representative of an NGO or a trade union what I am concerned with is that what I say or do might have positive or negative implications for my organization; I need not think beyond that. As a member of government, however, I am a representative working for the whole country and I have to weigh the impact of what I do on the country as a whole. So we have to make an intellectual and a cultural adjustment to our new role as government administrators of an independent, sovereign nation.

Would you agree that given the experience of East Timor, and the present global political dispensation, the United Nations ought to be further strengthened and empowered?

I believe so. If any lesson can be drawn from East Timor, it is about the importance of the UN, of regional organizations, of multilateralism, as the vehicles through which we should address common concerns, challenges and problems that face the international community. As it is not possible for individual countries to effectively resolve the problem of poverty and environment, it is also not possible for individual countries to fight international terrorism or to create peaceful environments in places like East Timor and Afghanistan; it has to be a common effort.

So it is increasingly important and it is in everybody's self-interest to strengthen the UN. But the UN also needs to reform; there have been some reforms carried out over the last decade or so, but they are not enough. The UN is still very weak in human resources, as it is financially, although this can probably be attributed of course to its member states.

Unfortunately most countries have their own agendas which they do not abandon when they are in the UN; they try to push their agenda in order to get UN approval for actions that are sometimes exclusively in their national interest. Sometimes member states are able to get away with it, sometimes they are not. Most countries unfortunately use the General Assembly of the UN as a forum for propagating their national agendas.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource.