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Statement of the East Timorese people on the Nobel Peace Prize

Source
Indonesian South African Friendship Society Newsletter - January 1997

We the members of the East Timor House of Representatives, on behalf of our constituents of the people of East Timor, wish to express our grave disappointment that your prestigious Nobel Peace Prize has been used to reopen wounds that we have been trying to heal since our integration with Indonesia brought an end to a bloody civil war and a beginning to a process of development never witnessed during more than 450 years of Portuegese colonial rule.

If we were convinced that your award was truly meant to honour a man of peace like Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and reward him for his commitment to the betterment of our society, our concern would be abated. Unfortunately, the sharing of his prize with Mr Ramos Horta an individual who has been a party to the extermination of his political opponents, does a great disservice to all East Timorese who value the peace for which so many have sacrificed.

In your statement, you emphasized that you are honouring efforts to bring about peace in East Timor. Mr Ramos Horta has never worked for peace and if he did bring anything to East Timor, it was strife and suffering. If there is a prize for atrocity, Mr Ramos Horta certainly deserves it. The bloodiest crimes in the sad history of East Timor were committed in 1975 by Mr Ramos Horta and his political party. Mr Ramos Horta was in fact one of the leaders of the FRETILIN who planned the mass killing in Aileu, Maubessi, and Same. Many leaders of the UDT and the APODETI, the rival political parties of FRETILIN, such as 75 years old Hermegildo Martins, Jose Fernando Osorio Soares, Casimiro de Araujo, DomiNGOs Pinto, and some 200 others were seized, tortured and killed by FRETILIN. In 1975, the chief of the Timor Portuegese Red Cross, Victor Santa, who was in Dili on a mission of mercy to alleviate the suffering of civil war victims in East Timor, was arrested and killed by the FRETILIN. A Portuegese police officer, Maegolo Gouveia, in spite of the fact that he presented the white flag of surrender when the FRETILIN came upon him, was never-theless killed in cold blood. Many of the witnesses to these atrocities are still alive and it saddens us that what they have to say about Mr Ramos Horta and what the overwhelming majority of East Timorese think of him were not taken into account when you awarded the Peace Prize to him. The award is therefore an affront not only to Mr Ramos Horta's victims and their bereaved families but also to all the people of East Timor.

The award has one unfortunate implication as if the East Timorese society has only one point of view, that which coincides with Mr Ramos Horta's. The fact is that we East Timorese have always had a diversity of political beliefs. East Timorese from across the politi-cal spectrum , therefore resent the support provided by a foreign organisation, such as the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Committee to a minority view espused by Mr Ramos Horta. In fact, this minority view has been one of the principal causes of the problems and sufferings of the East Timorese people. For Mr Ramos Horta's FRETILIN at every opportunity raised obstacles to the referendum that would be the chief instrumentality of the democratic decolonization process in East Timor which Portugal was supposed to undertake in 1974. When the other political parties UDT, APODETI, KOTA and TRABALHISTA readily agreed to attend a conference an Macao convened by the Portuegese Government in June 1975 to discuss the referendum and the decolonization process, the FRETILIN refused to attend. Later another conference was convened in Bangkok; again the FRETILIN refused to attend. Finally the FRETILIN shattered the decolonization process by unilaterally declaring independence and seizing power through armed force with armes provided by the Portuguese colonial authorities.

Of this we are certain: if Mr Ramos Horta and his party, the FRETILIN, had been more cooperative and if they did not disrupt the decolonization process, there would have been peace in East Timor instead of civil war. But they never gave peace a chance. For this and for his part in a massacre Mr Ramos Horta gets the Noble Prize for Peace?

Mr Ramos Horta has no right to prescribe his ideas for East Timorese society. For when it was obvious that the FRETILIN could not win the bloody conflict as its political cause was utterly rejected by the overwhelming majority of East Timorese people, Mr Ramos Horta simply took flight to Australia. Today he has made it a profession to sow further turmoil in East Timor from the safety of foreign bases of operation, using foreign resources.

Neither will we accept the pontificates of a distant foreign committee, however well intentioned. Only those who have lived through the violence of the civil war and the attendant hunger, disease and other deprivation, and have remained contributing members of our community, can speak on the validity of our decision to integrate with Indonesia instead of languishing under oppression and neglect.

You claim that your award will now focus attention on East Timor. We welcome any attention that will assist us in our efforts to pursue the social economic and political development of East Timor. We need ideas and resources to help us improve the quality of life of our people. But please spare us from ill-advised gestures by those who will use us as pawns for their own political interests.

Chairman of the East Timor House of RepresentativeSigned, Antonio Freitas ParadaDili, 12 November 1996.

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